sic as repugnant to common sense as it
is to Christian philosophy. To this fact, so important in certain of
its bearings, we have ample testimony in the private diaries kept
before his conversion, from which we shall make extracts later on.
They find a later confirmation in some most interesting memoranda,
jotted down, after conversation with him at intervals during the last
years of his life, by one whom he admitted to an unusually close
intimacy. He was always singularly reserved concerning matters purely
personal; his confidences, when they touched his own soul, seldom
seemed entirely voluntary, and were quickly checked. Occasionally
they were taken by surprise, as when the course of talk insensibly
turned toward internal ways; and again they were deliberately angled
for with a hook so well concealed that it secured a prize before he
was aware. From these notes we shall here make a few quotations
bearing on the point made above--i.e., that his difficulties prior to
his entrance into the church were neither moral nor spiritual, but
intellectual. Of him, if of any man, it was always true that his
heart was naturally Christian. The first of these extracts, bearing
as it does on a topic constantly in his thoughts, affords a good
enough example of what was meant in saying that his confidences were
sometimes taken by surprise:

"There are some for whom the predominant influence is the external
one, authority, example, precept, and the like. Others in whose lives
the interior action of the Holy Spirit predominates. In my case, from
my childhood God influenced me by an interior light and by the
interior touch of His Holy Spirit."

At another time he said:

"While I was a youth, and in early manhood, I was preserved from
certain sins and certain occasions of sin, in a way that was peculiar
and remarkable. I was also at the same time, and, indeed, all the
time, conscious that God was preserving me innocent with a view to
some future providence. Mind, all this was long before I came into
the church."

And again:

"Many a time before my conversion God gave me grace to weep over
those words: 'And all those who love His coming.' I did not believe
in His coming, but I loved it honestly and longed to believe it. I
had learned much of the Bible from my mother and had read it often
and much myself."

This consciously supernatural character of his inner life from the
first, should be kept closely united in the reader's mind wi