pressed upon them at that time so closely, that he was compelled to leave him, thus mortally wounded, "but with his heart full of love, and his eyes full of Heaven."—"There," says he, " fell a great Christian, a good soldier, and a faithful friend.”

When the army went into winter-quarters, Staniforth obtained his discharge for fifteen guineas, which his wife remitted him. He now settled at Deptford, became a leading man among the Methodists there, and finally a preacher in his own neighbourhood, and in and about London. And however little it was to be expected from the early part of his life, and the school in which he was trained, his life was honourable to himself and beneficial to others. "I made it a rule," he says, "from the beginning, to bear my own expenses; this cost me ten or twelve pounds a year; and I bless God I can bear it. Beside visiting the class and band, and visiting the sick, I preach five or six times in the week. And the Lord gives me to rejoice in that I can still say, these hands have ministered to my necessities." His preaching was so well liked, that he was more than once invited to leave the Connexion, and take care of a separate congregation, with a salary of forty or fifty pounds a-year: but he was attached to Methodism: he saw that it was much injured by such separation; he was not weary of his labour; and as to pecuniary considerations, they had no weight with him. The course of his life, and the happy state of his mind, are thus described by himself: "I pray with my wife before I go out in the morning, and at breakfast-time with my family and all who are in the house. The former part of the day I spend in my business; my spare hours in reading and private exercise. Most evenings I preach, so that I am seldom at home before nine o'clock; but, though I am so much out at nights, and generally alone, God keeps me both from evil men and evil spirits: and many times I am as fresh when I come in at night, as I was when I went out in the morning. I conclude the day in reading the Scriptures, and in praying with my family. I am now in the sixty-third year of my age, and, glory be to

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God, I am not weary of well-doing. I find my desires after God stronger than ever; my understanding is more clear in the things of God; and my heart is united more than ever both to God and his people. I know their religion and mine is the gift of God through Christ, and the work of God by his Spirit: it is revealed in Scripture, and is received and retained by faith, in the use of all gospel ordinances. It consists in an entire deadness to the world and to our own will; and an entire devotedness of our souls, bodies, time, and substance, to God, through Christ Jesus. In other words, it is the loving the Lord our God with all our hearts, and all mankind for God's sake. This arises from a knowledge of his love to us: We love him, because we know he first loved us; a sense of which is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost that is given to us. From the little hereof that I have experienced, I know, he that experiences this religion is a happy man."

No man found his way into the Methodist connexion in a quieter manner, nor brought with him a finer and more reasonable mind than GEORGE STORY, a native of Harthill, in the West Riding of Yorkshire. The circumstances of his boyhood were favourable to his disposition: his parents taught him early the fear of the Lord; and though their instructions, he says, were tedious and irksome, yet the impression which they made was never lost, and often recurred when he was alone, or in places of temptation. The minister of the parish also was a pious and venerable man: the solemnity with which he performed his duty impressed the boy with an awful sense of the Divine presence; and, when he listened to the burial-service, he had a distant prospect of judgment and eternity. Thunder and lightning filled him with a solemn delight, as a manifestation of the majesty and power of the Almighty. His heart, as well as his imagination, was open to all wholesome influences; and having one day killed a young bird by throwing a stone at it, grief and remorse for the pain which he had inflicted, kept him waking during several nights;

and tears and prayers to God for pardon were the only means wherein he could find relief. After a decent school education, he was placed with a country bookseller. Here, being surrounded with books, he read with insatiable and indiscriminate avidity: histories, novels, plays, and romances, were perused by dozens. He studied short-hand, and improved the knowledge which he had learned at school of geometry and trigonometry; picked up something of geography, astronomy, botany, anatomy, and other branches of physical science; and tired himself with the Statutes at Large. The lives of the heathen philosophers delighted him so much, that at one time he resolved to take them for his models; and Thomas Taylor or John Fransham would then have found him in a fit state to have received the mysteries of Paganism. He frequently read till eleven at night, and began again at four or five in the morning; and he always had a book before him while he was at his meals.

From the shop he entered the printing-office, and, applying himself sedulously to the business, learned to despatch it with much regularity, so that he had plenty of time both for study and recreation. One summer he was an angler, the next he was a florist, and cultivated auriculas and polyanthuses. These pursuits soon became insipid. He tried cards, and found them only implements for unprofitably consuming time; and, when led into drinking, in the midst of that folly he saw its madness, and turned from it with abhorrence. He hoped that horse-racing might be found a more manly and rational amusement; so he attended the races at Doncaster, with the most flattering expectations of the happiness he should find that week. "The first day," says he, "vanished away without any satisfaction: the second was still worse. As I passed through the company dejected and disappointed, it occurred to my mind, What is all this immense multitude assembled here for? to see a few horses gallop two or three times round the course, as if the devil were both in them and their riders! Certainly, we are all mad, we are fit for

Bedlam, if we imagine that the Almighty made us for no other purpose but to seek happiness in such senseless amusements. I was ashamed and confounded, and determined never to be seen there any

more."

At this time he had risen to the management of the printing-office: he had to publish a weekly newspaper, select the paragraphs from other papers, prepare the advertisements, correct the press, and superintend the journeymen and apprentices; an employment, he says, which flattered his vanity, increased his native pride, and consequently led him further from God. For now, in the course of his desultory reading, he fell in with some of those pernicious writers who have employed themselves in sapping the foundations of human happiness. "I read and reasoned," says he, "till the Bible grew not only dull, but, I thought, full of contradictions. I staggered first at the divinity of Christ, and at length gave up the Bible altogether, and sunk into Fatalism and Deism." In this state of mind, and at the age of twenty, he went to London, in full hope of there finding the happiness of which he was in search. But new things soon became old: they palled' upon him; and, instead of happiness, an unaccountable anguish of spirit followed whenever his mind sunk back upon itself. He would gladly have gone abroad, for the sake of continual change, but it was a time of war. He resolved to try if religion would afford him relief, and went to several places of worship; "but even this," says he, "was in vain; there was something dull and disagreeable wherever I turned my eyes, and I knew not that the malady was in myself. At length I found Mr. Whitefield's chapel, in Tottenham-Court-Road, and was agreeably entertained with his manner of preaching: his discourses were so engaging, that, when I retired to my lodgings, I wrote down the substance of them in my journal, and frequently read them over with pleasure; but still nothing reached my case, nor had I any light into the state of my soul. Meantime, on the week nights. I went to the theatres, nor could I discern any

difference between Mr. Whitefield's preaching, and seeing a good tragedy."

Weary of every thing, and all places being alike to him, he yielded to the persuasion of his friends, returned into the country, and thinking himself too young and inexperienced to enter into business for himself, as they would fain have had him do, undertook, once more, the management of a printing-office. He wanted for nothing, he had more money than he knew what to do with, yet, in his own words, he was as wretched as he could live, without knowing either the cause of this misery, or any way to escape from it. For some years he had attempted to regulate his conduct according to reason; but even at that bar he stood condemned. His temper was passionate; he struggled against this, having thus far profited by the lessons of the Stoics; and greatly was he pleased when he obtained a victory over his own anger; but, upon sudden temptation, all his resolutions were "as a thread of flax before the fire." He mixed with jovial company, and endeavoured to catch their spirit; but, in the midst of levity, there was a weight and hollowness within him: experience taught him that this laughter was madness; and when he returned to sober thoughts, he found into how deep a melancholy a stimulated mirth subsides. He wandered to different places of worship, and found matter of disquiet at all; at length he forsook them all, and shut himself up on Sundays, or went into the solitude of a neighbouring wood. "Here," says he, "I considered, with the closest attention I was able, the arguments for and against Deism. I would gladly have given credit to the Christian revelation, but could not. My reason leaned on the wrong side, and involved me in endless perplexities. I likewise endeavoured to fortify myself with stronger arguments and firmer resolutions against my evil tempers; for, since I could not be a Christian, I wished, however, to be a good moral Heathen. Internal anguish frequently compelled me to supplicate the Divine Being for mercy and truth. I seldom gave over till my heart was melted, and I felt something of God's