ciples, and heart, were still darker than my outward condition, how little would you have imagined....... But we must break off here.
In this iron furnace, heated seven times, under a tropical sun, amidst the pestilential atmosphere of a low coast tangled with woods and traversed by rivers, not rolling their healthful and fertilizing streams into the open sea, but degenerating into shallows and marshes— our young prodigal did not come to himself. His heart, which amidst former adversities had been hardened with pride, inflamed with rage, and brooded with resentment, was now brought down, quenched, and subdued. Here he lost all resolution, and almost all reflection, sinking into that fatuity which is the last refuge of exhausted nature in hopeless captivity. He himself thus describes his apathy:— "I had lost the fierceness which fired me when on board the Harwich, and which made me capable of the most desperate attempts; but I was no further changed than a tiger tamed by hunger;— remove the occasion, and he will be as wild as ever.
Such was his personal and mental, but what was his spiritual state? It has already been intimated, that he was the only son of his mother; but she was in her grave; she could no longer plead for him at a throne of grace; her earnest intercession for him in infancy seemed to have been answered no otherwise than by her own providential removal from the evil to come upon him. She had not been permitted to live for him to break her heart; and in mercy to both, he was spared that sin unto death— that species of parricide which it is to be feared is more frequent than forgiving parents and rebellious children are themselves aware. His mother, before he was six years
