pet_, the
organ of the sect, Hosea Ballou, Walter Balfour, and others whose names
I do not recall. Balfour was a Scotchman, preaching with an accent,
and rolling his scalp, from his eyes to the nape of his neck. The
sermons had two peculiarities. First the text was examined carefully
and so construed as to show that the author, whether Jesus, Peter, or
Paul, taught the doctrine of universal salvation. Then came a process
of reasoning designed to show that God could not punish his creatures
in a lake of fire and brimstone. First, he was all-powerful; next, he
was all-wise; then he was infinitely just, and finally his mercy was
without limit. Could a being endowed with these attributes consign his
children to unending misery? From the first I saw the defect in the
process of reasoning. The premises were not faulty, but given a being
with infinite faculties, could another being, with finite faculties
only, forecast the result of the exercise or operation of the infinite?

The little town was made notorious by the career of the physician, Dr.
Aaron Bard. He was born in Jaffrey, N. H., about the year 1770. He
obtained his medical education in part at least, at Troy, N. Y., from
which place he fled to avoid arrest upon the charge of robbing graves.
His parents were rigid believers in the old faith, and in that faith
they had trained the son. Against that faith the son rebelled, dropped
the second "a" in his baptismal name, and rejected the Scriptures as
not containing divine truth. As the mass of the people believed
implicitly in the divine origin and plenary inspiration of the Bible, a
disbeliever was denounced as an infidel and punished by social outlawry.

Bard was not a quiet doubter. He attacked the Bible, ridiculed much of
the Old Testament, accepted controversies with the clergy, although he
attended their families without charge. His reputation as a physician
was considerable, and although his enemies, who were many, made
repeated efforts to secure a competitor, the wary declined their
invitations, and the credulous were soon driven away by poverty, or the
fear of it. Bard was a bachelor, lived economically, never presented a
bill, and when he died, about the year 1850, his books were free of
charges. Before the repeal of the Third Article in the Bill of Rights,
Bard organized a society which by some art of logic was so far
recognized as a religious body as to exempt its members from taxation
in the o