In Arkansas there are but four Missionary Baptist Churches that sustain a regular pastor, or sustain preaching more than once a month.  In North Alabama, two; in the whole of Alabama, twelve; in Missouri, twenty-seven.  Missouri has six hundred white churches, with a membership of fifty thousand, which have preaching once a month.  Once a month preaching by secularized ministry!  Is it any wonder that the cause does not go forward faster?  Not more than two dozen out of seven hundred churches in Missouri have service every Sunday.

Let us pause a moment over this picture of Southern and Western Baptist Churches, drawn by themselves.  In Arkansas but four churches had at this time preaching every Lord’s day; in Alabama, twelve, and in Missouri twenty-four out of seven hundred!  Well may the writer ask, “Is it any wonder that the cause does not go forward faster?”

But if this was the order of the Missionary Baptists in the year 1870, what must have been the order of the Old Baptists seventy years before, when “Raccoon” John Smith was groping his way out of darkness into the light of the gospel, all unconscious of his utter blindness, that the reading of the Scriptures would conduce, either directly or indirectly, to his regeneration or sanctification.

The people known as “Hardshell” Baptists do not wish to be called by that name.  They wish to be known as Old Baptists, or United Baptists, for they allege that they are the lineal descendants of the United Baptists, and that the Missionary Baptists have apostatized, and gone away after strange gods.  The Old Baptists had long been declaiming against college-bred preachers and a hireling ministry.  They had certain pet theories concerning man’s inability and God’s sovereignty concerning a certain special, supernatural, immediate and efficacious work of grace on the heart of the sinners.  They said, “If God wants a missionary, he can send him, and maintain him, too.  He needs no human help in the conversion of sinners, whether at home or abroad.  We can find no Scripture for Sunday-schools, Bible classes, prayer-meetings, weekly meetings, hireling preachers, missionaries or missionary societies.”  So they kept to their monthly meetings and monthly preaching.

They have no schools of learning, few educated men, no well-educated men, no missionaries, no contributions for missionary purposes, no weekly meetings, no weekly preaching, no weekly breaking of the loaf, no Sunday-schools, no Bible classes, no prayer-meetings.  But they have monthly preaching, by a man who is reputed a pastor over four churches, and who, in the nature of things, can not reside in three of the four churches over which he professes to preside.  He obtains but meager pecuniary reward for his preaching.  He therefore provides for his own sustenance and that of his family by the labor of his own hands.  For this reason he must needs go to his appointments on Saturday, and return on Monday morning, and is