“After the death of our father, you know I was extremely low-spirited; and, like most other people, began to consider seriously, without any particular determination, that invisible world to which he was gone, and to which I must one day go. Yet I still read the Bible unenlightened; and said a prayer or two rather through terror of a superior power than from any other cause. Soon, however, I began to attend more diligently to the words of our Saviour in the New Testament, and to devour them with delight; when the offers of mercy and forgiveness were made so freely, I supplicated to be made partaker of the covenant of grace with eagerness and hope: and thanks be to the ever-blessed Trinity for not leaving me without comfort. Throughout the whole, however, even when the light of divine truth was beginning to dawn on my mind, I was not under that great terror of future punishment, which I now see plainly I had every reason to feel: I look back now upon that course of wickedness which, like a gulf of destruction, yawned to swallow me up, with a trembling delight, mixed with shame at having lived so long in ignorance, and error, and blindness. I could say much more, but I have no more room. I have only to express my acquiescence in _most_ of your opinions, and to join with you in gratitude to God for his mercies to us: may he preserve you and me and all of us to the day of the Lord!” CHAPTER II. Still the desire of applause, and the ambition of distinction as a scholar, that great temptation of ardent youth, kept him from making much progress in the infinitely more important study of divine truth. His heart was still destitute of humility, and he was not yet sensible of the real vanity of human pursuits. This lesson, however, the providence of God taught him in the manner which, of all others, would make the deepest impression on such a mind as his. It was not until he received the highest honours of college, in January 1801, that he felt that temporal gratifications cannot satisfy the desires of the soul. “I obtained my highest wishes,” he said, “but was surprised to find that I grasped a shadow.” He felt a disappointment which astonished himself, that the great object for which he had laboured so hard, and sacrificed so much, and which had caused him even to neglect the interest which he had in eternity, should now seem as vain and unsatisfying, as if he had been toiling to pursue a shadow! Happy is the youth who will not wait for experience to convince him that this is a truth, and will believe what the word of God asserts to be the end of all such hopes and efforts; who will trust the declarations of those men who have tried for themselves, and, like Martyn, have been obliged, in the midst of their triumph, honestly to confess that they were disappointed of the happiness which they calculated on as sure. Martyn had been so diligent in order to gain this supposed reward, that his fellow-students called