SELINA, COUNTESS OF HUNTINGDON, had no religion, who could feel for the temporal miseries of others, and help them ; but few, even among professors, who had a proper concern for the awful condition of ignorant and perishing souls. What, therefore, I can save for a while out of my own necessaries I will give them ; but more I dare not take without being guilty of sacrilege." Yet her humility was now as great as her spiritual pride had formerly been ; she had now a sense of her own deficiencies, and she thus wrote to Dr. Doddridge a fewmonths after her husband's death :-" 0, how do I lament the weakness of my hands, the feeble- ness of my knees, and the coolness of my heart ! I want it on fire always, not for self-delight, but to spread the Gospel from pole to pole." Soon after the death of Lord Huntingdon, she was attacked with an illness, which obliged her to repair to Bath, the great centre of autumnal attraction at that time to invalids and fashionable loungers ; and in the summer of 1747, her eldest son having set out on a Continental tour for the purpose of finishing his education, she went, with her daughters and two of her sisters-in-law-the Ladies Anne and Frances Hastings-on a journey through Wales, where she enjoyed the society of numerous itinerant preachers. Upon her return, she was visited byher faithful friend, Dr. Doddridge, who speaks of her as " quite a mother to the poor," and adds " more cheerfulness Inever saw intermingled with devotion.' The Countess was at this time a centre of attrac- 18
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