home, he attended a tolerably good school in the vicinity, hoping to acquire a better education, but the pupils and teacher persecuted him so sorely that he was obliged to withdraw. Determining to lose no time in waiting for an education, he at once began the work of preaching. Being possessed of strong natural sense, a ready wit, and being thoroughly imbued with the spirit of frontier life, he was just the man to carry the Gospel home to the hearts of the rude pioneers of the great West. His manner was that of a backwoodsman, and he had no city airs and graces to offend the plain, rough people to whom he preached. He was emphatically one of them. He offered them the plain Gospel, and gave theological theories a wide berth.
His plan of operations was adapted to the rudest intellect. It was to thunder the terrors of the law into the ears of his converts, or, in his own words, to "shake them over hell until they smelt brimstone right strong," and make them see the fearful condition in which they lay by reason of their sin. Man was to him a wretched, degraded creature, and the only way to bring him to God was to drive him there by the terrors of the law. Our preacher had very little faith in the quieter, more persuasive means of grace. His first effort was to give the souls of his hearers a good shaking up, bring them face to face with hell and its torments, and then, having forced them to flee from the wrath to come, to 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