Nelson was a man of immense physical strength; his own trade had fostered this, and before his conversion he had, no doubt, been feared as a man who could hit out and hit hard. As the most effectual means of silencing him, he was pressed for a soldier; but John was not only a Methodist, he had adopted the Quaker notion that a Christian dare not fight; and he seems to have been a real torment to the officers and men of the regiment, who indeed marched him about different parts of the country, but could not get him either to accept the king’s money or to submit to drill. An officer put him in prison for rebuking his profanity, and threatened to chastise him. Nelson says, “It caused a sore temptation to arise in me; to think that a wicked, ignorant man should thus torment me, and I able to tie his head and heels together. I found an old man’s bone in me; but the Lord lifted up the standard within, else should I have wrung his neck and set my foot upon him.” At length, after three months, the Countess of Huntingdon procured his discharge. The regiment was in Newcastle. He preached there on the evening of the day on which he was liberated, and it is testified that a number of the soldiers from his regiment came to hear him, and parted from him with tears. He was arrested as a vagrant, without any visible means of living. A gentleman instantly stepped forward and offered five hundred pounds bail; but the bail was refused. He was able to prove that he was a high-charactered, industrious workman; but it availed nothing. Crowds wept and prayed for him as he was borne through the streets. “Fear not!” he cried, “oh, friends; God hath His way in the whirlwind, and in the storm. Only pray that my faith fail not!” It was at Bradford. They thrust him into a most filthy dungeon. The authorities would give him no food. The people thrust in food, water, and candles. He shared these with some wretched prisoners in the same cage, and he sang hymns, and talked to them all night. He was marched off to York; but there the excitement was so great when it was known that John Nelson was coming a prisoner that armed troops were ordered out to guard him. He says, “Hell from beneath was moved to meet me at my coming!” All the windows were crowded with people—some in sympathy, but most cheering and huzzaing as if some great political traitor had been arrested; but he says, “The Lord made my brow like brass, so that I could look upon all the people as grasshoppers, and pass through the city as if there had been none in it but God and me.”