About half a year from the time of this conversation, Mr. Davidson had again occasion to visit Cromarty; he called on Andrew, and was struck, in the moment he saw him, by a remarkable change in his appearance. Formerly, the expression of his countenance, though interesting, was profoundly melancholy; it was now lighted up by a quiet tranquil joy; and, though modest and unassuming as before, he was less timid. He had passed the wicket. He felt he had become one of the family of God; and found a new principle implanted within him, which so operated on his affections, that he now hated the evil he had previously loved, and was enamoured of the good he had formerly rejected. Standing, as Bacon has beautifully expressed it, on the “vantage ground of truth,” he could overlook the windings of the track on which he had lately journeyed, not knowing whither he went. “I see,” said he to Mr. Davidson, “that the very bent of my mind was contrary to God--especially to the way of salvation by Christ--and that I could no more get rid of this disposition through any effort of my own, than I could pull the sun out of the heavens. I see, too, that not only were all my ordinary actions tainted by sin, but that even my religious duties were sins also. And yet, out of these actions and duties, was I accumulating to myself a righteousness which I meant to barter for the favour of God; and, though he was at much pains with me in scattering the hoard in which I trusted, yet, after every fresh dispersal, would I set myself to gather anew.”--When passing the wicket, he had been shot at from the castle. He was conscious that a power, detached from his mind, had been operating upon it; for, as it fluctuated on its natural balance between gaiety and depression, he had felt this power weighing it into despair as it sunk towards the lower extreme, and urging it into presumption as it ascended towards the upper. He had seen, also, the rarities at the house of the Interpreter. Religion had communicated to him the art of thinking. It first inspired him with a belief in God, and an anxious desire to know what was his character; and, as he read his Bible, and heard sermons, his mental faculties, like the wheels of a newly-completed engine, felt for the first time the impulse of a moving power, and began to revolve. It next stirred him up to stand sentinel over the various workings of his mind, and, as he stood and pondered, he became a skilful metaphysician, without so much as knowing the name of the science. As a last step in the process, it brought him acquainted with those countless analogies by which the natural world is rendered the best of all commentaries on the moral. “I am unable,” said he to his friend the clergyman, “to describe the state of my soul as I see it, but I am somewhat helped to conceive of it by the springs which rise by the wayside, as I pass westward from the town, along the edge of the bay. They contain only a scanty supply of water, and are matted