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 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