“This, sir,” says he, “has been the fountain of that repentance which I so much rejoice in; this is the delightful sorrow,” says he, “that I spoke of just now; and this makes smiles sit on my face while tears run from my eyes, a joy that I can no otherwise express than by telling you, sir, that I never lived a happy day since I came to an age of acting in the world till I landed in this country, and worked in your plantation, naked and hungry, weary and faint, oppressed with cold in one season, and heat in the other. Then I began to see into my own ways, and see the difference between the hardships of the body and the torment of the mind. Before I revelled in fulness, and here I struggled with hard fare; then I wallowed in sloth and voluptuous ease; here I laboured till nature sometimes was just sinking under the load; but with this difference in the felicity of either case, namely, that there I had a hell in my soul, was filled with horror and confusion, was a daily terror to myself, and always expected a miserable end; whereas here I had a blessed calm of soul, an emblem and forerunner of heaven, thankful and humble, adoring that mercy that had snatched me out of the jaws of the devil. These took up my thoughts, and made my most weary hours pleasant to me, my labour light, and my heart cheerful. I never lay down on my hard lodging but I praised God with the greatest excess of affection, not only that it was not the condemned hole, and that I was delivered from the death I had deserved, but that it was not Shooter’s Hill; that I was not still a robber, a terror to just and honest men, a plunderer of the innocent and the poor, a thief, and a villain, that ought to be rooted out from the earth for the safety of others; but that I was delivered from the horrid temptation of sinning to support my luxury, and making one vice necessary to another; and this, I bear witness, is sufficient to sweeten the bitterest sorrow, and make any man be thankful for Virginia, or a worse place, if that can be.”
He then entertained me with an opinion of his, that if it were possible for the face of heaven and hell to be disclosed and laid open, and that men could be made capable of seeing distinctly and separately the joys and glory and utmost felicity of one, and the horrors of the other, and to make a judgment of both according to the power of human reasoning, the first would have a stronger and more powerful effect to reform the world than the latter; but this we had further discourses about on many occasions.
If it should be inquired how I was capable of hearing all this, and having no impressions made upon my mind by it, especially when it so many ways suited my own case, and the condition of the former part of my life, I shall answer that presently by myself. However, I took no notice of it to him, for he had quite other notions of me than I had of myself; nor did I, as is usual in such cases, enter into any confidence with him on my own story, only that I took sometimes the occasion to let him know that I did not come over to Virginia in the capacity of a criminal, or that I was not transported; which, considering how many of the inhabitants there were so who then lived in good circumstances, was needful enough to be done.
But as to myself, it was enough that I was in condition now; ’twas no matter to anybody what I had been; and as it was grown pretty much out of memory from what original disaster I came into the country, or that I was ever a servant otherwise than voluntary, and that it was no business of mine to expose myself, so I kept that part close. But for all that, it was impossible for me to conceal the disorder I was in as often as he talked of these things. I had hitherto gone on upon a notion of things founded only in their appearance, as they affected me with good or evil, esteeming the happy and unhappy part of life to be those that gave me ease or sorrow, without regarding, or indeed much understanding, how far those turns of life were influenced by the Giver of Life, or how far they were all directed by a sovereign God that governs the world, and all the creatures he had made.
As I had no education but as you have heard, so I had had no instruction, no knowledge of religion, or indeed of the meaning of it; and though I was now in a kind of search after religion, it was a mere looking, as it were, into the world to see what kind of a thing or place it was, and what had been done in it. But as to Him that made it, there had truly been scarce a creature among all that He had made, with souls in them, that were so entirely without the knowledge of God as I was, and made so little inquiry about it.
But the serious, affectionate discourse of this young man began to have different effects upon me, and I began to say to myself, “This man’s reflections are certainly very just; but what a creature am I, and what have I been doing!—I that never once did this in all my life; that never said so much—’God, I thank Thee for all that I have been saved from, or all that I have been brought to in this world;’ and yet my life has been as full of variety, and I have been as miraculously delivered from dangers and mischiefs, and as many of them, as ever he has. And if it has all been brought to pass by an invisible hand in mercy to me, what have I been doing, and where have I lived, that I only should be the most thoughtless and unthankful of all God’s creatures?”
This, indeed, began to grow upon me, and made me very melancholy; but as to religion, I understood so little about it that if I had resolved upon any such thing as a new course of life, or to set about a religious change, I knew not at which end to begin or what to do about it.
One day it happened that my tutor—for so I always called him—had the Bible in his hand, and was looking in it, as he generally did many times every day, though I knew not for what. Seeing the Bible, I took it out of his hands, and went to look in it, which I had done so little before that I think I might safely say I had never read a chapter in it in all my life. He was talking of the Bible then as a book only, and where he had it, and how he brought it to Virginia, and in some ecstasy he took and kissed it. “This blessed book!” says he; “this was all the treasure I brought out from England with me. And a comfortable treasure it has been to me,” added he; “I would not have been without it in my sorrows for any other treasure in the world;” and so he went on at large.
I, that had no notion of what he meant—only, as I have said above, some young infant thoughts about the works of Providence in the world and its merciful dealings with me—took the book out of his hand and went to look in it; and the book opened at the Acts xxvi. 28, where Felix says to St. Paul, “Almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian.” “I think,” says I, “here’s a line hits me to a tittle, upon the long account you have given of yourself, and I must say them to you, as the governor here said;” and so I read the words to him. He blushed at the text, and returns, “I wish I could answer you in the very words the Apostle returned to him in the next verse: ‘I would thou wert both almost, and altogether such as I am, except these bonds.’”
I was now more than thirty years old by my own account, and as well as it was possible for me to keep a reckoning of my age, who had nobody left that ever knew my beginning; I was, I say, above thirty years old, and had gone through some variety in the world. But as I was perfectly abandoned in my infancy, and utterly without instruction in my youth, so I was entirely ignorant of everything that was worthy the name of religion in the world; and this was the first time that ever any notion of religious things entered into my heart. I was surprised at this man’s talk, and that several ways particularly he talked so feelingly of his past circumstances, and they were so like my own, that every time he made a religious inference from his own condition, and argued from one condition of his to another, it struck into my thoughts like a bullet from a gun that I had certainly as much to be thankful for and to repent of as he had, except only that I had no knowledge of better things to be thankful for, which he had. But in return for that, I was delivered and set up in the world, made a master, and easy, and was in good circumstances, being raised from the very same low, distressed condition as he was in—I mean a sold servant—but that he remained so still; so that, if his sin had been greater than mine, so his distress was still greater.