During this season of retirement, I spent my time most happily in reading and prayer, and found great delight in this occupation.  I was able to say, with the Psalmist, “I love the Lord, because He has heard my voice and my supplication;” and, like him, I could say, “I will call upon Him as long as I live; I will walk before Him in the land of the living; and I will take the cup of salvation and call upon the name of the Lord.”  That is, in secret or private life; in social intercourse with my fellow-men; and in the worship of the sanctuary, I will seek the glory of God.  I used to have much pleasure every day in asking God to give me a deeper sense of His love, that I might unfeignedly thank Him, and show forth His praise with my life as well as my lips.

All this, be it observed, was because God had saved not my soul, but my life; for as yet I had not, like the Psalmist, felt any trouble about my soul.  I knew nothing of what he describes as the “sorrows of death and the pains of hell.”  I had not been awakened by the Spirit to know the danger and sorrow of being separated from God (which is spiritual death).  I was perfectly unconscious that between God and myself there was the “impassable gulf” I have already referred to, and consequently I had not experienced such overwhelming anxiety as made the Psalmist cry out, “O Lord, I beseech Thee, deliver my soul.”  I knew nothing of the necessity of passing from death to life, and therefore I could not say, “The Lord has delivered my soul from death, mine eyes from tears, and my feet from falling.”

The only thing I knew was that God was good to me, and therefore I loved Him, and was thankful, not for the sake of getting His favour, but because I thought I had it.  I turned over a new leaf, and ’therewith covered up the blotted page of my past life.  On this new path I endeavoured to walk as earnestly in a religious way, as I had before lived in a worldly one.

This mistake into which I fell was natural enough and common as it is natural; but for all this it was very serious, and might have been fatal to me, as it has proved to multitudes.  I did not see then, as I have since that turning over a new leaf to cover the past, is not by any means the same thing as turning back the old leaves, and getting them washed in the blood of the Lamb.

I have said before that I did not know any better; nor was I likely to see matters in a clearer light from the line of study in which I was chiefly occupied.  I was absorbed for the time, not so much in the Bible as in the “Tracts for the Times”—­a publication which was engaging much attention.  These Oxford tracts suited me exactly, and fitted my tone of mind to a nicety.  Their object was the restoration of the Church of England from a cold, formal condition, into something like reality—­from a secular to a religious state; this also was my own present object for myself.  I read these writings with avidity, and formed from them certain ecclesiastical proclivities which carried me on with renewed zeal.