had laid it down as a
rule, that their first object should be to destroy the influence of
their opponents, and that in order to do this, they should do their
utmost to damage their reputation, and make them odious. He acted on
this principle, in his debate with me, with the greatest fidelity. He
raked together, and gave forth in his speeches, all the foolish and
wicked stories which my old persecutors had fabricated and spread abroad
respecting me, except those about my having committed suicide, and being
smothered to death, and some others which were so notoriously false that
they could no longer be used to my disadvantage. Those stories he
improved by making them worse. He made a number of new ones also.

I had published a book, giving the story of my life up to the time of my
expulsion from the Methodist New Connexion. This work, like my other
works, was written in the clearest and simplest style, so that no man
with ordinary abilities could fail to understand it, and no man without
powers of perversion bordering on the miraculous, could give to any part
of it an objectionable meaning. This book he took, and read, and
misread, and interpreted, and misinterpreted, so as to make the
impression on persons unacquainted with it, that I had written and
published the most foolish, ridiculous, and in some cases, really
discreditable things of myself, and even false and unwarrantable
statements about others.

Before the discussion came on he gave a lecture on this book. I went to
hear it. He spoke about an hour, and every quotation from the work, and
every reference he made to it, was false. There was not a word of truth
in the whole lecture. There was not a sentence which was not as opposite
to truth and as full of falsehood as he could make it. And the ingenuity
he displayed in his task was marvellous. It was really devilish. He
enlarged my conception of the evil powers of wicked men, in the line of
turning good into evil, and truth into lies, beyond all that I could
otherwise have imagined. He did a hundred things, the least of which my
poor limited capacity would have deemed impossible.

He pursued the same course in the debate. He went as far beyond poor
McCalla, as McCalla had gone beyond ordinary sinners. If I had
undertaken to correct his misrepresentations, and expose his fictions, I
should not have had one moment to give to the subject we were met to
discuss. So I did as I did with McCalla, I rebuked the man with