whole country flocked to the place, and all were confounded with amazement and astonishment. If such operations were religion, our country has been without it for a long time. Then our old-fashioned camp-meetings—where are they? They are things of the past. I recollect leaving a camp-ground at a late hour of the night, just as the congregation divided up into groups, and the groups went out into the woods in different directions to engage in secret prayer. We heard them when we were three miles away—_strange secret prayer_! Do you know anything of that kind of secret prayer at the present time? The common pulpit teaching of those times was wonderful(?), but it was the best they had. It was common for preachers to make war upon education. They often boasted of their ignorance. They claimed that education was not necessary to qualify a man for the pulpit. The best school teachers in our country received twelve and fifteen dollars per month for teaching, and boarded themselves. Teachers who now pay five dollars per week for board, can’t see how those old teachers got along upon such wages. In those times it was very common for teachers to get their board for seventy-five cents per week. The farmers claimed that it was unnecessary to educate their daughters, and only necessary to educate their sons sufficiently well to enable them to keep their accounts. Beyond this it was often claimed that an education was of no value—that it only made rascals. I recollect a very zealous old man who preached for the German Baptists; he is now “across the waves.” Once, in my presence, he disposed of a grammatical argument that was put against him, by saying, “It is the wisdom of the world, and it is sensual and devilish.” It was common forty years ago for preachers to say, “I don’t know what I shall say, but just as the Lord gives it to me I will hand it to you.” As a general thing those men knew no better, and the masses of the people knew no better. The people were living in an Emotional period, with the exception of a few brave thinkers, and they were governed by their emotions. Prosperity grew with the growth of our country, and the standard of education was elevated. The free-school system took the place of the old-fashioned subscription schools, which were worth twelve dollars per month to the whole community, and the brave thinkers continued stirring up thought in religion, and giving the fathers and mothers trouble about this thing of confounding religion with passion, and our country is now fairly at sea in an Intellectual period. Religion is now a thing to be learned and lived—_to be done_. Those brave men who advocated an intelligent religion forty years ago, were denounced, from almost every pulpit in our country, as a set of “whitewashed infidels,” having no religion, and “without God in the world.”