One of its most eager and receptive hearers was “Raccoon” John Smith. He was a frontiersman with little formal education but with a keen mind, a free spirit, and a passion for preaching the gospel. In 1824, when he met Campbell, he was forty years old (four years older than Campbell) and had been an ordained Baptist minister for sixteen years. Within the next year he began to preach in the way of the Reformers—the gospel for all, a simple faith in Christ such as is common to all sects, no creed, every man able to believe and repent, no miraculous “experience” needed. Charges of un-Baptistic teaching were brought against him at an annual meeting of the North District Association and were to be acted upon the next year. Meanwhile he went forth to evangelize and before the next meeting of the association he had won so many converts and organized so many new churches “on the Bible alone” that the charges had to be dropped. In April, 1830, this association formally adopted the principles of the Reformers, but did not at that time dissolve. Within the year, three or four other Baptist associations had taken similar action. At the same time, through the work of other Baptist preachers who cast in their lot with the new movement, many new independent churches had been formed, and some old churches had dropped the Baptist name. As early as 1825 the Baptist church in Louisville, of which P. S. Fall was pastor, voted to give up the Philadelphia Confession and take the Bible alone. Jacob Creath, Sr., and Jacob Creath, Jr., and John Smith evangelized so widely and so successfully that the new movement gathered a considerable following from the previously unconverted as well as from the Baptist churches. By the end of 1830, the Reformers—“Campbellites” to their opponents—were a clearly recognizable element in Kentucky, though most of them were still nominally Baptists. Walter Scott, the “Gospel Restored”