I returned to my home neither a better nor a wiser man. But I was full of thought. I had been afraid that in the excitement of controversy, and under the smart of persecution, I had gone too far. But here were people who had gone immeasurably farther. I was afraid I had been too rash. But here were pleasant looking and educated people, compared with whom I was the perfection of sobriety. And the sense of my comparative moderation quieted my fears, prevented salutary investigation, and prepared me to go still farther in the way of doubt. New books were placed in my hands, all favorable to anti-christian views. I got new friends and acquaintances, and all were of the doubting, unbelieving class. Several of them were atheists, and insinuated doubts with regard to the foundation of all religious belief. 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 toward Christ as I had partly hoped, I got farther 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 neighbors. 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 was 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,