Introduction

I propose to write how I became a christian and not why. The so-called “philosophy of conversion” is not my theme. I will only describe its “phenomena,” and will furnish materials for more disciplined minds than mine to philosophize upon. I early contracted the habit of keeping my diary, in which I noted down whatever ideas and events that came to pass upon me. I made myself a subject of careful observations, and found it more mysterious than anything I ever have studied. I jotted down its rise and progress, its falls and backslidings, its joys and hopes, its sins and darkness; and notwithstanding all the awfulness that attends such an observation like this, I found it more seriously interesting than any study I ever have undertaken. I call my diary a “log-book,” as a book in which is entered the daily progress of this poor bark toward the upper haven through sins, and tears, and many a woe. I might just as well call it a “biologist’s sketch-book,” in which is kept the accounts of all the morphological and physiological changes of a soul in its embryological development from a seed to a full-eared corn. A part of such a record is now given to the public, and the reader may draw whatever conclusions he likes from it. My diary, however begins only few months before I accepted Christianity.