up discipline in his warehouse, where the young men had so little
liberty, that for weeks together they never had occasion to put on their
hats except on Sunday.

Daniel was a thoughtless, irreverent lad, full of schoolboy restlessness
when first he came; but though he was at first remarkable for his ill-
behaviour in church, his attendance insensibly took effect upon him, as
it brought his mind under the influence of the two chief powers for good
then in London, John Newton and Richard Cecil. The vehement struggle for
conversion and sense of individual salvation that their teaching deemed
the beginning of grace took place, and he turned for aid to them and to
his old schoolmaster, Mr. Eyre. It was from his hands in 1797, at the
age of nineteen, that he received his first Communion, with so much
emotion and such trembling, that he writes to his mother, "I have no
doubt I appeared very foolish to those about me," but he adds in another
letter to a friend that it had been the happiest day of his life. "And
to you I confess it," he says, "(though it ought perhaps to be a cause
for shame,) that I have felt great desire to go or do anything for the
love of JESUS, and that I have even wished, if it were the Lord's will,
to go as a missionary to foreign lands."

It is very remarkable that this thought should have occurred at such a
moment to one who only became a missionary thirty-five years later, at a
summons from without, not from within. The distinct mission impulse
passed away, but a strong desire remained to devote himself to the
ministry of the Church. He tried to stifle it at first, lest it should
be a form of conceit or pride; but it only grew upon him, and at last he
spoke to Mr. Eyre, who promised to broach the subject to his parents.

His father was strongly averse to it, as an overthrow to all his plans,
and Mr. Eyre, after hearing both sides, said that he should give no
opinion for a year; it would not hurt Daniel to remain another year in
the warehouse, to fulfil the term of his apprenticeship, and it would
then be proper time to decide whether to press his father to change his
mind. It was a very sore trial to the young man, who had many reasons
for deeming this sheer waste of time, though he owned he had not lost
much of his school learning, having always loved it so much as to read as
much Latin as he could in his leisure hours. He submitted at first, but
was uneasy under his submission, and asked co