“I mount my horse and sit upon him for ten or fifteen minutes, wishing to go somewhere, but not knowing where to ride; for I would escape anywhere from the incubus that weighs me down, body and soul; but the fiend follows me en croupe....  The strongest considerations of duty are barely sufficient to prevent me from absconding to some distant country, where I might live and die unknown.”

A mind in such a state as this is the natural prey of superstition.  A dream, he used to say, first recalled his mind to the consideration of religion.  This was about the year 1810, at the height of those hot debates that preceded the war of 1812.  For nine years, he tells us, the subject gradually gained upon him, so that, at last, it was his first thought in the morning and his last at night.  From the atheism upon which he had formerly plumed himself, he went to the opposite extreme.  For a long time he was plunged into the deepest gloom, regarding himself as a sinner too vile to be forgiven.  He sought for comfort in the Bible, in the Prayer-book, in conversation and correspondence with religious friends, in the sermons of celebrated preachers.  He formed a scheme of retiring from the world into some kind of religious retreat, and spending the rest of his life in prayers and meditation.  Rejecting this as a cowardly desertion of the post of duty, he had thoughts of setting up a school for children, and becoming himself a teacher in it.  This plan, too, he laid aside, as savoring of enthusiasm.  Meanwhile, this amiable and honest gentleman, whose every error was fairly attributable to the natural limitations of his mind or to the diseases that racked his body, was tormented by remorse, which would have been excessive if he had been a pirate.  He says that, after three years of continual striving, he still dared not partake of the Communion, feeling himself “unworthy.”  “I was present,” he writes, “when Mr. Hoge invited to the table, and I would have given all I was worth to have been able to approach it.”  Some inkling of his condition, it appears, became known to the public, and excited great good-will towards him on the part of many persons of similar belief.

Some of his letters written during this period contain an almost ludicrous mixture of truth and extravagance.  He says in one of them, that his heart has been softened, and he “thinks he has succeeded in forgiving all his enemies”; then he adds, “There is not a human being that I would hurt if it were in my power,—­not even Bonaparte.”  In another place he remarks that the world is a vast mad-house, and, “if what is to come be anything like what has passed, it would be wise to abandon the bulk to the underwriters,—­the worms.”  In the whole of his intercourse with mankind, he says he never met with but three persons whom he did not, on getting close to their hearts, discover to be unhappy; and they were the only three he had ever known who had a religion.  He expresses this truth in language which limits it to one form or kind of religion, the kind which he heard expounded in the churches of Virginia in 1819.  Give it broader expression, and every observer of human life will assent to it.  It is indeed most true, that no human creature gets much out of life who has no religion, no sacred object, to the furtherance of which his powers are dedicated.