Why should I now write my life, or retrace the more adventurous part of
it? I have no material to afford instruction or impart knowledge even
to the humblest class of readers.
I have been an unobservant and an unintelligent traveller. The
exclusive occupation of an arduous profession may indeed excuse this,
but cannot obviate its sterilising consequences.
I have no new events, no unknown regions, no wonderful discoveries to
unfold. Reader, there are a great many good reasons for not troubling
thee with a book, and thou mayest well inquire why I have not attended
to them.
The fact is, they have had considerable weight with me, and for these
fourteen or fifteen years have served to keep my manuscripts quiet in
my desk, and they would have kept them there for ever if, by reflection
and consideration of the times, I had not conceived a hope that their
publication might be useful to my countrymen.
Another motive I have, which I mention last, because it is the most
serious, and this is, that I have found much of the writing and style
of contemporaneous authors calculated to undervalue religion, to
undermine it by sneers and insinuations, and to look down upon it with
compassionate airs of superior illumination.
Hundreds who are startled, interested, and attracted by the audacity
of assaults upon religion neither know nor care what has been the
deliberate conclusion of Newton, of Locke, of Milton, or of Pope.
Therefore, let the man who has through life felt religion to be as a
guard and shield spread before him, becoming a more ample and secure
protection as the exigency became more pressing and severe, let him
oppose his sober experience to that of the scoffer, whose works and
words give out that he has found some secret of happiness in throwing
religion aside as a troublesome, childish, and unfashionable restraint.
Most indolently, most imperfectly have I served my God, but I have
never in any part of life forgotten Him, never have ceased to love and
fear Him.
The return He has made to me it is that I think worthy of remark.
In the depression before Him of conscious unworthiness, He has enabled
me, in spite of my transgressions, to carry my heart serenely and
lightly in my breast.
Whether my soul has conceived her danger from the wars of earth or the
storms of ocean, the conflict of armies or of elements, if I have had
courage, if I have had comfort, if I have had the tranquillity and
firmness of a man, I know of no source from which I can have derived
them, excepting only the kindness of God speaking to my soul through
the promises of religion.
In sickness and in suffering, the friend and the nurse remove every
object of external disquiet, and the faults of the strong are forgotten
in the sufferings of the sick. But what friend, or what nurse is, or
has ever been to me, so kind as the Spirit of God.
Silently then, (removing the far more disquieting subject of internal
uneasiness), the mountain of recollected offences, and the anxious
cloud of apprehended evils, are melted away before the steadfast beam
of Christian hope, like snow before the sun of summer. Does it need,
then, much learning or much study to contradict the sneer of the
mocker or emancipate the spirit of his victim? I think not, and hope
that in the book now offered to the public something like good fruit
may be found. The seed indeed is small, but may God give the increase.
[Illustration: Charles Boothby (signature)]
SUTTERTON, LINCOLNSHIRE,
1824.