What was happening in the United States during the thirty years we are studying was the saving of the people from the rough and often coarse and sensual life of the frontier. Under conditions such as have been described the influence and power of the preacher in young America were extraordinary. And the clergy deserved the authority they exercised. Never before the war was a Methodist bishop even charged with immoral conduct. The standards of the Baptists and Presbyterians were equally high. The preachers who called men to repentance were beyond question of the highest character. Earnest, sincere, overwhelmed with the sense of their responsibility, they "preached the Word with power," and the Word was the Bible which all believed implicitly from cover to cover. It was not clear to preacher or congregation how God spoke to man first in the Hebrew of the Old Testament, then in the Greek of the New Testament, and finally in the Authorized Version of James I. But it mattered not; the Bible was inspired by the Heavenly Father, for it was so stated in Revelation, and a curse was held up for him who denied its truth or so much as removed one syllable or added a line. It was the authority of the Bible as preached by Martin Luther and John Calvin, and the interpreters of the Sacred Book were the clergy, not the Pope or some distant sacerdotal see. Just how many people were members of the churches it would be very difficult accurately to determine. The Methodists of the South numbered nearly a million in 1860, those of the North were equally strong. The Baptists, North, South, and West, were nearly as numerous. The Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and Christians (Campbellites) had each some hundreds of thousands of members. All the churches, including Catholics, offered seating accommodations for about 20,000,000 of the 31,000,000 people of the country; which is a large proportion. And from the census returns, it seems that church accommodations were always best and most plentiful in the older communities, the East having almost as many pews as there were people. The South could seat 6,500,000 worshipers,--that is, a little more than half of the population; the Northwest was able to accommodate only about 4,000,000.