Many a book has originated in the misfortunes of its Author. Want, imprisonment, and disablement by bodily infirmity from active occupation, have produced almost as many works in prose or rhyme, as leisure, voluntary exertion, and strong desire. Asgill's harmless heresy began in an involuntary confinement to which he was reduced in consequence of an unsuccessful speculation; he had engaged in this adventure (by which better word our forefathers designated what the Americans call a _spec_,) with the hope of increasing his fortune, instead of which he incurred so great a loss that he found it necessary to keep his chamber in the Temple for some years. There he fell to examining that “Book of Law and Gospel,” both which we call the Bible; and examining it as he would have perused an old deed with the hope of discovering in it some clause upon which to ground a claim at law, this thought, he says, first came into his head; but it was a great while coming out. He was afraid of his own thoughts, lest they were his own only, and as such a delusion. And when he had tried them with pen, ink and paper, and they seemed to him plainer and plainer every time he went over them, and he had formed them into an Argument, “to see how they would bear upon the proof,” even then he had no intention of making them public. “But writing an ill hand,” says he, “I resolved to see how it would look in print. On this I gave the Printer my Copy, with money for his own labour, to print off some few for myself, and keep the press secret. But I remember before he got half way through, he told me his men fancied I was a little crazed, in which I also fancied he spoke one word for them and two for himself. However I bid him go on; and at last it had so raised his fancy that he desired my leave to print off one edition at the risque of his own charge, saying he thought some of the Anabaptists would believe it first. I being just then going for Ireland, admitted him, with this injunction, he should not publish them 'till I was got clear out of Middlesex; which I believe he might observe; though by what I heard afterwards, they were all about town by that time I got to St. Albans: and the book was in Ireland almost as soon as I was, (for a man's works will follow him,) with a noise after me that I was gone away mad.”