“My dear Miss M——­, I am now old, and I hope have done with the world; but I have been young and drunk deeply of youth’s choicest pleasures.  I was blest with the best and most indulgent of parents; I was the wife of a man of sense, sentiment, and sensibility, who was my very first love and lover; and that love ripened and improved with years.  My children were good and healthy; love, health, peace, and competency blessed our dwelling.  I had also, in early life, taken hold of God’s covenant, and tasted his covenant love; and devoted myself to his service, which was in my mind a principle of moderation, compared with mere worldlings; but very far was I from that non-conformity to the world which the precept of the gospel requires.  Had I kept close to my covenant God, enjoyed his bounty with thankfulness, occupied my talents, devoted my time to usefulness and communion with him; had I prayed against corruption within and temptation without, the Lord would have directed my steps and held up my goings, and I should have continued to inherit the earth, and should not have been diminished.  But this was very far from being my conduct; the bent of the natural, unrenewed heart, is still opposed to God; and the best are sanctified only in part, while in this life; the law in the members still wars against the law of the Spirit of life in the mind.  The goodness of God, which ought to have been a powerful motive to gratitude, love, and diligence, was misimproved; I enjoyed the gifts, and forgot the giver; ‘hugged my comforts to death.’  Many, many light chastisements, my dear, my kind, my indulgent heavenly Father exercised me with; I had many repenting seasons under his strokes, many manifestations of pardon I received, and many fresh and solemn dedications of my heart, life, and substance did I make; but no sooner was ease and comfort restored, than my heart turned aside like a deceitful bow:  my whole life, from fifteen till the thirtieth year of my age, was one continued succession of departure and backsliding on my part—­of chastening, forgiving, restoring, and comforting on the part of my God.

“He did not cast me off, but dealt with me according to the constitution of his well-ordered covenant:  ‘If his children,’ Christ’s, ’forsake my law and walk not in my judgments, if they break my statutes and keep not my commandments, then will I visit their transgression with the rod, and their iniquity with stripes.  Nevertheless, my loving-kindness will I not utterly take from him, nor suffer my faithfulness to fail; my covenant will I not break, nor alter the thing that is gone out of my lips.’  Psalm 89:30.  This is the covenant—­made with Christ as the head of all who believe—­of which I took hold in early life; my God kept me to my choice, and manifested his own faithfulness and the stability of his covenant.  When lighter afflictions proved ineffectual, he at last, at one blow, took from me all that made life dear, the very kernel of all my earthly joys, my idol,