mischief. Of course he was to be consigned
immediately to the "fiery furnace below." And the greatest of American
preachers, Henry Ward Beecher, in the same revival, gathered about him
the hard-headed business men of New York City and together they prayed
that wicked playwrights and worldly-minded theater-goers might be
brought to a realizing sense of the shame of their conduct, and that the
houses of their frivolous vice might be converted into temples of
Christian worship. Again, those who would not heed the solemn warnings
of the pulpit were "given up," and the Heavenly Father was asked to
remove them "hence."

The influence of this sense of the awfulness of the after life to those
who might not be saved was far-reaching. The farmer, driven by the hard
necessity of making a living for himself and family to remain away from
church, meditated sorrowfully as he followed his plow, and often at the
end of his furrow fell upon his knees and besought the Creator to save
his undying soul and spare him the everlasting torture of the damned. A
popular little gift book, published by the American Tract Society of New
York, was entitled _Passing Over Jordan_, and on an early page we find
the following typical lines:--

"My thoughts on awful subjects roll,
Damnation and the dead:
What horrors seize my guilty soul
Upon a dying bed."

And a young woman who received this as a New Year's present was a
perfectly normal girl of Cincinnati and the daughter of a prominent
family there.

What was happening in the United States during the thirty years we are
studying was the saving of the people from the rough and often coarse
and sensual life of the frontier. Under conditions such as have been
described the influence and power of the preacher in young America were
extraordinary. And the clergy deserved the authority they exercised.
Never before the war was a Methodist bishop even charged with immoral
conduct. The standards of the Baptists and Presbyterians were equally
high. The preachers who called men to repentance were beyond question of
the highest character. Earnest, sincere, overwhelmed with the sense of
their responsibility, they "preached the Word with power," and the Word
was the Bible which all believed implicitly from cover to cover. It was
not clear to preacher or congregation how God spoke to man first in the
Hebrew of the Old Testament, then in the Greek of the New Testament,