ehold; and, after having given them a long and happy life
on earth, receive them to His kingdom, to share together the riches of
His love for ever and ever.

CHAPTER XVII.

CONTINUATION OF MY STORY. FRESH TROUBLES. A CHANGE FOR THE BETTER. HOW
BROUGHT ABOUT. INCIDENTS. THE CHANGE COMPLETE AT LENGTH. ITS RESULTS.

In compliance with the request of some skeptical neighbours, I lectured
against the Divine authority of the Bible in my first settlement in
Ohio. Mr. Spofforth, 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 another 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 with great patience, 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 over, to avoid being buried before we were dead.

The young men had provided themselves plentifully with rotten eggs,
thinking to pelt me on my way home; but the night was very dark, and the
way led through a tall, dense, shadowy forest, and somehow they mistook
their own father for me, and gave _him_ the eggs. When he got home he
was as slimy and odoriferous as a man need to be; while I was perfectly
clean and sweet.

But I was not to be permitted to escape in this way. During the night
they pulled down the fences of my farm, and gave me other hints, that I
must leave, or do worse. So I sold my farm for what I could get, and
bought another some seventy miles away, near Salem, Columbiana County, a
region occupied chiefly by what, in America, were called
"_Come-outers_"--people who had left the churches and the ministry, and
even separated themselves from civil organizations, resolved to be
subject to no authority but their own wills or their own whims. Among
people so free as those, I thought I should have liberty plenty; but I
soon found that they were so fond of freedom, that they wanted _my_
share as well as their own, and I got into trouble once more. And then I
saw that the greatest brawlers