trust to their future Christian experience for the means of acquiring
a knowledge of the tender mercies of the Saviour. It must be confessed
that this was the only plan open to him in the field in which he
labored. The people to whom he preached were a rude, rough set, mainly
ignorant and superstitious, and many of them sunk in the depths of
drunkenness and viciousness. The Western country was almost a
wilderness. Vast forests and boundless prairies lay on every hand, with
but here and there a clearing with a solitary log cabin in it, or but
two or three at the most. The people lived in the most perfect solitude,
rarely seeing any but the members of their own households. Solitude and
danger made them superstitious, and the absence of schools kept them in
ignorance. They drank to keep off the blues, and when they came together
for amusement they made the most of their opportunities, and plunged
into the most violent sports, which were not always kept within the
bounds of propriety. Churches were as scarce as schools, and until the
Methodist circuit riders made their appearance in the West, the people
were little better than heathen. The law had scarcely any hold upon
these frontiersmen. They were wild and untamed, and personal freedom was
kept in restraint mainly by the law of personal accountability. They
were generous and improvident, frank, fearless, easy-going, and filled
with an intense scorn for every thing that smacked of Eastern refinement
or city life. They were proud of their buckskin and linsey-woolsey
clothes, their squirrel caps, and their horny hands and rough faces.
They would have been miserable in a city mansion, but they were lords
and kings in their log-cabins. To have sent a preacher bred in the
learned schools of New England to such a people would have been folly.
The smooth cadences, the polished gestures, and, above all, the
manuscript sermon of a Boston divine, would have disgusted the men and
women of the frontier. What cared they for predestination or free-will,
or for any of the dogmas of the schools? They wanted to hear the simple,
fundamental truths of the Gospel, and they wanted to hear them from a
man of their own stamp. They wanted a "fire and brimstone" preacher, one
whose fiery eloquence could stir the very depths of their souls, and set
their simple imaginations all ablaze; one who could shout and sing with
true Western abandon; who could preach in his shirt-sleeves, sleep with
them on t