"Be sure that God has changed your heart first, Jane. His work begins within; and the heart that is being probed and cleansed and renewed by his grace does not begin with external things. I knew a young lady once—she was such by birth and station—who became acquainted with a Christian family, and admired and loved them ardently. They were extremely plain in their dress, and having resolved to follow them in everything, she did so in that. She not only gave up the gay society she had mixed in, and offended all her relatives by denouncing them as worldly, and unworthy of her attention and love, but she gave away all her ornaments, many of which were very valuable, burned or destroyed all her fashionable clothes, and appeared abroad in a plain common gown, and a bonnet with only ribbon enough on it to serve for strings. Her friends began to think she was deranged; but she said that God's people were 'a peculiar people,' and the Lord Jesus himself was said to be mad. "She was sent from home for a time, in the hope of giving a turn to her thoughts; but this only strengthened her resolutions, and increased the ardor of her apparent devotion to her religious views. At last, believing her to be sincere and conscientious in all these singularities, her mother received her again, allowing her to dress, act, visit, read, and go among the sick and poor as she pleased, while the subject of religion was never mentioned in her presence excepting with respect and concurrence in anything she thought proper to say. "By degrees she wearied of a profession which had no enduring life-giving energy within, and no connection with true faith from above; and after the lapse of about two years, the cessation of all opposition left the sparks she had kindled herself to die out. I met her in the street to her way to pay a morning visit, dressed expensively and fashionably, even to a white bonnet and feathers; and I heard of her shortly afterwards dancing among the gayest and most thoughtless at a ball given by some of her worldly friends, who were delighted to perceive that she had what they called 'come to her senses again.' "Once afterward I had an opportunity of speaking to her, when she boldly denounced all who made any profession of religion, as hypocrites or self-deceivers, and said she should forever suspect everybody who wore a straight ribbon, or a common gown unsuited to her station in life; that she had made a great mistake herself in being influenced by the example of others while in their society; but that she had now regained the exercise of her own independent judgment, and was once more a reasonable creature. Thus, you see, she had returned from the extremity of outward opposition to the world and its ways, to the point from which she set out." "But did she never have any more religious thoughts or desires?" asked Jane. "I do not know; but I should suppose her hours of private meditation, if she ever had any, could not be very happy ones."