244 Presidential* Addresses 



had characters strong alike for good and for evil. 

 Their rugged natures made them powers who served 

 light or darkness with fierce intensity; and together 

 with heroic traits they had those evil and dreadful 

 tendencies which are but too apt to be found in 

 characters of heroic possibilities. Such men make 

 the most efficient servants of the Lord if their 

 abounding vitality and energy are directed aright; 

 and if misdirected their influence is equally potent 

 against the cause of Christianity and true civilization. 

 In the hard and cruel life of the border, with its 

 grim struggle against the forbidding forces of wild 

 nature and wilder men, there was much to pull the 

 frontiersman down. If left to himself, without 

 moral teaching and moral guidance, without any of 

 the influences that tend toward the uplifting of man 

 and the subduing of the brute within him, sad would 

 have been his, and therefore our, fate. From this 

 fate we have been largely rescued by the fact that 

 together with the rest of the pioneers went the 

 pioneer preachers; and all honor be given to the 

 Methodists for the great proportion of these pioneer 

 preachers whom they furnished. 



These preachers were of the stamp of old Peter 

 Cartwright men who suffered and overcame every 

 hardship in common with their flock, and who in 

 addition tamed the wild and fierce spirits of their 

 fellow-pioneers. It was not a task that could have 

 been accomplished by men desirous to live in the 

 soft places of the earth and to walk easily on life's 

 journey. They had to possess the spirit of the 



