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to angels and men, so that he hardly durst presume to pray for pardon; yet what he then suffered, was not so much from the fear of hell, tho’ he concluded it must soon be his portion, as from a sense of the horrible ingratitude he had shewn to the God of his life, and to that blessed Redeemer who had been in so affecting a manner set forth as crucified before him.
In this view, it may naturally be inferred, that he passed the remainder of the night waking: and he could get but little rest in several that followed. His mind was continually taken up in reflecting on the divine purity and goodness; the grace which had been proposed to him in the gospel, and which he had rejected; the singular advantages he had enjoyed and abused; and the many favours of Providence he had received, particularly in rescuing him from so many imminent dangers of death, which he now saw must have been attended with such dreadful and hopeless destruction. The privileges of his education, which he had so much despised, lay with an almost unsupportable weight on his mind; and the folly of that career of sinful pleasure, which he had so many years been running, with desperate eagerness, filled him with indignation against himself, and against the great deciever, by whom (to use his phrase) he had been “so wretchedly and scandalously befooled.”
The mind of Major Gardiner continued from this remarkable time, rather more than three months, (but especially the first of them,) in as extraordinary a situation as one can well imagine. He knew nothing of the joys arising from a sense of pardon; but, on the contrary, for the greater part of that time, and with very short intervals of hope, towards the end of it, took it for granted that he must, in all probability, quickly perish. Nevertheless he had such a sense of the evil of sin, of the goodness of the Divine Being, and of the admirable tendency of the Christian revelation, that he resolved to spend the remainder of his life, while God continued him out of hell, in as rational and as useful a manner as
