After the first stunning effect was over, the next feeling was, "This is that indispensable sorrow! this is to save me from _eternal death_!" And so, as soon as I could do any thing, I began a course of religious reading, prayer, and mental conflict. I tried to remedy that pernicious mental habit of reverie and castle-building; I tried to do I knew not what in "becoming a Christian."
Shut up in entire seclusion, all my dearest hopes forever crushed, without hope or object in life, overwhelmed with grief, horrified less at his dreadful death than at the awful apprehensions he himself had imparted that he was unprepared to die, I spent week after week in reading the stern and powerful writings of President Edwards, Dwight's System of Theology, and other similar works. I hoped for nothing, cared for nothing but to become a Christian. Yet no one could tell me intelligibly how to do it, while it was clear that all expected nothing from my efforts, and that all was dependent on a divine efflatus that was to change the birth-gift of a depraved heart.
And yet I was told that the fault was all my own; that it was my obstinate _unwillingness_ to do what was required that alone made it needful for God to interfere. This was urged as a doctrine from God, and so, though it seemed as if I was not only willing, but that I longed for this change, I submitted my humble intellect to His, and owned that it must be so. So passed several dark and weary months.
Next, I went to visit the parents of the friend I had lost. Here I read his private records of _years_ of almost superhuman effort to govern his mind, and to achieve the very thing I was laboring for, and yet, to his mind, all ended in entire failure; and this, too, without any murmuring, or any accusation of any one but himself. It was, as he maintained, because he was so ungrateful, so hardened, so obstinately "unwilling," so averse from God and his service. And yet he was the model of every domestic, social, and official virtue; so reverent to God, so tender as a son and brother, so conscientious and faithful as an instructor! In not a single duty did he fail that the closest intimacy could discover; and yet, by his own showing, he had no love to God, and was entirely "unwilling" to love and serve him.