Neville recounts that after leaving Barbados for America at seventeen, he later -- at about the age of twenty or twenty-one -- fell into a period of strict self-denial: he gave up meat, fish, and fowl entirely, stopped drinking alcohol, and remained celibate, sustaining this for seven years. He frames the period as an example of the biblical 'state of John the Baptist,' a stage of doing violence to one's own appetites that, in his teaching, every person passes through before entering the higher state represented by 'the one greater than John.'