"There was sound preaching in those days. The preachers preached hell and damnation more than they do now. They could hold a sinner over the pit of fire and brimstone till he could see himself hanging by a slender thread, and he would surrender and accept the gospel that was offered to him."--ONSTOTT: _Lincoln and Salem_, pp. 120, 127. Of one of these preachers, Abraham Bale, Onstott says: "He had a habit when preaching of grasping his left ear with his hand, then leaning over as far as he could and lowering his voice. He would commence to straighten up and his voice would rise to a high key. He would pound the Bible with his fist and stamp the floor, and carry everything before him. He created excitement in the first years of his ministry in Salem. He was a Baptist, though not of the hardshell persuasion."--ONSTOTT: _Lincoln and Salem_, p. 149. This was the general and accepted habit of Baptist preachers in that movement, and the author has heard scores of sermons delivered in this fashion. Of the religious life of early Illinois and of frontier communities in general, Professor Pease says: "Religion came to be the most universally persuasive intellectual force of the frontier. As might be expected, on the frontier the first tendency was toward a disregard of religious observances. The emigrant from the older settled regions left behind him the machinery and the establishment of sectarian religion. Until that machinery could be set up again on the frontier he lived without formal worship and often for the time at least the sense of the need of it passed out of his life. In cases where observance had been due to social convention, there was no doubt a welcome feeling of freedom and unrestraint. "Normally the frontiersman was unreligious. Birkbeck noted with relish the absence of ceremony at baptism or funeral and the tolerance of all backwoods preachers alike, whether they raved or reasoned. Sunday was a day for riot and disorder. Other observers looked with horror on such a state of things, did their best to set up at least stated regular worship, and noted an improvement in morals as a result."--PEASE: _Centennial History of Illinois_, II, 23. There were, however, some compensations. Fordham wrote: "This is not the land of hypocrisy. It would not here have its reward. Religion is not the road to wordly respectability, nor a possession of it the cloak of immorality."--_Personal Narrative_, p. 128. Of the sporadic nature of much of the religious effort on the frontier, Professor Buck says: "In spite of the tremendous exertions of the pioneer preachers, many of the remote settlements must have been practically devoid of religious observances, and even in the older settlements the influence of occasional visitations, however inspiring they might be, was often lacking in permanence."--_Illinois in 1818_, p. 179.