presents made us by the benevolent friends of the church, and a few dollars we made as marriage fees, we must have suffered much more than we did.  But the Lord provided, and, strange as it may appear to the present generation, we got along without starving or going naked.”  There is something awe-inspiring in the simple trust in God which this good man displayed in every stage of his life.  Once satisfied that he was in the path of duty, he never allowed the future to trouble him.  He provided for it as far as he could, and left the rest to the Master whose work he was doing.  Poverty and hardship had no terrors for this brave young couple, and it was very far from their thoughts to wait until a better day to marry.  They would go out hand in hand into the world and meet their trials together.  Children would come, they knew, and those little mouths would have to be fed, but they would be industrious, saving, and patient, and “God would provide.”

Peter Cartwright’s mission was to plant the Methodist Episcopal Church in the West as well as to preach the Gospel.  For that end he worked and prayed.  The Methodist Episcopal Church was his haven of safety.  Without, all was storm and darkness; within its fold all was peace and light.  He believed his church to be the best door to heaven, if indeed it was not in his estimation the only one.  He was a fanatic, pure and simple, as regarded his own denomination, but a fanatic full of high and noble purposes, and one whose zeal was productive only of good.  This fanaticism was necessary to the success of his labors.  It was his perfect belief that his was the only church in which sinners could find perfect peace that carried him through the difficulties which encompassed him.  Men were dying all around him, and they must come into his church.  They had other denominations close at hand, but they, in his estimation, would not do.  The Methodist Episcopal Church was a necessity for sinners, therefore it must be planted in all parts of the land.  No sacrifice was too great for the accomplishment of this object.  He has lived to see those sacrifices rewarded, to see his church one of the most numerous and powerful religious bodies in the country.

Being so zealous in behalf of his own church, it is not strange that he should have clashed frequently with other denominations.  He got along very well with the majority, but with the Baptists and Universalists he was always on the war path.  The latter especially excited his uncompromising hostility, and he never failed to attack their doctrines with all his forces wherever he encountered them.  “I have thought,” says he, “and do still think, if I were to set out to form a plan to contravene the laws of God, to encourage wickedness of all kinds, to corrupt the morals and encourage vice, and crowd hell with the lost and the wailings of the damned, the Universalist plan should be the plan, the very plan that I would adopt....