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 about liberty, when they come to be tried, are often the most arrant despots and tyrants on the face of the earth. Then the people in the district were not _all_ Come-outers. Some were Christians. And these I provoked by my disregard of the Sabbath, and by my advocacy of views unfriendly to religion and the divine authority of the Bible. I worked in my garden or on my farm on a Sunday, in sight of my neighbors as they went to church. I had previously called a Bible convention in the place, and taken the leading part in its proceedings. I took the skeptical side in a public discussion on Christianity in the town, and gave utterance to sentiments which pained the hearts of the religious portion of my neighbors beyond endurance. The consequence was, I got into trouble again, and had to move once more, or be undone.