Abolitionists.--Women's Rights.--All kinds of wild
revolutionary theories.--Go farther into unbelief instead of getting
back to Christ.--A mad world, with strange unwritten histories, and
awful, nameless mysteries, 241

CHAPTER XVI.

Story of my descent from the faith of my childhood, to doubt and
unbelief.--Bad theological teaching in my early days.--Dreadful
results.--Perplexity.--Madness.--Survive all, and get over it.--The
first arguments I heard for the Bible.--True basis of religious
belief.--Reading on the evidences.--Effects.--Unsound
arguments.--_Their_ effect.--_Internal_ evidences best.--Negative
criticism, long continued, ruinous both to faith and virtue.--Moving
ever downwards.--The devil as a theologian, a poet and a
philosopher.--Bible Conventions.--W. L. Garrison, A. J. Davis.--Public
discussions in Philadelphia with Dr. McCalla.--The Doctor's disgraceful
failure.--Great,--mad,--excitement.--Narrow escape from murder.--Eight
nights' debate with Dr. Berg.--The good cause suffered through bad
management.--The Doctor took an untenable position.--Undertook to prove
too much and failed.--Substantially right, but logically wrong.--Other
debates in Ohio, Indiana, England and Scotland.--Mean and mischievous
opponents.--Honorable and useful ones.--Bad advocates of a good cause,
its worst enemies, 269

CHAPTER XVII.

Continuation of my Story.--Lectures on the Bible in
Ohio.--Trouble.--Riot.--Rotten eggs.--Midnight mischief.--Had to
move.--Settlement among Liberals, Comeouters.--_Too_ fond of
liberty.--Would have my share as well as their own.--Fresh
trouble.--Another forced move.--Settlement in the wilds of Nebraska,
among Indians, wolves, and rattlesnakes.--Experience there.--A change
for the better.--How brought about.--Quiet of
mind.--Reflection.--Horrors of Atheism.--Destroys the value of
life.--Deceives you; mocks you; makes you intolerably
miserable.--Suggests suicide.--Prosperity not good for much without
religion: adversity, sickness, pain, loss, bereavement
intolerable.--Strange adventures in the wilderness; terrible dangers;
wonderful deliverances.--Solemn thoughts and feelings in the boundless
desert.--Solitude and silence preach.--Religious feelings
revive.--Recourse to old religious books.--Demoralizing tendency of
unbelief.--Lecture in Philadelphia.--Cases of infidel depravity.--You
can't make people good, nor even decent, without religion.--Infidelity
means utter debasement.--A good, a lovin