"There were children crying for bread to parents whose own distress
was little less terrible to witness.

"One feeling specially forced itself upon me, and I can recollect
it as distinctly as though it had transpired only yesterday, and
that was the sense of the folly of spending my life in doing things
for which I knew I must either repent or be punished in the days to
come.

"In my anxiety to get into the right way, I joined the Methodist
Church, and attended the Class Meetings, to sing and pray and speak
with the rest." (A Class Meeting was the weekly muster of all
members of the church, who were expected to tell their leader
something of their soul's condition in answer to his inquiries.)
"But all the time the inward Light revealed to me that I must not
only renounce everything I knew to be sinful, but make restitution,
so far as I had the ability, for any wrong I had done to others
before I could find peace with God.

"The entrance to the Heavenly Kingdom was closed against me by an
evil act of the past which required restitution. In a boyish
trading affair I had managed to make a profit out of my companions,
whilst giving them to suppose that what I did was all in the way of
a generous fellowship. As a testimonial of their gratitude they
had given me a silver pencil-case. Merely to return their gift
would have been comparatively easy, but to confess the deception I
had practised upon them was a humiliation to which for some days I
could not bring myself.