At Halifax, contrary to the rule for preachers of his standing, he married a Miss Salt, of Betley, in Staffordshire, and was sentenced by the next conference to lose a year of his probation.
[1] Barker was expelled from the Methodist New Connexion, at the conference which met at Halifax in 1841, on the grounds that he "had denied the divine appointment of baptism, and refused to administer the ordinance".
The Unitarians enabled him to start a printing establishment on a larger scale at Wortley, a suburb of Leeds, where, on 6 July 1846, a steam printing-press, which had been provided at a cost of some £600l., was publicly presented to him by Dr. John Bowring.
Some months previously Barker had issued a Proposal for a new library of three hundred volumes, the cheapest collection of works ever published.
After the summer assizes in 1848, the judge at Liverpool issued bench warrants for the arrest of a number of political agitators, including Barker.
[1] Whilst still waiting for trial at the Liverpool winter assizes, Barker was elected a member of the town council of Leeds.
Barker sailed from Boston 11 January 1860, for England, and having landed at Liverpool proceeded to Betley, in Staffordshire, the native place of his wife.
His wife and children followed in August of the same year, and found him already engaged in secularist propaganda as one of the editors of the National Reformer, a position which, however, he then vacated in disgust.
The process of return is documented in Barker's Review of Politics, Literature, Religion, and Morals, and Journal of Education, Science, and Co-operation, a publication he started on Saturday, 7 September 1861, after he had abandoned what he called the "unbounded license party".
In 1862 he became lecturer to a congregation of an eclectic kind of 'unbelievers' at Burnley, where he lived and laboured for more than a year, enforcing precepts of morality, and often taking occasion to speak favourably of the Bible and Christianity.
He returned to America and stayed for a short time at Omaha, where his estate had become a valuable property; then went east, and made Philadelphia his headquarters.
After spending the winter of 1874–5 at Boston, he slowly travelled back to Omaha in the following spring, resting with friends at New York and Philadelphia on his way.
A few days before his death he declared that he "died in the full and firm belief of Jesus Christ, and in the faith and love of His religion as revealed in His life and works, as described in the New Testament.