Among the visiters to the dame's domicile, there had long been some who professed the tenets of Wesley,--the great heresiarch who drew his first breath in the Isle of Axholme. Of the peculiar doctrines set forth by this celebrated religious teacher, Joe, like Deborah herself, knew nought, save that the parson said they were "heresies." The sturdy intelligence of Dame Deborah led her to turn a deaf ear to all innovations in religion. She had been bred a strict church-woman, and never conceived the slightest idea of the fallibility of the orthodox and established Protestant faith. Her apprentices were not permitted to attend meeting or conventicle; and she steadfastly repelled and discouraged all attempts, on the part of her visiters, to introduce religious novelties in their daily gossip. But the restlessness and disquietude of his mind, now its faculties were once more without a fixed object of attachment, impelled Joe to discard, imperceptibly at first, the rules on religious matters, which had been tacitly observed by every member of the dame's household ever since he had entered it. With those who manifested a disposition to enlarge on the merits of the new religious system, he entered eagerly into discussion; and the result was, a determination to pay a secret attendance on one of the meetings of the sect, and thus form a judgment for himself. A preacher of considerable rhetorical powers occupied the meeting-house pulpit, during his first stolen visits; and the skill with which passages from the book which had been his first source of instruction were quoted and applied, rivetted his attention and inflamed his fancy. The speaker gave illustrations of some of the patriarchal histories, and founded on them, and upon the sacrifices under the Mosaic law, such hypotheses as were exactly calculated to awe, and yet to lead captive, Joe's active imagination. To tell, in one sentence, the history of numberless hours of mental revolution, Joe brooded over these theories and their consequences while engaged at his daily labour, and repeated his secret visits to the meeting-house, until his young and earnest mind was filled with the one pervading idea that the only true happiness for the human soul was to be found in some sudden and ecstatic change to be received by what his new teachers called "an act of faith in the atonement."