whenever the established church of England shall lose one of its brightest living ornaments, and one of the most useful members which that, or perhaps any other Christian communion, can boast.  In the mean time, may his exemplary life be long continued, and his zealous ministry abundantly prospered!  I beg my reader’s pardon for this digression.  The passage I referred to above is remarkably, though not equally, applicable to both the cases, under that head where I am showing that God sometimes accomplishes the great work of which we speak, by secret and immediate impressions on the mind.  After preceding illustrations, there are the following words, on which the colonel’s conversion will throw the justest light.  “Yea, I have known those of distinguished genius, polite manners, and great experience in human affairs, who, after having out-grown all the impressions of a religious education—­after having been hardened, rather than subdued by the most singular mercies, even various, repeated, and astonishing deliverances, which have appeared to themselves as no less than miraculous—­after having lived for years without God in the world, notoriously corrupt themselves, and labouring to the utmost to corrupt others, have been stopped on a sudden in the full career of their sin, and have felt such rays of the divine presence, and of redeeming love, darting in upon their minds, almost like lightning from heaven, as have at once roused, overpowered, and transformed them; so that they have come out of their secret chambers with an irreconcilable enmity to those vices to which, when they entered them, they were the tamest and most abandoned slaves; and have appeared from that very hour the votaries, the patrons, the champions of religion; and after a course of the most resolute attachment to it, in spite of all the reasonings or the railleries, the importunities or the reproaches of its enemies, they have continued to this day some of its brightest ornaments; a change which I behold with equal wonder and delight, and which, if a nation should join in deriding it, I would adore as the finger of God.”

The mind of Major Gardiner continued from this remarkable time, till towards the end of October, (that is rather more than three months, but especially the first two of them,) in as extraordinary a situation as one can well imagine.  He knew nothing of the joys arising from a sense of pardon; but, on the contrary, for the greater part of that time, and with very short intervals of hope towards the end of it, took it for granted that he must in all probability quickly perish.  Nevertheless, he had such a sense of the evil of sin, of the goodness of the Divine Being, and of the admirable tendency of the Christian revelation, that he resolved to spend the remainder of his life, while God continued him out of hell, in as rational and as useful a manner as he could; and to continue casting himself at the foot of divine mercy every day, and often in a day,