This humble edifice had been erected by a peculiar religious sect calling themselves the Free Grace Believers, the radical tenet of whose creed was a denial of the existence of such a place as Hell, and an affirmation of the universal mercy of God, to the intent that all souls should enjoy eternal happiness in the life to come.
For this dangerous heresy the Free Grace Believers were expelled from the Massachusetts Colony, and, after sundry peregrinations, settled at last in the Providence Plantations, upon Pick-a-Neck-a-Sock Point, coadjacent to the town of New Hope. There they built themselves a small cluster of huts, and a church wherein to worship; and there for a while they dwelt, earning a precarious livelihood from the ungenerous soil upon which they had established themselves.
As may be supposed, the presence of so strange a people was entertained with no great degree of complaisance by the vicinage, and at last an old deed granting Pick-a-Neck-a-Sock to Captain Isaiah Applebody was revived by the heirs of that renowned Indian-fighter, whereupon the Free Grace Believers were warned to leave their bleak and rocky refuge for some other abiding-place. Accordingly, driven forth into the world again, they embarked in the snow[1] "Good Companion," of Bristol, for the Province of Pennsylvania, and were afterwards heard of no more in those parts. Their vacated houses crumbled away into ruins, and their church tottered to decay.
1 [ A two-masted square-rigged vessel.]
So at the beginning of these events, upon the narrative of which the author now invites the reader to embark together with himself.
I
HOW THE DEVIL HAUNTED THE MEETING-HOUSE
At the period of this narrative the settlement of New Hope had grown into a very considerable seaport town, doing an extremely handsome trade with the West Indies in cornmeal and dried codfish for sugar, molasses, and rum.
Among the more important citizens of this now wealthy and elegant community, the most notable was Colonel William Belford—a magnate at once distinguished and honored in the civil and military affairs of the colony. This gentleman was an illegitimate son of the Earl of Clandennie by the daughter of a surgeon of the Sixty-seventh Regiment of Scots, and he had inherited a very considerable fortune upon the death of his father, from which he now enjoyed a comfortable competency.