ght, and next to it is, what may indeed be meant for a
necklace, but what I cannot make out to be any thing else than a set of
beads suspended, with a little cross attached. At this time I was not
quite ten years old. I suppose I got these ideas from some romance, Mrs.
Radcliffe's or Miss Porter's; or from some religious picture; but the
strange thing is, how, among the thousand objects which meet a boy's
eyes, these in particular should so have fixed themselves in my mind,
that I made them thus practically my own. I am certain there was nothing
in the churches I attended, or the prayer books I read, to suggest them.
It must be recollected that Anglican churches and prayer books were not
decorated in those days as I believe they are now.

When I was fourteen, I read Paine's Tracts against the Old Testament,
and found pleasure in thinking of the objections which were contained in
them. Also, I read some of Hume's Essays; and perhaps that on Miracles.
So at least I gave my Father to understand; but perhaps it was a brag.
Also, I recollect copying out some French verses, perhaps Voltaire's, in
denial of the immortality of the soul, and saying to myself something
like "How dreadful, but how plausible!"

When I was fifteen, (in the autumn of 1816,) a great change of thought
took place in me. I fell under the influences of a definite Creed, and
received into my intellect impressions of dogma, which, through God's
mercy, have never been effaced or obscured. Above and beyond the
conversations and sermons of the excellent man, long dead, the Rev.
Walter Mayers, of Pembroke College, Oxford, who was the human means of
this beginning of divine faith in me, was the effect of the books which
he put into my hands, all of the school of Calvin. One of the first
books I read was a work of Romaine's; I neither recollect the title nor
the contents, except one doctrine, which of course I do not include
among those which I believe to have come from a divine source, viz. the
doctrine of final perseverance. I received it at once, and believed that
the inward conversion of which I was conscious, (and of which I still am
more certain than that I have hands and feet,) would last into the next
life, and that I was elected to eternal glory. I have no consciousness
that this belief had any tendency whatever to lead me to be careless
about pleasing God. I retained it till the age of twenty-one, when it
gradually faded away; but I believe that it had