vanity, lightness, and wantonness.”  His aspiration was also soon echoed from her own heart—­“Oh, that the seeing of it in others may cure and mortify the seeds of it in myself!” She could not help observing the shameless vice that passed unrebuked, by many hardly noticed.  The observation gave a shock to her sensitive soul.  Her distress was great, and in her distress she turned to the right quarter.  She sought solace in the Bible.  That hitherto neglected Book enchained her attention, and she became a most diligent searcher into its hidden truths.  Some of the gay friends of the society in which she moved found her occupied in this Bible reading.  It supplied them with a new amusement, telling how the attractive marchioness had become a “Methodist.”  Hers was not the nature to be turned aside from its purpose by a taunt.  “If for so little I am to be called a Methodist, let me have something more worthy of the name.”  Such was her reflection, and her Bible reading was continued with renewed earnestness.

In the course of that reading the work of the Holy Spirit was impressed upon her attention.  The promise met her eyes, “If ye, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask Him?” “From that time,” she records, “I began to pray for the Holy Spirit.”  To the end of her life she increasingly realised and brought others to realise the paramount importance of the personal work of the Holy Spirit.  Lady Huntly could not now join in the pursuits of the world as she had formerly done.  Her husband did not fully sympathise with the change in her views, but he saw enough of the sinful emptiness of mere gaiety to make him refrain from insisting upon her taking part in its pursuits.  More than this, he gave every facility to her for carrying out her wishes, even when he could not understand the spirit which was their motive.

When in Geneva, after her Bible reading had begun, she found a very helpful friend in Madame Vernet.  “If any one is to be called my spiritual mother,” she said, “it is Madame Vernet of Geneva.”  That good Christian unfolded to her plainly the plan of salvation, showing her first her lost condition, and then the way of redemption by Jesus Christ.  Lady Huntly was also helped by her intercourse in Paris with Lady Olivia Sparrow and others who frequented her house for the sake of the religious society.

On her return from Paris the winter was passed at Kimbolton Castle, the seat of her brother-in-law, the Duke of Manchester.  That place was memorable in her spiritual history.  “I knew Christ first,” she afterwards said, “if I really know Him, at Kimbolton; I spent hours there in my dressing-room in prayer, and in reading the Bible, and in happy communion with Him.”  Lady Huntly referred to this period of her spiritual life in these terms, some one having made the remark that deep conviction of sin is almost invariably the beginning