alarmed. They supposed it to be a threat of something very terrible, and expected to see me carried away at once to prison. And some of the bystanders began to reproach me, and say I was rightly served for not accepting the generous offer of the Attorney-General. I, of course, knew that the Attorney-General's nolle prosequi meant that he would have nothing more to do with me, and that I was now free. While therefore my friends were fearing and trembling, I stood calm and comfortable. After a few moments the judge said, "You are at liberty; and may retire."

When my friends found that I was free, they were wild with delight, and flocked round me, eager to shake me by the hand, and give me their congratulations. They were now satisfied that in rejecting the proposal of the Attorney-General, I had done no more than my duty. One gentleman, who had been bail for me, was extravagant enough to declare that I occupied the proudest position of any man in the country. "You have withstood the tyranny of the Government," said he, "and have triumphed." I hurried home as fast as I could with my happy wife and my exulting friends. When we got there the cannon were roaring and the bands were playing. My workmen and neighbours had heard of my triumph, and were celebrating it in the noisiest way they could. Then followed feasting and public congratulations, both at home and in distant parts of the country, and for a time I was quite a hero.

The interference of the authorities with my liberty, and the needless annoyances to which they had subjected me, had roused my indignation to a high pitch, and after my liberation I wrote and spoke more violently against the Government than I had done before. At length the great excitement in which I had so long lived, and the excessive labours in which I had been so long engaged, exhausted my strength. My health failed; I thought my constitution was giving way; so I resolved to dispose of my business and go to America. In 1851 I transported myself and my family to central Ohio. It was pleasant to get away from one's religious and political opponents, but painful to part with so many devoted friends, who had proved their affection by so

many sacrifices, and their stedfastness in times of so much trial; but I had hopes of keeping up my intercourse with them through the press, and of ministering to their gratification and improvement by sending them accounts of all I saw or learnt of an interesting character in the land to which I was going. I had also hopes that a quiet home in a retired and peaceful part of a new country might prove conducive to my own improvement and happiness.

One of the objects I had in view in going to America was to obtain a little quiet for calm reflection on the course I had so long been pursuing, and a sober consideration of the position which I had reached. I was not satisfied that the changes which had taken place in my views and way of life since my separation from the Church and the ministry had all been changes for the better. I had had suspicions for some time, that amidst the whirl of perpetual excitement in which I had lived, and the continual succession of angry contests in which I had been engaged, I had probably missed my way on some points, and I wished for a favourable opportunity of ascertaining whether these suspicions were well grounded or not.

But when I got to America I found myself in a condition less friendly to a just and impartial review of my past history, than the one from which I had fled. I had in the first place a farm to select, and then the purchase to make. I had then my goods to look after, my house to arrange, and food to provide. Then work wanted doing on the farm-a hundred kinds of work, all new, and many of them hard and very perplexing. We wanted men to aid us, and men were not to be got; or, when got, were difficult to manage, and hard to please. And horses, and cows, and sheep were wanted; and poultry, and pigs, and ploughs; and harrows, and wagons, and harness. And stoves and fuel were required. And the house had to be enlarged, and the barns rebuilt, and the gardens cultivated, and the orchards replanted. And a hundred lessons had to be learnt, and a hundred more to be unlearnt. And we were always making mistakes and sustaining losses. And our neighbours were not all that we could wish; and we were not

all that they could wish. It was impossible to avoid impositions, and difficult to take injustice quietly; so we remonstrated and resisted, and made things worse.

Before we had got ourselves fairly settled we began to be visited by a number of friends. And many of those friends were wilder and more extravagant in their views of religion and politics than myself; and instead of helping me to quiet reflection, did much to render such a thing impossible. They were mostly Garrisonian Abolitionists, with whom I had become acquainted while in England, or through the medium of anti-slavery publications. Many of them had had an experience a good deal like my own. They had been members and ministers of churches, and had got into trouble in consequence of their reforming tendencies, and had at length been cast out, or obliged to withdraw. They had waged a long and bitter war with the churches and ministers of their land, and many of them, if not all, had become sceptics and unbelievers of a somewhat extravagant kind. My own descent to scepticism was attributable in some measure to my intercourse with them while in England, and to a perusal of their works. The first deadly blow was struck at my belief in the supernatural inspiration of the Scriptures by Henry C. Wright. It was in conversation with him too that my belief in the necessity of church organisation was undermined, and the way smoothed to that state of utter lawlessness which so naturally tends to infidelity and all ungodliness. My respect for the talents of the abolitionists, and the interest I felt in the cause to which they had devoted their lives, and the sympathy arising from the similar way in which we had all been treated by the churches and priesthoods with which we had come in contact, disposed me first to regard their sceptical views with favour, and then to accept them as true.

And now they welcomed me to their native land, and embraced the earliest opportunity of visiting me in my new home. All that passed between us tended to confirm us in our common unbelief. In some of the abolitionists, anti-Christian views had led to immoral habits, which rendered their antipathy to Christianity all the more bitter. In almost all they had produced a lawlessness of

speculation on moral matters, which could hardly fail to produce in the end, if it had not already produced, licentiousness of life.

And these were now my principal associates. We met at anti-slavery meetings and Bible conventions, and naturally encouraged each other in our irreligious speculations.

As soon as I got things tolerably settled at home, I was drawn away by invitations to public meetings, anniversaries, lectures, discussions, and conventions. New books were placed in my hands all favourable to anti-Christian views. I got new friends and new acquaintances, and all were of the doubting, unbelieving class. Some of them were atheists, and insinuated doubts with regard to the foundation of all religious beliefs. Till my settlement in America I had continued to believe, not only in God, and providence, and prayer, but in immortality; and to look on atheism as the extreme of folly. But now my faith in those doctrines began to be shaken. Instead of drawing back from the gulf of utter unbelief, and retracing my steps towards. Christ, as I had partly hoped, I went further astray; and though I did not plunge headlong into atheism, I came near to the dreadful abyss, and was not a little bewildered with the horrible mists that floated round its brink.

Thus my hopes of calm and quiet thought, and of a sober reconsideration of the steps I had taken in the path of doubt and unbelief, were all, alas! exploded, and the last state of my soul was worse than the first.

To make things worse, I got into trouble with my Christian neighbours. My alienation from Christ had already produced in me a deterioration of character. I was not exactly aware of it at the time, and if I had been told of it, I might not have been able to believe it; but such was really the case. The matter is clear to me now past doubt. I had become less courteous, less conciliatory, less agreeable. I had discarded, to some extent, the Christian doctrines of meekness and humility. My temper had suffered. I was sooner provoked, and less forgiving. I was more prompt in asserting my rights, and more prone perhaps to regard as rights what were

no such things. And I made myself enemies in consequence, and got into unhappy disputes and painful excitements.

I imagined, I suppose, while in England, that the disturbers of my peace were all outside me, and that when I went to America I should leave them all behind; but I see now that many of them were within me, and that I carried them with me over the sea, to my far-off Western home. And they gave me as much trouble in my new abode as they had given me in my old one. It is the state of our minds that determines the measure of our bliss. As Burns says,

"If happiness have not her seat

And centre in the breast,
We may be wise, or rich, or great,
But never can be blest.
No treasures, nor pleasures,
Can make us happy long;
The heart aye's the part aye

That makes us right or wrong.'

And my heart was out of tune, and tended to put everything around me out of tune.

As I have already hinted, I had, before going to America, come to call in question the Divine authority of the Bible, and now I began to advocate my obnoxious views among my new neighbours. A Methodist minister was induced to hold a public discussion with me on the subject, and as he was not well acquainted either with his own side of the question or the other, he was soon embarrassed and confounded, and obliged to retire from the contest. Not content with the retirement of my opponent, I announced a course of lectures on the Bible, resolved not to relinquish my hold of the people's attention till I had laid before them my thoughts on the exciting subject at greater length. The company listened to me for a time, but while I was giving my last lecture, some young men set to work outside to pull down the log school-house in which I was speaking, and I and my friends had to make haste out before the lecture was concluded, to avoid being buried before we were dead. The young men had provided themselves with a plentiful