salvation or damnation. His old adversary
vexed his soul with evil suggestions, and even quoted Scripture to
enforce them. "It may be you are not elected," said the Tempter; and the
poor tinker thought the supposition altogether too probable. "Why,
then," said Satan, "you had as good leave off, and strive no farther; for
if, indeed, you should not be elected and chosen of God, there is no hope
of your being saved; for it is neither in him that willeth nor in him
that runneth, but in God who showeth mercy." At length, when, as he
says, he was about giving up the ghost of all his hopes, this passage
fell with weight upon his spirit: "Look at the generations of old, and
see; did ever any trust in God, and were confounded?" Comforted by these
words, he opened his Bible took note them, but the most diligent search
and inquiry of his neighbors failed to discover them. At length his eye
fell upon them in the Apocryphal book of Ecclesiasticus. This, he says,
somewhat doubted him at first, as the book was not canonical; but in the
end he took courage and comfort from the passage. "I bless God," he
says, "for that word; it was good for me. That word doth still
oftentimes shine before my face."

A long and weary struggle was now before him. "I cannot," he says,
"express with what longings and breathings of my soul I cried unto Christ
to call me. Gold! could it have been gotten by gold, what would I have
given for it. Had I a whole world, it had all gone ten thousand times
over for this, that my soul might have been in a converted state. How
lovely now was every one in my eyes, that I thought to be converted men
and women. They shone, they walked like a people who carried the broad
seal of Heaven with them."

With what force and intensity of language does he portray in the
following passage the reality and earnestness of his agonizing
experience:--

"While I was thus afflicted with the fears of my own damnation, there
were two things would make me wonder: the one was, when I saw old people
hunting after the things of this life, as if they should live here
always; the other was, when I found professors much distressed and cast
down, when they met with outward losses; as of husband, wife, or child.
Lord, thought I, what seeking after carnal things by some, and what grief
in others for the loss of them! If they so much labor after and shed so
many tears for the things of this present life, how am I to be bemoaned,
pi