Having made this resolution, he was settled till his roommate asked him to accompany him to hear Mr. McGready preach. Of the deep impression made on him by the discourse he heard on that occasion he says:
His coarse, tremulous voice excited in me the idea of something unearthly. His gestures were the very reverse of elegance. Everything appeared by him forgotten but the salvation of souls. Such earnestness, such zeal, such powerful persuasion, enforced by the joys of heaven and miseries of hell, I had never witnessed before. My mind was chained by him, and followed him closely in his rounds of heaven, earth and hell, with feelings indescribable. His concluding remarks were addressed to the sinners to flee the wrath to come without delay. Never before had I comparatively felt the force of truth. Such was my excitement that had I been standing I should have probably sunk to the floor under the impression.
When the meeting was over he returned to his room, and when night came he walked out into a field and seriously reasoned with himself on the all-important subject of religion. He asked himself: "What shall I do? Shall I embrace religion, or not?" He weighed the subject and counted the cost. He concluded that if he embraced religion he would then incur the displeasure of his relatives and lose the favor and company of his companions: become the object of their scorn and ridicule; relinquish all his plans and schemes for worldly honor, wealth and preferment, and bid adieu to all the pleasures in which he had lived. He asked himself, "Are you willing to make this sacrifice?" His heart answered, "No, no." Then there loomed before him a certain alternative, "You must be damned." This thought was so terrible to him that he could not endure the thought, and, after due deliberation, he resolved from that hour to seek religion at the sacrifice of every earthly good, and immediately prostrated himself before God in supplication for mercy.
In accordance with the popular belief, and the experience of the pious in those days, he anticipated a long and painful struggle before he should be prepared to come to Christ, or, in the language of that day, before he should "get religion." This anticipation was fully realized. For a year he was tossed about on the waves of uncertainty, laboring, praying and striving for "saving faith," sometimes desponding and almost despairing of ever getting it. He wrestled with this condition until he heard a sermon on "God is love," which so impressed his mind that he retired to the woods alone with his Bible. There he read and prayed with various feelings, between hope and fear, till the great truth of the love of God so triumphed over him that he afterward said: