He will be either something very bad or very good." One day, when he was in an obstinate and impracticable state of idleness, Mr.Eyre said, "Daniel, you are not worth flogging, or I would flog you," which so stung him that he never fell into similar disgrace again; nay, one morning when he had failed in his appointed task, he refused food saying, "No! If my head will not work, my body shall not eat." He had considerable powers, and when his own theme on a given subject was finished, would find "sense" for all the dull boys--varying the matter but keeping to the point in all: but his education ceased at fourteen, when he was bound apprentice to his uncle, who followed the same trade as his father, and lived in Cheapside.

He was a widower with seven children, one of whom in after years became Daniel's wife.

It was a strictly religious household, and whereas Daniel's parents had been wont to attend church or meeting as suited them best, his uncle was a regular churchman, and took his whole family constantly with him, as decidedly as he kept up discipline in his warehouse, where the young men had so little liberty, that for weeks together they never had occasion to put on their hats except on Sunday.
Daniel was a thoughtless, irreverent lad, full of schoolboy restlessness when first he came; but though he was at first remarkable for his ill- behaviour in church, his attendance insensibly took effect upon him, as it brought his mind under the influence of the two chief powers for good then in London, John Newton and Richard Cecil.

The vehement struggle for conversion and sense of individual salvation that their teaching deemed the beginning of grace took place, and he turned for aid to them and to his old schoolmaster, Mr.Eyre.

It was from his hands in 1797, at the age of nineteen, that he received his first Communion, with so much emotion and such trembling, that he writes to his mother, "I have no doubt I appeared very foolish to those about me," but he adds in another letter to a friend that it had been the happiest day of his life.