unbroken wilderness, with here and
there a scattered settlement, made up of a frontier and uneducated
people. What are now its great cities were then insignificant hamlets,
and its means of commerce were rude flat boats on its rivers, and
pack-horses, or clumsy, heavy lumber wagons on its rough and often
impassable roads. There were few schools, fewer churches and still fewer
educated men. The country was perambulated by itinerant preachers. These
were guided by visions and revelations. Signs, omens and impressions
directed them to their field of labor and controlled their lives.
Ecstatic joy, vivid impressions, voices in the air, or seeing the Lord
in the tree-tops, were their evidences of pardon.

Once every year the people came together to a great camp-meeting. There
was intense excitement and enthusiasm, and many got religion; and this
was followed by spiritual lethargy, coldness and apostasy. It was a
short, hot summer, followed by a long, cold winter of moral and
spiritual death.

Among the Old Baptists there was preaching once a month. This was all.
There were no prayer-meetings, no meeting together every first day of
the week to break break and read the Holy Scriptures. Christian morality
was at a low ebb, and Christian liberality down to zero.

At length there came a change. The fountains of the great deep were
broken up, and men broke loose from the dominion of these old and
man-made systems. John Smith took the lead, and was followed by old
Jacob Creath, Samuel Rogers, John Rogers, John Allen Gano, P. S. Fall,
and many others. Alex. Campbell once said:

If any man can read the Acts of Apostles through three times, chapter by
chapter, pondering each chapter as he reads, and then can remain an
advocate of these old systems of conversion, may the Lord have mercy on
him!

But the old Baptists fiercely resisted the Reformers, and cast them out
as heathen men and publicans. And now the Bible was a new revelation to
the men that came into this movement. The veil was taken off their eyes,
and they could read the Scriptures as they had never read them before.
They could now see that the Bible was a simple and intelligible volume,
written to be understood by the common people, and they were only amazed
at their former blindness. But they were made to know what persecution
means. All the denominations combined against them, and they were
compelled to read the Scriptures to defend themselves; and thus pressed
by t