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I had always felt attached to this divine
production, even when I had not believed myself one of its avowed
followers. I now studied it with far greater respect than before;
yet my mind was often almost involuntarily bent upon other matters;
and I knew not what I read. By degrees I surmounted this
difficulty, and was able to reflect upon its great truths with
higher relish than I had ever before done. This, in me, did not
give rise to the least tendency to moroseness or superstition,
nothing being more apt than misdirected devotion to weaken and
distort the mind. With the love of God and mankind, it inspired me
also with a veneration for justice, and an abhorrence of wickedness,
along with a desire of pardoning the wicked. Christianity, instead
of militating against anything good, which I had derived from
Philosophy, strengthened it by the aid of logical deductions, at
once more powerful and profound.
Reading one day that it was necessary to pray without ceasing, and
that prayer did not consist in many words uttered after the manner
of the Pharisees, but in making every word and action accord with
the will of God, I determined to commence with earnestness, to pray
in the spirit with unceasing effort: in other words, to permit no
one thought which should not be inspired by a wish to conform my
whole life to the decrees of God.
The forms I adopted were simple and few; not from contempt of them
(I think them very salutary, and calculated to excite attention),
but from the circumstance of my being unable to go through them at
length, without becoming so far abstracted as to make me forget the
solemn duty in which I am engaged. This habitual observance of
prayer, and the reflection that God is omnipresent as well as
omnipotent in His power to save, began ere long to deprive solitude
of its horrors, and I often repeated, "Have I not the best society
man can have?" and from this period I grew more cheerful, I even
sang and whistled in the new joy of my heart. And why lament my
captivity? Might not a sudden fever have carried me off? and would
my friends then have grieved less over my fate than now? and cannot
God sustain them even as He could under a more trying dispensation?
And often did I offer up my prayers and fervent hopes that my dear
parents might feel, as I myself felt, resigned to my lot; but tears
frequently mingled with sweet recollections of home. With all this,
my faith in God remained undisturbed, and I was not disappointed.
CHAPTER VII.
To live at liberty is doubtless much better than living in a prison;
but, even here, the reflection that God is present with us, that
worldly joys are brief and fleeting, and that true happiness is to
be sought in the conscience, not in external objects, can give a
real zest to life. In less than one month I had made up my mind, I
will not say perfectly, but in a tolerable degree, as to the part I
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