2. My sins here had this grievous aggravation, they were committed against greater light, and more of the means of grace, than I had ever before enjoyed. We had sermons almost every day, and were catechized every Saturday. My mother took care I should attend most of these, and at the same time, private duties, praying with me, and for me, and obliging me to read the scripture, and other useful books. But so far was all this from having its due effect, that I was weary of it, and went on in sin: though not without frequent convictions, occasioned sometimes by the remains of my education. Yet all these were only as the starts of a sleeping man, disturbed by some sudden noise: he stirs a little but soon sinks down again, faster asleep than before. I easily freed myself from them, either by promising to hear, or comply with them afterward, by withdrawing from the means of conviction, by extenuating my sins; or by turning my eye to some thing I thought good in myself, though God knows I had little which had even the appearance of it. At other times I looked to the tendency of these convictions, _viz._ the engaging me to be holy; and then I pored upon the difficulties of that course, till I had frighted myself from a compliance with them. If all these shifts failed, I then betook myself to diversions, which soon choaked the word, and all convictions from it. 3. In December 1686, upon the earnest desire of my father’s sister, married to the provost of Perth, I was sent home. While I stayed in this family, I saw nothing of religion; and I easily took the liberty they gave, and made fair advances towards rejecting the very form of it. My aversion to those sins, which through the influence of education I abominated before, sensibly weakened. My hate to learning increased, which I looked on as a burthen and a drudgery, worse than the basest employment. And many a sinful shift did I betake myself to, that I might get the time shuffled over. In spring my mother came to me. I was then so rooted in ill, that in spite of natural affection, I was grieved at her return; and when I first heard her voice, it damped me. I cared not to see her; nor was there any thing I disliked more than her conversation. I feared to be questioned as to what was past, or to be restrained from my sinful liberty. However, in the beginning of summer, my mother took me again to Rotterdam, and put me to Erasmus’s school there. Here, though I stayed not long, the method of teaching took with me, so that I began to delight in learning. But otherwise I was still worse and worse, under all the means God made use of to bring me to myself. CHAPTER III. _Of the revival of his convictions, and their effects till 1690._