old, had instilled into his heart such principles of Christian faith and practice, as he never could wholly get rid of, amidst all the dissipation of his reprobate career. The remembrance of these early lessons had often haunted him before the time at which we have been contemplating his fallen character and condition. Thrice before he became recklessly apostate from the faith— an avowed infidel, half persuading himself that he was altogether such; he had tried to accommodate his desires and projects in life to a form of godliness; but in each instance he had utterly miscarried; for it was in his own wisdom and by his own strength that he sought to make out a righteousness to suit corrupt nature, rather than in obedience to the gospel. In the issue he had been so bewildered by Shaftesbury— whose Characteristics had fallen into his hands, and in whose paradise of fools he delighted to wander and revel till his imagination was intoxicated— that he cast off all reverence for revealed truth, and appeared to others what he himself desired to be— a hardened sceptic. In this victory over better knowledge he was aided by the sophistry of a profligate companion a-board the man of war, after his impressment, and the conflict was decided by the treachery of his own deceitful and desperately wicked heart; for no cup of enchantment, with whatsoever subtlety mingled, can in any case prevail till "a man is drawn away of his own lust, and enticed."
Here, then, on that island of despair, where he wanted every earthly comfort, the forlorn exile was equally destitute of heavenly consolations. God was not in all his thoughts, though often on his tongue, but acknowledged only in curses, and invoked in "the swearer's prayer, that prayer which, through the forbearance of divine mercy, is oftener than any
