Both these organizations had to give way to the great wave of religious enthusiasm which swept the section early in the nineteenth century. Baptist and Methodist missionaries, many of them unlettered but vigorous and powerful, went into the remotest districts and swept the population into their communions. They preached a narrow, strait-laced, Old Testament religion, but it went deep. They believed in the verbal inspiration of the Bible, and so far as they could they interpreted it literally, laying emphasis upon the future, the rewards of the righteous, and the tortures of the damned. Life upon this earth was regarded as simply a preparation for the life to come. One is sometimes tempted to believe that these spiritual guides deprecated attempts to improve conditions here on earth lest men should grow to think less of a future abode. It is easy to understand why such a doctrine of future reward should have appealed to negroes, and it is perhaps not surprising that the poor upon the frontier likewise found comfort and solace in it. Years ago the social position of the great majority of the Methodists and Baptists was distinctly below that of the Episcopalians and Presbyterians. In recent years many Methodists and Baptists have grown prosperous. Instead of being bare barns, their church edifices are often the most ornate and costly in the town or city. A Methodist or a Baptist can have none of the former feeling of martyrdom now, when in numbers and wealth his denomination is so powerful. ¹ ¹ Except these five, other church organizations have few members. There are a few Congregationalists, almost entirely the result of post-bellum missions to the negroes. White and negro Lutheran churches are scattered through the Southern States, and in Kentucky and Tennessee the Disciples are important. Here and there other denominations have gained a foothold, but their numbers are insignificant in the South as a whole.