The life of Wesley - 1847 Author:Robert Southey Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER XVIII. JOHN HAIME. SAMPSON STANIFORTH.OEOBQE STORY. Among the memoirs of his more eminent preachers, which Wesley published in his magazine, as wr... more »itten by themselves for general edification, is " A short Account of God's Dealings with Mr. John Haime." Satan has so much to do in the narrative, that this is certainly a misnomer. It is accompanied by his portrait, taken when he was seventy years of age. What organs a craniologist might have detected under his brown wig, it is impossible to say; but Lavater himself would never have discovered, in those mean and common features, the turbulent mind, and passionate fancy, which belonged to them. Small, inexpressive eyes, scanty eyebrows, and a short, broad, vulgar nose, in a face of ordinary proportions, seem to mark out a subject who would have been content to travel a jogtrot along the high-road of mortality, and have looked for no greater delight than that of smoking and boozing in the chimney-corner. And yet John Haime passed his whole life in a continued spiritual ague. He was born at Shaftesbury, in 1710, and bred up to his father's employment, of gardening. Not liking this, he tried button-making; but no occupation pleased him : and indeed he appears, by his own account, to have been in a state little differing from insanity; or differing from it in this only, that he had sufficient command of himself not to communicate the miserable imaginations by which he was tormented. He describes himself as undutiful to his parents, addicted to cursing, swearing, lying, and Sabbath- breaking ; tempted with blasphemous thoughts, and perpetually in fear of the devil, so that he could find no comfort in working, eating, drinking, or even in sleeping. " The devil," he says, " broke in upon me with reasonings concerning the bein...« less