Missouri has six hundred white churches, with a membership of fifty thousand, which have preaching once a month.

Once a month preaching by secularized ministry! Is it any wonder that the cause does not go forward faster?
Not more than two dozen out of seven hundred churches in Missouri have service every Sunday.
Let us pause a moment over this picture of Southern and Western Baptist Churches, drawn by themselves.

In Arkansas but four churches had at this time preaching every Lord's day; in Alabama, twelve, and in Missouri twenty-four out of seven hundred! Well may the writer ask, "Is it any wonder that the cause does not go forward faster ?" But if this was the order of the Missionary Baptists in the year 1870, what must have been the order of the Old Baptists seventy years before, when "Raccoon" John Smith was groping his way out of darkness into the light of the gospel, all unconscious of his utter blindness, that the reading of the Scriptures would conduce, either directly or indirectly, to his regeneration or sanctification.
The people known as "Hardshell" Baptists do not wish to be called by that name.

They wish to be known as Old Baptists, or United Baptists, for they allege that they are the lineal descendants of the United Baptists, and that the Missionary Baptists have apostatized, and gone away after strange gods.

The Old Baptists had long been declaiming against college-bred preachers and a hireling ministry.