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 loving, and a faithful wife, who never ceases to pray.--Return to England.--Experience there.--Unbounded licentiousness of Secularism.--Total separation from the infidel party.--My new Periodical.--Resolution to re-read the Bible, to do justice to Christianity, &c.--A sight of Jesus.--Happy results.--Change both of head and heart.--Happy transformation of character.--A new life.--New work.--New lot.--From darkness to light,--From death to life,--from purgatory to paradise,--from hell to heaven, 310

CHAPTER XVIII.

Parties whose Christian sympathy, and wise words, and generous deeds, helped me back to Christ, 345

CHAPTER XIX.

The steps by which I gradually returned to Christ.--Lectures and sermons on the road.--Answers to objections against the Bible and Christianity.--Spiritualism.--Strange phenomena.--Answers to objections advanced by myself in the Berg debate.--The position to be taken by advocates of the Bible and Christianity.--Additional remarks on Divine inspiration.--What it implies, and what it does not imply.--Overdoing is undoing.--Genesis and Geology.--The Bible and Science.--Public discussions,--explanation.--At Home in the Church.--Sorrowful, yet always rejoicing.--Joy unspeakable, 355