In January, 1855, while over on business, I had a public debate at Halifax, England, with Brewin Grant, a congregational minister. This, so far as its impression on my own mind was concerned, was the most unfortunate discussion I ever had. My opponent was the meanest and most unprincipled or ill-principled man I ever met. In a pamphlet which he had published, giving instructions to those who were called to defend the Bible and Christianity against unbelievers, he 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.