December 21. (Sunday.)—In the evening, after a solemn season of prayer, I received letters from Europe, one from Cousin T., Emma, Lydia, and others. The torrent of vivid affection which passed through my heart at receiving such assurances of regard continued almost without intermission for four hours. Yet, in reflection afterwards, the few words my dearest Lydia wrote turned my joy into tender sympathy with her. Who knows what her heart has suffered! After all, our God is our best portion; and it is true that if we are never permitted to meet, we shall enjoy blissful intercourse for ever in glory.
December 22.—Thinking far too much of dear Lydia all day.
December 23.—Set apart the chief part of this day for prayer, with fasting; but I do not know that my soul got much good. Oh, what need have I to be stirred up by the Spirit of God, to exert myself in prayer! Had no freedom or power in prayer, though some appearance of tenderness. Lydia is a snare to me; I think of her so incessantly, and with such foolish and extravagant fondness, that my heart is drawn away from God. Thought at night, Can that be true love which is other than God would have it? No; that which is lawful is most genuine when regulated by the holy law of God.
December 25.—Preached on 1 Tim. i. 15 to a large congregation. Those who remained at the Sacrament were chiefly ladies, and none of them young men. My heart still entangled with this idolatrous affection, and consequently unhappy. Sometimes I gained deliverance from it for a short time, and was happy in the love of God. How awful the thought, that while perishing millions demand my every thought and care, my mind should be distracted about such an extreme trifle as that of my own comfort! Oh, let me at last have done with it, and the merciful God save me from departing from Him, and committing that horrible crime of forsaking the fountain of living waters, and hewing out to myself broken cisterns.
As the delightful cold season of the Bihar uplands passed all too quickly, and the dry hot winds of Upper India began to scorch its plains, the solitary man began to think it ‘impossible I could ever subsist long in such a climate.’ From April 1807 his hereditary disease made rapid advances, while he reproached himself for lassitude and comparative idleness, and put additional constraint on himself to work and to pray unceasingly. From this time his Journal has frequent records of sickness, of loss of appetite, and of ‘pain’ in his ministrations, ending in loss of voice altogether for a time. Corrie and Brown and his other correspondents remonstrated, but they were at a distance. He needed a watchful and authoritative nurse such as only a wife could be, and he found only lack of sympathy or active opposition. He lived, as we can now see, as no white man in the tropics in any rank of life should live, from sheer simplicity, unselfishness, and consuming zeal. When the hot winds drove him out of the barracks, the first rainy season flooded his house. At all times and amid the insanitary horrors of an Indian cemetery he had to bury the dead of a large cantonment in a sickly season. His daily visits to the hospital were prolonged, for there he came soul to soul with the sinner, the penitent, and the rejoicing. And all the time he is writing to Corrie and each of his friends, ‘I feel anxious for your health.’ To marry officers and baptize children he had to make long journeys by palanquin, and expose his wasting body alike to heat and rain. But amid it all his courage never fails, for it is rooted in God; his heart is joyful, for he has the peace that passeth all understanding.
1807, May 18.—Through great mercy my health and strength are supported as by a daily miracle. But oh, the heat! By every device of darkness and tatties I cannot keep the thermometer below 92°, and at night in bed I seem in danger of suffocation. Let me know somewhat more particularly what the heat is, and how you contrive to bear it. The worst bad effect I experience is the utter loss of appetite. I dread the eating time.
July 7.—Heat still so great as to oblige me to abandon my quarters.
July 8.—Went to Bankipore to baptize a child. One of the ladies played some hymn-tunes on my account. If I were provided with proper books much good might be done by these visits, for I meet with general acceptance and deference. In the evening buried a man who had died in the hospital after a short illness. My conscience felt again a conviction of guilt at considering how many precious hours I waste on trifles, and how cold and lukewarm my spirit is when addressing souls.
August 23. (Sunday.)—Preached on Job xix. 25-27: ‘I know that my redeemer liveth.’ There seemed little or no attention; only one officer there besides Major Young. At Hindustani prayers, the women few, but attentive; again blest with much freedom; at the hospital was seized with such pain from over-exertion of my voice, that I was obliged to leave off and go away.
To Brown he writes: ‘The rains try my constitution. I am apt to be troubled with shortness of breath, as at the time I left you. Another rainy reason I must climb some hill and live there; but the Lord is our rock. While there is work which we must do, we shall live.’ Again in the early Sunday morning of August he dreamed—