Very different from the straining carefulness of his spiritual life was the extremely haphazard way in which he managed his worldly affairs. He drifted from farm to farm with his inefficient labour—many a hearty Kentish kick and curse must have followed him as he roamed head-in-air, soul-in-hell, through the tasks of his day. He was always ill, always poor, and yet at the age of twenty-one he married in Frittenden church a girl as penniless as himself. Then a painful internal complaint began to afflict him. He grew unable for all but the lightest farm work, and soon became so ill that he had to go into the infirmary at Maidstone. Here he fell under the influence of a pious Baptist lady, who visited him on behalf of the “Benefit Society for the Sick,” and to her he owed his deliverance from his “legal struggles,” since she taught him the doctrines of Election and of Uncovenanted Grace. But there was a bad time to be lived through first. His agonies of soul increased, the _sortes biblicæ_ yielded only blasts of damnation, and then the day came when “I clearly saw the justice of God in my eternal overthrow, and actually bade adieu to the world with an Amen to my own destruction.” Immediately upon this surrender followed Illumination—“a sweet glowing, a brilliant light like the shining of silver. I sprang up and sang and wept and cried aloud for joy.” Directly after his conversion came Weller’s brief sweet experience of the Joyful Mysteries. There is a touching account of his first happy moments in the midst of poverty and sickness, and the cares of his young increasing family which would not even allow privacy for his devotional raptures.—“Having no place to retire to, I have wrapped myself in the curtains of my bed, and in silent breathings poured out my soul to God in the sweetest strains possible.” But trouble was never far from a nature combining the philosophy of Micawber as to the affairs of this world with that of Mrs. Gummidge as to the next. All through life his happiness was to be threatened by the presiding evils of both states—Debt and Damnation. He tried various means of livelihood, combining them with a new-found vocation as a preacher. A little school, a baker’s shop, severally failed, and for some time he tried to support himself by a peddling sale of books and tea. Luckily he was gifted with an ingenuous humility which allowed him thankfully to accept any gift, whether of money, food or clothing, no matter how grudgingly it was bestowed—grateful to the Lord who had provided for him as for Elijah out of the hard, unsympathetic beaks of ravens.