whom I have consulted, that a respite from preaching for a few weeks would be of essential service to my establishment in health..........O that the Lord would be my Guide and Director! I heard the other day, that I am received upon the List of Reserve. O, how responsible is the care of souls! how awful is the work of the ministry! May the Lord give me His Spirit, and grant that my sufficiency may be of God! I have given myself to the church. God of my fathers, be my God!

At this time it was suggested by some of his friends, that it might be advantageous for him to study for a season at Edinburgh; but he never saw it to be the path of duty, though it occasioned him much perplexity and anxiety. To this he refers in the following

extract:

August 26th. I have written to Mr. Lessey, inquiring his mind as to the Edinburgh project, and have also requested Mr. Kirk to consult and give me Mr. Bunting's views on the scheme; and as they decide, I intend to act, if there is a providential opening. I have made, and shall continue to make, it matter of earnest prayer. I should certainly prefer going out under one of the Preachers, (according to the preparatory plan proposed at the last Conference,) as the cost would be less, for one thing, even if I bore my own expenses, which did not enter into their plan. O that God would direct my path! No one knows what I feel but God alone,-what is the agony of my mind occasionally. I examine myself: I want not to go into the work for gain, for riches, "for a morsel of bread." God forbid! O that I could see the path in which I am to walk! but it is lost in mists, it is hid in darkness. If I could reconcile my mind to the thing, I would go into business; but there are the clamours of conscience. I am called to "walk by faith, and not by sight." But O, I am so unfaithful, so sinful, so miserable! If there were a place lower than the dust, gladly would I take it as my station.......... But there is Jesus. In Jesus Christ the Father is well pleased, and in Him I take refuge as my sanctuary. O boundless grace!

""Tis mercy all, immense and free,

For, O my God, it found out me!"

Mr. Lessey appears to have been favourable to the Edinburgh plan; but the record continues :

August 29th.-Still I continue to have doubts upon my mind as to the hand of Providence in the matter.........O, I would not miss my providential way for worlds! I am sometimes afraid

that I have run before I was sent. It is true I have had fruit of my labours: but still that is not a sufficient proof of one's call; for what is the meaning of that passage in Matthew, where it is said, "Many shall say unto me, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in Thy name?" &c., but a statement that it is possible for those who have not been sent of God, to be instrumental in the salvation of sinners? Still I cannot give up the belief that I am called. I have been thinking, that, if I do not go out before or at the next Conference, I ought to take it as a proof that it is my duty to go into business. Yet I dare not so determine.

August 31st.-I am a wonder to myself. I cannot tell how it is, that the people in general seem to think and speak so well of me, who am nothing, and who comparatively know nothing, dust and ashes, sin, ignorance, and misery..........O that I may never disgrace my Christian profession! My soul trembles and shakes to its very centre while I think of the possibility of so doing. Nothing, I know, but Omnipotence can prevent it. Into Thy hands I commit my cause, O God!

September 19th.-O that I knew the designs of God towards me! But no, I check myself: it is wrong. It is mine to trust; and He who has hitherto sustained me, shall keep me to the end. I want a spirit of entire and uninterrupted dependence upon God.

22d.—I see it is very possible to be a Preacher without being a Divine; and I therefore determine to use intense application in the pursuit of that knowledge which will enable me, with readiness and ease, to give to every one a reason of the hope that is in me."

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In this spirit he continued to improve his leisure, through the year commencing with the Conference of 1829. His knowledge of the Greek and Latin languages, one would judge from collateral circumstances, though nothing occurred particularly to test this point, was not much more than rudimental; but his acquaintance with history was considerable, and his love of the holy Scriptures most ardent. He thirsted for sacred knowledge, yet chiefly for knowledge of that kind which ministered to the affections of impassioned piety. His studies for life now began to take their peculiar type, and to fulfil their part in the formation of his ministerial character. Now, also, in his own personal spiritual life, he had begun more fully

and painfully to fight "the good fight of faith;" that is, he was becoming better acquainted with himself, with the conquered but still existing struggles of the carnal mind, and more liable, from his position, to the assaults of the adversary of souls. He had not, like many others, found his way to the blessing of justification and peace with God through months and years of bitter darkness and distress, where the soul has such a sense of the misery and curse of unpardoned sin, that the memory and influence of this bitterness seem to last through life; and where the subsequent joy in God preserves the full force of its contrast in coeval measure. Being so well trained in his childhood and early youth, both by his mother and by pastoral teaching, in the doctrines of repentance and faith in Christ crucified, he had simply to wait till his knowledge became vital and practical, until it should stir his heart to its very depths, as well as inform his understanding and affect his creed. And, therefore, when the Holy Spirit, whose prevenient grace had been so far improved, made known to John his guilt and misery, turning his cold convictions into a real (and, for a short season, alarming) burden of distress; he saw, almost as soon, the sinner's only Refuge, and clung to Him; confiding in His sacrificial blood, and closing with Him as a present Saviour. The malady and the cure were apprehended almost at the same time, insomuch that he had not then a complete view of the wretchedness and danger of the one, or of the glory and fulness of the other. The lesson was now opening before him. Where the early conflicts of many Christians were in a good part terminated, his were beginning. He had incipient faith, faith wrought by the operation of the Holy Spirit, such as he could not cherish or exercise before he became a true penitent, quite in such a living form and sufficient amount as to disprove the semi-Pelagian notion, that the believing which justifies is a naturally possessed faculty; and this brought to him, through the same

Spirit as the Spirit of adoption, a comfortable sense of the favour of his heavenly Father; but as far as "tribulation worketh patience, and patience experience, and experience hope, and hope maketh not ashamed, because the love of God is [more abundantly] shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost given unto us," all this he had yet practically to learn. He heard the warning trumpet, and prepared himself for the battle; not only as a standard-bearer in Christ's army, but as one among the thousands of struggling souls who, for their own sakes, are contending for the faith which was once delivered to the saints.

A few months after the Conference just mentioned, he was summoned by private arrangement to supply for a while the place of the Rev. Thomas H. Squance, in the Hull Circuit, whose health had failed. He had here the advantage of a brief association in labour with his revered friend and former Pastor, the Rev. Edmund Grindrod, who was Superintendent of the Circuit; and viewed with the greatest admiration and profit the mingled firmness and benignity with which the spiritual affairs of the Societies were administered under his hands. John learned here how to obey, and thus became possessed of the first qualification of one who might hereafter become called upon to rule. It was at this time the writer had the opportunity of hearing him preach one Lord's-day morning at George-yard chapel. The subject was the Sabbath, and taken from the vision of the beloved disciple in the Apocalypse: "I was in the Spirit on the Lord's day." (Rev. i. 10.) His manner was serious and becoming; he was so far recollected as to be able to do justice to his feelings by giving due emphasis to the emphatic portions of the beautiful hymns which he had selected, and in prayer he was humble and earnest, though deficient in that intercessory fulness which he afterwards attained, the lack of which in some Ministers makes a litany so desirable, and cannot be supplied without greater knowledge and a larger heart. The opening

of the sermon was natural and modest, being a kind of outline-exposition of the vision and its attendant circumstances; the main substance consisted of an historical view of the sabbatical institution, with its adaptation to the wants of mankind in succeeding ages, and also its divinely-appointed and necessary connexion with the means of grace and salvation, and the upholding of belief in revealed religion. The teaching part of the sermon, though coherent and clear, was not so full and complete as he might have made it, had it been wrought out more in detail in his previous meditations; there was an evident desire to hasten on to practical conclusions: but as he approached the application, his natural impetuosity became more apparent; and then, as he alluded to the atrocities of the atheistic French Revolution, and the misery of all sabbathless men, living and dying in sin, his complexion, delicately fair, glowed with mingled tenderness and awe; his eye kindled into unwonted lustre, his voice arose; and though his appeals were clothed in exuberant rhetoric, yet they were powerful and startling in their effect, because they came from the heart, and were uttered under the Spirit's own unction. His descant upon the Sabbath of heaven was peculiarly happy, and he quoted the well-known lines,—

"O glorious hour! O blest abode !

I shall be near and like my God,"

in a tone and manner which convinced his hearers, that even then he began to cherish that love of the better country which is so sure a sign of a regenerate condition. Still this exercise did not so much indicate what he was, as what he was likely to be. His day, if we may speak so, was brief, and his hours of transition from stage to stage of characteristic and spiritual improvement hastened rapidly along.

At the Conference of 1830, he received in the usual manner an appointment to the Waltham-Abbey Cir