CHRIST the FOUNTAIN: “With You is the fountain of life” (Ps 36:9). Peter Cartright (1785-1872) is a remarkable example of the muscular Christianity that plowed up the fallow ground of the American frontier. Born to a poor, ungodly veteran of the Revolutionary War, he was converted at a gospel meeting a few miles from his Kentucky home. “In the midst of a solemn struggle of soul,” he writes, “an impression was made on my mind, as though a voice said to me, ‘Thy sins are all forgiven thee.’ Divine light flashed all around me, unspeakable joy sprung up in my soul.” He began an itinerant evangelism at the tender age of 16, traveling as much as five thousand miles a year—on horseback. He wrote that he “went through storms of wind, hail, snow, and rain;…plunged through swamps, swam swollen streams, lay out all night, wet, weary and hungry…slept with his saddle blanket for a bed…” Yet thousands first drank from the Fountain of life under his preaching.
