The Godless and lawless people hated the religious with a bitter hatred, and gathered in great crowds to break up their meetings.

On the other hand, those who had experienced religion were no believers in the doctrine of nonresistance.

At the core, they were thoroughly healthy men, and they fought as valiantly against the powers of evil in matters physical as in matters moral.

Some of the successful frontier preachers were men of weak frame, whose intensity of conviction and fervor of religious belief supplied the lack of bodily powers; but as a rule the preacher who did most was a stalwart man, as strong in body as in faith.

One of the continually recurring incidents in the biographies of the famous frontier preachers is that of some particularly hardened sinner who was never converted until, tempted to assault the preacher of the Word, he was soundly thrashed by the latter, and his eyes thereby rudely opened through his sense of physical shortcoming to an appreciation of his moral iniquity.
The Frontiersmen Threaten the Spanish Regions.
Throughout these years, as the frontiersmen pressed into the West, they continued to fret and strain against the Spanish boundaries.