ion was attended with, and
without which it might have been infinitely more miserable. I gave
humble and hearty thanks that God had been pleased to discover to me that
it was possible I might be more happy in this solitary condition than I
should have been in the liberty of society, and in all the pleasures of
the world; that He could fully make up to me the deficiencies of my
solitary state, and the want of human society, by His presence and the
communications of His grace to my soul; supporting, comforting, and
encouraging me to depend upon His providence here, and hope for His
eternal presence hereafter.

It was now that I began sensibly to feel how much more happy this life I
now led was, with all its miserable circumstances, than the wicked,
cursed, abominable life I led all the past part of my days; and now I
changed both my sorrows and my joys; my very desires altered, my
affections changed their gusts, and my delights were perfectly new from
what they were at my first coming, or, indeed, for the two years past.

Before, as I walked about, either on my hunting or for viewing the
country, the anguish of my soul at my condition would break out upon me
on a sudden, and my very heart would die within me, to think of the
woods, the mountains, the deserts I was in, and how I was a prisoner,
locked up with the eternal bars and bolts of the ocean, in an uninhabited
wilderness, without redemption. In the midst of the greatest composure
of my mind, this would break out upon me like a storm, and make me wring
my hands and weep like a child. Sometimes it would take me in the middle
of my work, and I would immediately sit down and sigh, and look upon the
ground for an hour or two together; and this was still worse to me, for
if I could burst out into tears, or vent myself by words, it would go
off, and the grief, having exhausted itself, would abate.

But now I began to exercise myself with new thoughts: I daily read the
word of God, and applied all the comforts of it to my present state. One
morning, being very sad, I opened the Bible upon these words, "I will
never, never leave thee, nor forsake thee." Immediately it occurred that
these words were to me; why else should they be directed in such a
manner, just at the moment when I was mourning over my condition, as one
forsaken of God and man? "Well, then," said I, "if God does not forsake
me, of what ill consequence can it be, or what matters it, though the
world sh