In justice to my supporters I must state that when I resigned from the Presbyterian church I had no idea that the step would eventually carry me beyond Christianity itself. "A purer Christianity" was my plea at that time, and I sincerely believed that with Calvinism out of the way there would be left no serious obstacle for reason to stumble over. I was not prepared at that stage of my evolution to perceive the impossibility of separating Calvinism from Christianity without destroying both. Calvinism was a symptom and not the disease itself. The disease was supernaturalism, of which the different sects are the manifestations. It is the disease and not its manifestation that required suppression. I was unable to see the relationship between an infinite God, sovereign of all, and Calvinism, and fancied in my mind that I could keep God and let Calvin go. But faith in a God who knows everything and is absolutely sovereign, spells Calvinism. The step out of Christianity was infinitely more difficult than the step out of Presbyterianism. Had my followers been trained to think rationally, they would have seen that since I did not resign from the Presbyterian church, for a different form of baptism, or communion, but because of its failure to recognize Reason as the highest authority in religion, I was bound, by the very stress and logic of my premises, to drop Christianity as I had been led to drop Calvinism. My trustees were quite unconscious of giving me dangerous advice, or of trying to make of me an example of arrested development. They were my friends, and the friends of the cause, but they could not think logically, and that is why they could not appreciate my reply that we are not free to command the truth,--we must obey the truth. Matters came to a crisis when I delivered a lecture on "Was Jesus God?" I can still see the painful expression on the faces of many of my hearers on that Sunday morning. Did I bring them out of the Presbyterian church to make "infidels" and "blasphemers" of them? A number of my hearers rose and left the hall. The strain upon me was severe. When I sat down I was in a profuse perspiration. When all was over, I must have looked ashen pale. I had hardly any strength left to announce the closing hymn. But my audience suffered perhaps even more than did I. To part with Jesus is not the same thing as parting with Calvin, and that morning I had told them that if Calvin goes, Jesus must go too.