“To be excluded from the church of my parents, to be slighted by those professing to be Christians, and by whom I was once respected and treated as a brother, without any reason given, was unendurable. I was grieved beyond measure, astonished and broken-hearted. My poor wife nearly died from grief, and my children, though I tried to conceal it from them, saw my agony. I tried to think what might be the reason of such harsh treatment, until my head seemed ready to burst, and such was the intense agony of my feelings that I was in fear that my heart might fail me, for it sadly ached. At last the question came. How is it possible for Christian men to act in this way? Are they followers of Jesus, who can hurt me so much without giving any reason whatever? As I have said, I never had a doubt about religion before, not one, but now the question came, Can a religion be true, and of God, that can allow men to treat me so unjustly and without mercy? I walked in my garden for hours, many a time till late at night, to retire to a weary, restless sleep. “Then one night the crisis came. I had a fearful dream. I do not believe in dreams, but this one, whether the fancy of a disordered brain or whatever it was, had a terrible result. I thought I saw a great treeless plain, in the center a low spot of ground from which arose a dense white mist and I heard a voice saying of the mist: ‘This is your God and beside it there is nothing else.’ I awoke in horror, bathed in a cold perspiration. I tried to recover my senses, but for all I could do, I felt myself a changed man. Completely worn out I fell asleep again. In the morning I began to tell my wife my dream but she checked me saying, ‘It is too awful, don’t speak of it!’ But I could not get rid of it. The mist was as real to me as myself. It overpowered me. I was a changed man as much so as if I had been metamorphosed into another being. A thousand times I have tried to analyze that dream and to account for it. I never had a doubt in my life about the existence of God, for I had always believed and trusted in Him implicitly, to my great comfort and peace. The only doubting question I ever had was whether a religion could be from God that could allow its believers to treat me as I had been treated. Whatever caused the dream I was another being from what I was the day before; I had no belief in a God whatever. My faith in the divinity of Jesus and in the divine inspiration of the Bible had ceased entirely. I had no feeling about the matter. I could not pray, for I had nothing to pray to. I had no fear, none in the least. I had done nothing to bring me into this condition and felt no responsibility for it. I had not the least desire to go back into the church and would not have accepted the highest place in it, if they had come on their knees begging me to take it. Strangely enough, though the day previous and for weeks and months I had been in an agony of distress, I was now serenely