The consummation of my _conversion_—I use the word in its strictest sense—is owing to a variety of causes, but chiefly to the conviction, unwillingly forced upon me, that the very few friends which an unprosperous life (the fruit of an ungovernable temper) had left me, were daily losing their hold upon me in a firmer grasp of ambition, avarice, or sensuality. I am not sure that to complete the anti-climax, avarice should not have been last; for although, in some of its effects, debauchery be more disgusting than avarice, yet as it regards the unhappy victim, this last is more to be dreaded. Dissipation, as well as power or prosperity, hardens the heart, but avarice deadens it to every feeling but the thirst for riches. Avarice alone could have produced the slave trade. Avarice alone can drive, as it does drive, this infernal traffic, and the wretched victims of it, like so many post-horses whipped to death in a mail-coach. Ambition has its cover-sluts, in the pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war; but where are the trophies of avarice? The handcuff, the manacle, and the blood-stained cowhide! What man is worse received in society for being a hard master? Who denies the hand of a sister or daughter to such monsters?—nay, they have even appeared in “the abused shape of the vilest of women.” I say nothing of India, or Amboyna—of Cortes, or Pizarro. When I was last in your town I was inexpressibly shocked, (and perhaps I am partly indebted to the circumstance for accelerating my emancipation,) to hear, on the threshold of the temple of the least erect of all the spirits that fell from heaven, these words spoken: “I don't want the Holy Ghost (I shudder while I write,) or any other spirit in me. If these doctrines are true, [St. Paul's] there was no need for Wesley and Whitfield to have separated from the church. The Methodists are right, and the Church wrong. I want to see the old church,” &c. &c.—that is, such as this diocese was under Bishop _Terrick_, when wine-bibbing {463} and buck-parsons were sent out to preach “a dry clatter of morality,” and not the word of God, for sixteen thousand pounds of tobacco. When I speak of _morality_, it is not as condemning it. Religion includes it, but much more. Day is now breaking, and I shall extinguish my candles, which are better than no light—or if I do not, in the presence of the powerful king of day they will be noticed only by the dirt and ill-savor that betray all human contrivances—the taint of humanity. Morality is to the Gospel not even as a farthing rush-light to the blessed sun.