The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders

My poor governess was utterly disconsolate, and she that was my

comforter before, wanted comfort now herself; and sometimes mourning,

sometimes raging, was as much out of herself, as to all outward

appearance, as any mad woman in Bedlam. Nor was she only disconsolate

as to me, but she was struck with horror at the sense of her own wicked

life, and began to look back upon it with a taste quite different from

mine, for she was penitent to the highest degree for her sins, as well

as sorrowful for the misfortune. She sent for a minister, too, a

serious, pious, good man, and applied herself with such earnestness, by

his assistance, to the work of a sincere repentance, that I believe,

and so did the minister too, that she was a true penitent; and, which

is still more, she was not only so for the occasion, and at that

juncture, but she continued so, as I was informed, to the day of her

death.

It is rather to be thought of than expressed what was now my condition.

I had nothing before me but present death; and as I had no friends to

assist me, or to stir for me, I expected nothing but to find my name in

the dead warrant, which was to come down for the execution, the Friday

afterwards, of five more and myself.

In the meantime my poor distressed governess sent me a minister, who at

her request first, and at my own afterwards, came to visit me. He

exhorted me seriously to repent of all my sins, and to dally no longer

with my soul; not flattering myself with hopes of life, which, he said,

he was informed there was no room to expect, but unfeignedly to look up

to God with my whole soul, and to cry for pardon in the name of Jesus

Christ. He backed his discourses with proper quotations of Scripture,

encouraging the greatest sinner to repent, and turn from their evil

way, and when he had done, he kneeled down and prayed with me.

It was now that, for the first time, I felt any real signs of

repentance. I now began to look back upon my past life with

abhorrence, and having a kind of view into the other side of time, and

things of life, as I believe they do with everybody at such a time,

began to look with a different aspect, and quite another shape, than

they did before. The greatest and best things, the views of felicity,

the joy, the griefs of life, were quite other things; and I had nothing

in my thoughts but what was so infinitely superior to what I had known

in life, that it appeared to me to be the greatest stupidity in nature

to lay any weight upon anything, though the most valuable in this world.