The majority of the leading members of these churches had been men and women of full age when they left Kentucky.  Some had tarried a little time in Indiana.  The memory of some went back to the time when the Mississippi Valley was almost an 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 their enemies on every hand, they were made to feel how near they were to each other, and how much they loved each other, and it became an easy thing to meet together every first day of the week to sing, to pray, to exhort, and to commemorate the death of their risen Lord.  But many of them were poor, and had growing families, and they had heard that there was a large and good land in the Military Tract in Illinois, and with many a tearful adieu, and bidding farewell to the they loved so well, like Abraham going out into the land that God had given him, into this land flowing with milk and honey they came—­and prospered.