November 3d, he speaks of arriving at Derby Plains, where he preached five sermons, and saw the ruinous effects of the strange delusion into which a Mr. Douglas Farnum, formerly from New England, had involved himself and many others; a delusion that strove to ignore the common rules of social morality, and to find a direct revelation from Heaven in every impulse of the heart and mind. Though excluded from the people of his earlier association, he held a few deluded persons by his views, until self-destruction scattered them and left their names a reproach to virtue. Their leader, after running this singular career, died, confessing, however, many past errors and wrongs.
"When a people," says Mr. B., "deviate in their zeal from the rules of decency, when they lay aside the Scripture, substitute imagination as a foundation for their action, and call every impulse of the mind an immediate revelation from God, I expect they will sink their characters in disgrace, and come to a miserable end. I visited the vacated village where he and his followers had joined in the merry dance, and felt a kind of horror, like that which once seized the thinking soul of a Volney at the ruins of Palmyra.
"In Clark County, at the head waters of the Little Miami, we had good meetings, were kindly entertained by Charles Arther, and had agreeable intercourse with Elder Isaac N. Walters, a young man about twenty years of age, who bids fair to be useful. At Pleasant township, Madison County, we were kindly received by Fargis Graham, a man fifty-seven years of age, who had just returned from a preaching tour of six weeks in Indiana; he had a good journey, and felt encouraged. I surveyed with admiration his gray hairs, his smiles and tears, while he gave an account of his journey. He visited the poor cabins in the wilderness, lay on the ground in the great prairie, where the wolves were howling around him, and passed through hunger and fatigue, but found God to be with him. His spacious plantation at home, on which he has more than one hundred head of cattle, besides other stock in proportion, reminded me of the ancient possessions of Abraham, Lot, and Jacob. He does much for the cause, and has long been one of its ornaments and faithful ministers."