He received also small sums of money for his preaching, which had a certain favour among the ‘dens’ of Kent. It had begun merely by an account of his conversion to a few sympathisers at Maidstone, but later he had learned, like most converts, to make a universal application of his private experiences, and laid huge stress on the doctrines of Predestination and Election and Free Grace. While still at Maidstone he had joined the Baptists, but the Baptists at Maidstone were Arminians, whereas his nature and the circumstances of his conversion inclined him towards Calvinism. He thought of joining the Calvinists, who had small congregations at Smarden and other hamlets. But “my pen cannot describe the exercises of my mind on the thought of leaving the Arminian Baptists. It would make many of my former friends my foes.” Far away at Oxford a similar conflict was at about the same time raging in the breast of Newman, and this mute inglorious Newman was to follow the same course as his famous contemporary. He seceded, and became a Particular Baptist. The next few years are a history of struggle, contempt, debt, care, family trials, dependence on the charity of the Elect, whose very cast-off clothing he and his children wore. But the greatest experience of his regenerate life was at hand—the Word which was to send him out of his native and familiar Kent into unknown Sussex, carrying his Gospel to the Gentiles. The call came to him as it had come to the Apostle Paul from the Man of Macedonia—“Come over and help us.” The Man of Sussex was a “miller in Ticehurst, a perfect stranger to me,” whom he met on the Headcorn Road. “He had passed but a few rods, when these words were powerfully impressed upon my mind—‘that man comes out of Sussex to invite you to go down there to preach.’ At which I immediately said ‘Dear Lord, I am not fit to go into Sussex.’” However, he dared not refuse so imperative a summons, enforced through the continual impression on his mind of the words “I will send thee far hence to the Gentiles.” To the Gentiles he went, the barbarians of Shovers Green, from whom soon afterwards came a definite call. He went in the greatest agony of mind, full of doubts and fears and distresses, but in spite of this his preaching was found acceptable to the little knot of believers at the cross-roads beyond Bantony. Here he continued going once a fortnight for some time, though in due course opposition arose—he was accused of being “an Antinomian, a Huntingtonian, a High Calvinist, a Beemanite,” and a large party withdrew from the chapel, though as others came from surrounding parishes, he still had a good congregation. However, in time the disaffected party got the upper hand, and there seems to have been a sort of riot—“an unusual concourse of people in the public road, with loud hollowings and shouts of Horrible! ‘Bominable! Stuff!” In the end, Weller’s career as an apostle of the Gentiles came