I gave up the _Christian Investigator_ at the end of two years, and as two of my friends were anxious to publish a periodical, I refrained for a time from commencing another, to give them a better chance of success. I also helped them by writing for them, at their request, a number of articles for the earlier numbers of their work. Their attempt however proved a failure. The work contained a heap of Antinomian and Millenarian nonsense, and my readers had no taste for such stuff; and the work was given up, and the Editors shortly after left me and my friends, and joined the Plymouth Brethren, repaying me for my kindness by treachery and abuse. One of them published a tract when he took himself away, exhorting my friends to be on their guard lest they should be led by me into anti-christian error. Their conduct towards me altogether, as I thought, was unjust and dishonorable, and though they are now both dead, I can think of no good excuse for the way in which they acted. But God is judge.
I now laid aside the name of _Methodist_ and adopted that of _Christian_, and I commenced a new periodical, bearing the same title. I made it, as I had made my other periodicals, the organ of my own mind, the vehicle of my own thoughts on every subject of importance that engaged my attention. My writing was simply free and friendly talk with my readers on matters in which we were all greatly interested. And the work contains the history of the changes which took place in my views during the period of its publication.
While publishing _The Christian_, I published a multitude of pamphlets. In answer to a pamphlet by the Rev. W. Cooke, in which I was roughly and unjustly handled, I published seven letters entitled _Truth and Reform against the World_, signing myself _A Christian_. In these letters I spoke with the greatest freedom both of myself and of my opponents, as well as on a great variety of other subjects. I exposed a number of what seemed extravagant or unguarded statements made by my assailant with regard to the Scriptures. I also published a work on _The Hired Ministry_. My tracts on _Saving Faith_ and _The Atonement_ came out about the same time. My aim in these latter publications was to free the subject of Saving Faith and the doctrine of the Atonement from needless mystery, by separating from the teachings of Christ and the Apostles on those points, the bewildering and mischievous additions of ignorant theologians. I did not deny the doctrine of salvation by faith in Christ, but only showed that the faith in Christ spoken of in the New Testament was simply a belief in Him as the Messiah, leading us to receive and obey His teachings, and to trust in Him for salvation. Nor did I deny the doctrine of redemption or atonement; but simply endeavored to put what the New Testament said on these subjects in its true light. In most of those works, if not in all of them, there are evidences of undue excitement, and in many of them there are passages which, in one's calmer and more candid mood, one is obliged to condemn.