4. Yet notwithstanding I felt the vanity of these ways, I still adhered to them. I again trusted my own heart, and hoped to recover by renewing the peace I lost by breaking my covenant. I laid the blame on some accidental defect in my former management, and thought, were that mended, all would be well. When I found something wanting still, I contrived to make it up with something extraordinary of my own, with the multiplication of prayers, or of some outward duty or other. But all these refuges failed, and my life was so throughly miserable while I was pursuing them, that had not the infinite mercy of God prevented, one of these effects had surely followed. Either, 1. The convictions I was under would have ceased, God giving over his striving with me, and then having attained to a form of godliness, I should have rested therein and looked no farther. Or, 2. If those convictions had continued, and I had been left to my own way, I should have _laboured in the fire all my days, wearying myself with vanity_, in a continual vicissitude of resolutions and breaches, security and disquietude: engagements and sins, false peace and racking anxiety, by turns taking place. Or, 3. When I had wearied myself in vain, I should have utterly given up religion, and gone over, if not to direct Atheism, at least to open prophaneness. Or, lastly, Being forced to seek shelter somewhere, and being so sadly disappointed in all the ways I tried, I had said, _This evil is of the |Lord|, why wait I any longer_? And so sunk in final despair. And in fact, I had some experience of all these. Sometimes I sat down with the bare form. Sometimes I wearied myself in running from one of these vain courses to another. At other times, finding no profit, I turned careless, and was on the point of throwing off all religion. And very often I was driven almost to distraction, and stood on the very brink of despair.