, as well as contrary
to that testimony relating to the circumstances of his death, which,
on the whole, appeared to me beyond controversy the most natural and
authentic, from whence, therefore, I shall take my account of that
affecting scene.]

In this view it may naturally be supposed that he passed the remainder
of the night waking, and he could get but little rest in several that
followed. His mind was continually taken up in reflecting on the divine
purity and goodness; the grace which had been proposed to him in the
gospel, and which he had rejected; the singular advantages he had enjoyed
and abused; and the many favours of providence which he had received,
particularly in rescuing him from so many imminent dangers of death,
which he now saw must have been attended with such dreadful and hopeless
destruction. The privileges of his education, which he had so much
despised, now lay with an almost insupportable weight on his mind; and
the folly of that career of sinful pleasure which he had so many years
been running with desperate eagerness and unworthy delight, now filled
him with indignation against himself, and against the great deceiver, by
whom (to use his own phrase) he had been "so wretchedly and scandalously
befooled." This he used often to express in the strongest terms, which I
shall not repeat so particularly, as I cannot recollect some of them.
But on the whole it is certain that, by what passed before he left his
chamber the next day, the whole frame and disposition of his soul was
new-modelled and changed; so that he became, and continued to the last
day of his exemplary and truly Christian life, the very reverse of what
he had been before. A variety of particulars, which I am afterwards to
mention, will illustrate this in the most convincing manner. But I cannot
proceed to them without pausing to adore so illustrious an instance of
the power and freedom of divine grace, and entreating my reader seriously
to reflect upon it, that his own heart may be suitably affected. For
surely, if the truth of the fact be admitted in the lowest views in which
it can be placed, (that is, supposing the first impression to have passed
in a dream,) it must be allowed to have been little, if anything less
than miraculous. It cannot in the course of nature be imagined how such
a dream should arise in a mind full of the most impure ideas and
affections, and (as he himself often pleaded) more alienated from the
thoughts o