During this time the Sunday assembling of the church in the wilderness was repeated as often as the safety of the congregation would permit. These were Dr. Beaumont's halcyon moments; the refreshing balms which enabled him to support his public and private affliction. The terrible death of Humphreys had made a great impression in the village, the outrageous blasphemies of the self-condemned reprobate in his last moments, and the utter inability of the various teachers of different opinions who gathered around him, to tranquillize his disordered imagination or quiet his alarmed conscience, led the beholders of that heart-rending scene to recollect, that no such occurrence had taken place during the quiet ministry of him who had preached the comfortable doctrine of God's universal acceptance of penitent sinners, and who had ever aimed rather to reform their lives than bewilder their understandings or influence their imaginations. Many of the neighbours who wanted courage to attend his more public services, visited the Doctor by night, and besought his instruction as a preceptor, or his judgment as a casuist. One wished him to talk with his wife, who was so much engrossed with spiritual things, that she thought it sinful to attend to temporal concerns. He said she left him alone in a severe fit of sickness, while in extreme danger, to listen to a favourite preacher; and, when reproved for her inhumanity, she burst into a transporting extacy, and declared herself now sure of salvation, as "she suffered for righteousness-sake," and would bear her cross with patience. He protested he knew not how to act, since, if he treated her with kindness, she was in despair, calling herself a lost soul, applying to her own case the woe denounced on those with whom the world is at peace, and complaining that she had no longer "a thorn in the flesh to buffet her." A disconsolate mother implored Dr. Beaumont to interfere and support her authority with her daughter, who, misunderstanding their preacher's encomiums on the sufficiency of faith, abandoned herself to antinomian licentiousness, asserting, that "it was the law which had created sin," but that the elect were free from the curse of the law. One father was ruined by children, who refused to "labour for the meat that perisheth." Another came in the deepest distress, lamenting that his son was committed to prison for having joined a band of fanatical desperadoes, who publicly plundered their neighbours, declaring that they were now superior to the commandments, and were prophets appointed to set up the empire of King Jesus, and restore those times "when believers had all things in common." In some of these instances Dr. Beaumont was enabled to enlighten the bewildered judgment; but when the errors of the imagination were fortified by licentious passions, or a perverse disposition, he could only give comfort to the afflicted relations by confirming them in a clearer view of divine truth.