kindled in his bosom a flame of missionary zeal; he wrote to the Society and offered himself to their service. They made inquiries respecting him, and invited him to England, so conspicuous a place in the South African Mission, it may not be improper to give some account of his conversion, and of his call to the Missionary work. The contents of the publication, which first reached him from the Lond. Miss, Soc. (an address from the Directors, put into his hands by a Moravian from Hernhuth,) produced so great an effect on his mind, that he immediately wrote to them a statement of his sentiments, and of his willingness to serve them among the Heathen. Alluding in his letter to what passed in his mind while perusing their address, he says, "I felt my heart immediately directed to communicate to you, the ideas which presented themselves to my mind, and took up my pen for that purpose. Allow me to say, I am in a strait betwixt two, having a desire to be sent, if it be the will of God, by your means to the Heathen," Of himself he writes thus: "As I am entirely unknown to you, I think I ought to give you a short account of my circumstances. I am near fifty years of age, born at Rotterdam, a member of the established religion of the country, of tolerable health. I first studied physic at Leyden, but afterwards entered into the army, where I served sixteen years, living a slave to vice and ungodliness. Marriage however, put an end to scandalous irregularities, and brought on some exter. nal reformation. I then left the service and went over to Edinburgh, where after two years study I took my degree, having, during my stay, composed a latin work on Cosmology, entitled Parmenides. On my return home, I practised physic in Zealand, where I became publicly a Deist, blaspheming the name of Christ, under the full conviction that I pleased God. Ten years after, I lost my dear wife and only child at the same moment, and was myself, as by miracle, res. cued from the jaws of death Six days after this terrible event, the Lord revealed himself to me, since which time I am his bounden servant devoted to the will of my Master and conqueror. Some of the clergy advised me to enter into holy orders; but though I was desirous to preach the Gospel of Christ, I was persuaded it was not his will in this way. He soon af er sent me to the army, in quality of Director and Superintendant of an Hospital, near Rotterdam, where I served till the revolution. I then thought it my duty to quit the service. At present I am retired from all business, employing my time in oriental literature, and in finishing a commentary on St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans, which I commenced before I went to the Dutch camp, and wish to leave behind me as a testimony of my con. viction of the truth as it is in Jesus, and now offering myself on his service," The spirit which this letter breathed, and the sentiments it contained, demanded that no time should be lost in replying and requesting of the Doct. an account of his conversion, and of his views of Missionary labors; and also in making inquiries at Rotterdam respecting him. where, on his arrival, he fully confirmed all their favorable impressions. He was ordained a Missionary to the Heathen on the 3d of Nov. 1797. Soon after this, he returned to His second letter was as follows. "Dearly beloved Sir, Dordrecht, May 19th, 1797. "The 10th of this month I was favored with your obliging letter, which breathes a fervent desire for promoting the interest of Christ's kingdom, guarded by a laudable circumspection in the choice of those whom the Society employs as instruments in the execution of their important plan. "You say the Directors require time, and more particular informa tion, before they can determine, or give me decisive counsel, of the prudence and propriety of which I am fully persuaded, and most de. sirous am I that every inquiry be made, and every answer, of which I am able, given to the questions you propose. In the mean time, Sir, you give me the noblest advice that can, in my present circum. stances, be given, to think seriously of the deceitfulness of my heart, and the danger of being influenced by pride, or any selfish motives, and to count the cost of a service that requires much meekness, patience, self-denial, courage, faith, &c. As to the deceitfulness of my heart, I am very conscious of it, and that it is more deceitful than I can know, and therefore, that trusting to its sincerity, would be to build on a deceitful foundation. Nothing ought to be undertaken, but by faith in Jesus Christ, who will not suffer those to be deceived, who truly believe in and desire to follow him. "With respect to pride and selfishness, it is true, those vices are deeply rooted in the corrupt frame of my heart, and are ready to defile every thought and action; but I think there is a criterion to be depended on, by which I may judge whether my desire to be subservient to the cause of Christ originates in pride, or springs from the love of God, shed abroad in my heart by the Holy Ghost, in which case it will be augmented and increased in the same proportion with faith. The result of my inquiries is, that I have reason to conclude this impulse to serve the Lord, is of God, because I feel an actual readiness to go to the Heathen, if he should call me to it; and on the contrary, an aversion to take any step in this matter, without his express command; and to this cause is to be ascribed my communica tion of the facts to your society in my last letter. When, on the 5th of April, I asked the Lord Jesus what he would have me to do, I was led to write to the Society; and now, I am trusting that you will be enabled by him, to discern, and reveal to me the will of the Lord. I think your letter prepares the way for its discovery. "Respecting my further deliberations, of which you ask; I can give no more exact description of the present state of my mind than in the words of Isaiah vi, 8-"I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, whom shall I send, and who will go for us, then said I, here am I, send me." This voice I heard after I sent my first letter; when reflecting on the Holland to settle his affairs, carrying with him an address, which he translated into the Dutch language and circulated; the immediate effects of which, were the formation of a very difficulty of finding missionaries, and the duty of every Christian to offer his services to the Lord; but you will observe that hitherto I have no ground to make the following word mine, "and he said, Go." This signal he hath not yet given me. "As to the qualities required for this important work, wisdom, meekness, &c. the consciousness of being deficient in this respect, does not much disturb me, for when I am weak, then I am strong, and can do all things, through Christ strengthening me. Faithful is he that calleth, when He pleases to call; I hope he will enable me to obey his voice by faith in him, and this too must be the gift of his grace; and if I am by faith found in him,'I shall find wisdom, patience, meekness, and whatever else I want; from hence you may easily conceive how I count the cost. Whenever we undertake to build a tower on our own plan, and presume to lay the foundation at our own cost, and in our own strength, we cannot expect that we shall finish the imaginary edifice; but if our tower rests on the foundation laid by Christ, at his cost, in his blood, we shall then find that neither the foundation nor the building cost us a farthing, as the materials for the building, and the expenses of the work will be furnished by the precious Founder himself. "You desire to have an account of some particulars respecting the conversion of my soul to Christ. "Christianity, to me, once appeared inconsistent with the dictates of reason-the Bible, a collection of incoherent opinions, tales, and prejudices. As to the person of Christ, I looked at first upon him as a man of sense and learning, but who, by his opposition to the established ecclesiastical and political maxims of the Jews, becamethe object of their hate, and the victim of his own system. 1 often celebrated the memory of his death, by partaking of the Lord's Supper; but some time after, reflecting that he termed himself the Son of God, and pretended to do miracles, he lost all my former veneration! "I then prayed that God would prepare me, by punishing my sins, for virtue and happiness, and I thanked him for every misfortune; but the first observation I made was, that though I was oftentimes severely chastised, it did not make me wiser or better. I therefore again prayed to God, that he would shew me, in every instance, the crime for which I was punished, that I might know and avoid it; but finding this vain, I feared that I should never perhaps be corrected in this life by punishment; still I hoped I might be delivered from moral evil after death in some kind of purgatory, by a severer punishment, yet reflecting that punishment had proved itself utterly ineffectual to produce even the lowest degree of virtue in my soul, I was constrained to acknowledge that my theory, though it seemed by a priori reasoning well grounded, was totally refuted by experience, and I concluded it was entirely out of the reach of my reason to discover the true road to virtue and happiness. I confessed this my imVOL. II. * respectable Society of Hollanders, (on the 19th of Dec.) at Rotterdam, called the Netherland Missionary Society, and another in Friesland, to co-operate with the Missionary So potence and blindness to God, and owned myself, as a blind man, who had lost his way, and waited in hope that some benevolent man would pass by, and lead him into the right way. Thus I waited upon God, that he would take me by the hand, and lead me in the way everlasting. "I could not however entirely get rid of the idea of being corrected by means of punishment, and I still looked on the doctrines of Christ's deity and atonement as useless and blasphemous, though I carefully kept this my opinion secret. "Such was the state of my mind, when on the 27th June, 1791, sailing in a boat, with my wife and daughter, for amusement, suddenly a water spout overtook us, and turning the boat in an instant upside down, we were sunk before we apprehended any danger; both my dearest relations were drowned, and I was carried down by the stream above a mile, and must soon have infallibly been lost also, as from the violence of the storm no person could attempt to approach the wreck, and it was supposed we must all have perished together: but now the Lord stretched forth his hand to deliver me; a stronger vessel lying in the port of Dort, was by the storm rent from its moorings, and blown out of the port towards me, till the men on board throught they discovered a person floating on the side of the wreck, and rescued me from the jaws of death. "I considered this terrible event as the severest punishment that could be inflicted on me; and saw the next day as clear as the light, that it had no more power to correct me than all the former provi dences, and hence concluded my state to be desperate, and that God abandoned me as incurable by correction. "The next Sunday I went to the church, where the Lord's Sup. per was to be administered, and though it seemed inconsistent with my principles to join in the praises of one, whom I still held to be an impostor, yet being ashamed to withdraw from the table, I placed myself among the communicants, but in order to divert my thoughts from the object of the solemnity, I directed them to God nearly in this kind of meditation: "My God I could not acquiesce in thy dealings with me, nor submit to thy will, but now I can. I choose to be deprived of my wife and child because it is thy will, accept them from my hands: I trust entirely on thee,' "At this moment these words were represented to my imagination, with an overruling authority, 'Do not trust them to God, but to me.' I started at the strange idea of not trusting to God, nor could I con ceive the paradox. I felt myself, however, pressed by the irresisti ble force of the command to obey; and from this, (if I recollect well) I looked upon the invisible and unknown speaker as a person, whose qualities far exceed every notion which I had hitherto entertained of my God, and it appeared clear to me, that it was the Lord Jesus who had thus addressed himself to me; to whom I replied, "Jesus, ciety in London. Also, about that time, Mr. Kicherer offered to join Dr. Vanderkemp in the proposed Mission to Africa, and accordingly accompanied him to London, where my lord, to thee I trust;' when it was asked again, if I now was satisfied that they were safe, and in good hands; I expressed my full persuasion of it. To this a reply was subjoined, if I really spoke truth, I certainly should have committed myself, together with them, to his care. Sensible and ashamed of my neglect, I instantly offered up myself, and all that I had to him; and experi enced, that the only religion acceptable to God was unreserved dependence upon Christ; here for a moment the matter rested, when I resumed in thought, 'O, my Jesus, if I trust only in thee, I must be obliged to adopt the Christian doctrine, which I have many times examined, and seemed to find it a jargon of absurdities. To this he answered, 'Examine it once more, and you will judge otherwise of my doctrine; and I will be with thee, and teach thee, that the impu tation of Adam's crime to his posterity, and the way by which I save my people is the same, but eat now this bread and remember thy new master. * "I would not say, that the very words you read here, were literally spoken to me, but only that I can in no other way convey to you a more exact account of the ideas which rapidly passed through my mind, whilst sitting at the Lord's table, and which seemed rather to be suggested in an obscure whisper, than in an audible voice. "Immediately after this I fell into a kind of stupor, from about tén o'clock to three in the afternoon, only on my way home from church I reflected for a moment on this wondrous event. Returning to my senses, which seemed for a while suspended, and recalling by degrees what had happened, I suspected the whole to be mere imagination; but recollecting the command to 'examine the Christian doctrine once more, and I will teach thee,' I concluded if the matter were not visionary, the truth of it would appear in the revision of the Christian system. I immediately sat down to make the trial, not knowing how to begin, but I remembered that I was directed to the imputation of Adam's transgression, and I saw thence a long series of new truths, proceeding from that principle in the form of Corollaries, and in a most easy course traced out the way by which a sinner from being similar to the guilty and condemned Adam, is brought to the image of a eighteous, holy, and glorified Redeemer, and so restored from sin and misery to virtue and happiness, without punishment, and as a child independent of reasoning. By free grace I learned how the justice of God is not only uninjured, but exalted, and placed in the strongest lustre, through justification by faith.. I rose before I had seen the end of the chain, and wrote down the most striking articles of what I had learned; assured that I had never before received any true notion of the doctrine of Jesus. The next morning, casting my What is known of the doings of these Societies is contained in the following account of the Missions to Africa |