“’Now, you poor, dirty, mean sinners, take this as a just judgment of God upon you for your meanness, and repent of your dreadful wickedness; and let this be the last time that you attempt to insult a preacher; for if you repeat your abominable sport and persecutions, the next time God will serve you worse, and the devil will get you.’

“They felt so badly that they never uttered one word of reply.”

Our preacher was determined that his work should be recognized, and as he and his fellow traveling ministers had done a good work on the frontier, he was in no humor to relish the accounts of the religious condition of the West, which the missionaries from the East spread through the older States in their letters home.  “They would come,” says he, “with a tolerable education, and a smattering knowledge of the old Calvinistic system of theology.  They were generally tolerably well furnished with old manuscript sermons, that had been preached, or written, perhaps a hundred years before.  Some of these sermons they had memorized, but in general they read them to the people.  This way of reading sermons was out of fashion altogether in this Western world, and of course they produced no effect among the people.  The great mass of our Western people wanted a preacher that could mount a stump or a block, or stand in the bed of a wagon, and, without note or manuscript, quote, expound, and apply the word of God to the hearts and consciences of the people.  The result of the efforts of these Eastern missionaries was not very flattering; and although the Methodist preachers were in reality the pioneer heralds of the cross through the entire West, and although they had raised up numerous societies every five miles, and notwithstanding we had hundreds of traveling and local preachers, accredited and useful ministers of the Lord Jesus Christ, yet these newly-fledged missionaries would write back to the old States hardly any thing else but wailings and lamentations over the moral wastes and destitute condition of the West.”

The indignation of our preacher was fully shared by the people of the West, who considered themselves as good Christians; as their New England brethren, and the people of Quincy called a meeting, irrespective of denomination, and pledged themselves to give Peter Cartwright one thousand dollars per annum, and pay his traveling expenses, if he would “go as a missionary to the New England States, and enlighten them on this and other subjects, of which they were profoundly ignorant.”  Circumstances beyond his control prevented his acceptance of this offer.  “How gladly and willingly would I have undertaken this labor of love,” says he, “and gloried in enlightening them down East, that they might keep their home-manufactured clergy at home, or give them some honorable employ, better suited to their genius than that of reading old musty and worm-eaten sermons.”