The majority of the leading members of these churches had been men and women of full age when they left Kentucky. Some had tarried a little time in Indiana. The memory of some went back to the time when the Mississippi Valley was almost an unbroken wilderness, with here and there a scattered settlement, made up of a frontier and uneducated people. What are now its great cities were then insignificant hamlets, and its means of commerce were rude flat boats on its rivers, and pack-horses, or clumsy, heavy lumber wagons on its rough and often impassable roads. There were few schools, fewer churches and still fewer educated men. The country was perambulated by itinerant preachers. These were guided by visions and revelations. Signs, omens and impressions directed them to their field of labor and controlled their lives. Ecstatic joy, vivid impressions, voices in the air, or seeing the Lord in the tree-tops, were their evidences of pardon. Once every year the people came together to a great camp-meeting. There was intense excitement and enthusiasm, and many got religion; and this was followed by spiritual lethargy, coldness and apostasy. It was a short, hot summer, followed by a long, cold winter of moral and spiritual death. Among the Old Baptists there was preaching once a month. This was all. There were no prayer-meetings, no meeting together every first day of the week to break break and read the Holy Scriptures. Christian morality was at a low ebb, and Christian liberality down to zero. At length there came a change. The fountains of the great deep were broken up, and men broke loose from the dominion of these old and man-made systems. John Smith took the lead, and was followed by old Jacob Creath, Samuel Rogers, John Rogers, John Allen Gano, P. S. Fall, and many others. Alex. Campbell once said: If any man can read the Acts of Apostles through three times, chapter by chapter, pondering each chapter as he reads, and then can remain an advocate of these old systems of conversion, may the Lord have mercy on him!