The step was, as he had anticipated, attended with great sacrifices. Old friends forsook him. He had always stood high among his preaching brethren, but now he was regarded with undisguised suspicion. Soon the storm gathered furiously about him. At the annual meeting of the association in which he held his membership charges were preferred against him, among the most serious of which was that, instead of the King James translation of the Scriptures, "he had on two or three occasions in public, and often in his family, read from Alexander Campbell's translation." Without being given an opportunity to defend himself, he was placed under censure, and given a year in which to correct his views and change his ways.
Returning to his home, the way for a time seemed to close before him. The little farm was covered with a heavy mortgage. The churches that had obligated themselves to pay his debt in compensation of his services, now refused to make further payment. Nothing apparently remained but for him to cultivate his farm with his own hands, and for a time to abandon the work of the ministry. Taking his ax he went into the forest with the heroic purpose, first to free himself from debt, and then to return to the defense of the faith which he now felt to be the teaching of the Word of God. But one day as he was bending to his labors he thought of the cause that he loved, and remembered that there was no one in all the land to advocate it but himself. He also thought of the construction that would be put on his silence by his enemies. He dropped the ax, went to the house, and threw down his coarse apron at the feet of his wife, exclaiming:
Nancy, I shall work no more! Get whom you please to carry on the farm, but do not call on me! In all the land there is not one soul to open his mouth in defense of the best cause under the sun! I am determined, from this time forth, to preach the Gospel, and leave the consequences to God.
With the courage of his convictions, he immediately began to preach the truth as he now felt it and saw it. No personal consideration was allowed to interfere with the course he had marked out for himself. His heroic wife readily caught his spirit and as cheerfully accepted the responsibilities of her new position--agreeing to take the oversight of the farm, care for the family, and to relieve him of every temporal care, while he should give himself wholly to the ministry of the Word.