A great preacher—Arthur Young the younger goes to Russia—Cowper’s Letters—Mrs. Young’s illness—Dr. Symonds—Novel reading—Skinner’s ‘State of Peru’—Death of Pitt—Burke’s publishing accounts—Literary projects—Approaching blindness.
February 24.—The sins of a journal are like those of life, much offence and a little repentance, minutes applied and months neglected. Last night, for the first time in my life, I was at a religious conversazione. Mr. Fry has it once a fortnight.
Mrs. Wilberforce and thirty more, I suppose, began with singing a hymn, and then a prayer, and ended in the same manner; the subject discussed was Providence. Scott, Macaulay, and Fry were the only speakers except myself, who threw in a word or two in a bad manner and not in unison; but I went without preparing the temper of my mind, and it proved to me a mere temptation to sin, as everything is sure to do when we trust in our own strength and do not pray for divine assistance. I like the thing itself much, and the recollection since it passed has produced in my mind a degree of humiliation which might not have been in it had I not gone there. I wished to touch on the state of the King’s health, where the hand of God is so evident; but they would attend only to little and private things, and probably were right. They made every possible event, the most trivial, providential. Scott is a predestinarian, but impresses the necessity of attending to the means by which God acts as much as if the divine decrees were not universal. The next subject is Temptation.
May 22.—My dear friend[[223]] at Bradfield writes me in a most melancholy strain, on the ill success of her husband’s farming. I doubt I shall lose largely by a scheme which was executed merely to keep him out of greater mischief.
The new Bishop of Bristol is in dress and manners much like what we call in Suffolk a leather breeches parson.
Somebody called on Mrs. Pelham, and found her lying on a sofa reading a novel, rouged as much as any Madame la Marquise. They thought she seemed to be too high flown to be asked to a sober party of whist. What a gradation of evil amongst the worldly even in the respectable (soi-disant) class.
An application from Phillips for another edition of the ‘Farmer’s Calendar.’ He printed 2,000 of the fifth, and 1,200 sold in a month; they will all be gone before it can be reprinted. I had 100l. for that edition, 40l. more for this six months after publication, and in future 25l. each succeeding one.
How grateful I ought to be, but am not, to God for a success which has smoothed many difficulties, and enabled me much to lessen, in assistance to other circumstances, my debts. The sale is an extraordinary one.
What would be with me the result of moral reflections and trust in human means, in the power of a vile heart to cure its own iniquities? I have a conviction amounting to sensation in its truth, that everything but looking unto Jesus is weaker than water—vain and frivolous. This is the grand consideration, result, and object of religion in the soul, all beside is wide of the mark and without power and efficacy. Oh, my God, my God! write these truths in my soul, impress them in my heart, that by communion with Thee I may by Thy grace be purified, washed, and cleansed from every evil thought. Blessed be Thy Holy Name for keeping me from acts of sin. Oh! have mercy on my mind and take away every thought of it.
I shall have to experience another temptation, and should be preparing for it. I have little doubt but Lord Carrington will be again President of the Board. He likes not me, and I shall be much more uncomfortable than I have been with Lord Sheffield; but such changes, if they happen, will be from the Lord, for nothing is so idle as for a Christian to suppose that anything takes place by chance.