The Great Revival.—Frontispiece.
[Illustration:
The Foundry, Moorfields.
]
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THE
GREAT REVIVAL
OF
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.
BY
REV. EDWIN PAXTON HOOD,
AUTHOR OF
“Isaac Watts: his Life and Writings, his Home and Friends,” etc.
With a Supplemental Chapter on the Revival in America.
PHILADELPHIA:
AMERICAN SUNDAY-SCHOOL UNION,
1122 CHESTNUT STREET.
NEW YORK. CHICAGO.
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EDITOR’S NOTE.
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The only changes made in revising this work are in the local allusions
to England as “our country,” etc., and in a few phrases and expressions
naturally arising from the original preparation of the chapters for
successive numbers of a magazine. If any reader thinks that the Author’s
enthusiasm in his subject has caused him to ascribe too great influence
to the “Methodist movement,” and not to give due recognition to other
potent agencies in the “great awakening” of the last century, let him
remember that this volume does not profess to give a _complete_, but
only a _partial_ history of the Great Revival. Indeed, the Author’s
graphic pictures relate chiefly to the movement, as it swept over London
and the great mining centres of England, where the truth, as proclaimed
by the great leaders, Whitefield, the Wesleys, and their co-laborers,
won its greatest victories, and where Methodism has ever continued to
render some of its most valiant and glorious services for Christ. It is
not to be inferred that in Scotland, Ireland, and in the American
colonies, as in many portions of England, other organizations,
dissenting societies and churches were not a power in spreading the
Great Revival movement.
A brief chapter has been added at the close, sketching some phases of
the revival in the American colonies, under the labors of Edwards,
Whitefield, the Tennents, and their associates. Whatever other material
has been added by the Editor is indicated by brackets, thus leaving the
distinguished Author’s views and expressions intact.
An Index has also been added, to increase the permanent value of the
book to the reader. If the history of the remarkable “religious
awakenings” of the eighteenth century were more diligently studied, and
the holy enthusiasm and wonderful zeal of those great leaders in
“hunting for souls” were to inspire workers of this century, what
marvellous conquests and victories should we witness for the Son of God!
Philadelphia, March, 1882.
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PREFACE.
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The author of the following pages begs that they may be read kindly—and,
he will venture to say, _not_ critically. Originally published as a
series of papers in the _Sunday at Home_, * * * they are only
_Vignettes_—etchings. The History of the great Religious Movement of the
Eighteenth Century yet remains unwritten; not often has the world known
such a marvellous awakening of religious thought; and, as we are further
removed in time, so, perhaps, we are better able to judge of the
momentous circumstances, could we but seize the point of view.
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CONTENTS.
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CHAP. PAGE.
I. THE DARKNESS BEFORE THE DAWN 7
II. FIRST STREAKS OF DAWN 24
III. OXFORD: NEW LIGHTS AND OLD LANTERNS 48
IV. CAST OUT FROM THE CHURCH—TAKING TO THE 68
FIELDS
V. THE REVIVAL CONSERVATIVE 86
VI. THE SINGERS OF THE REVIVAL 109
VII. LAY PREACHING AND LAY PREACHERS 132
VIII. A GALLERY OF REVIVALIST PORTRAITS 154
IX. BLOSSOMS IN THE WILDERNESS 180
X. THE REVIVAL BECOMES EDUCATIONAL—ROBERT 193
RAIKES
XI. THE ROMANTIC STORY OF SILAS TOLD 216
XII. MISSIONARY SOCIETIES 250
XIII. AFTERMATH 260
XIV. REVIVAL IN THE NEW WORLD 281
APPENDICES 303
INDEX 321
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THE GREAT REVIVAL.
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CHAPTER I
DARKNESS BEFORE DAWN.
It cannot be too often remembered or repeated that when the Bible has
been brought face to face with the conscience of corrupt society, in
every age it has shown itself to be that which it professes, and which
its believers declare it to be—“the great power of God.” It proved
itself thus amidst the hoary and decaying corruptions of the ancient
civilisation, when its truths were first published to the Roman Empire;
it proclaimed its power to the impure but polished society of Florence,
when Savonarola preached his wonderful sermons in St. Mark’s; and
effected the same results throughout the whole German Empire, when Bible
truth sounded forth from Luther’s trumpet-tones. The same principle is
illustrated where the great evangelical truths of the New Testament
entered nations, as in Spain or France, only to be rejected. From that
rejection and the martyrdoms of the first believers; those nations have
never recovered themselves even to this hour; and of the two nations,
that in which the rejection was the most haughty and cruel, has suffered
most from its renunciation.
England has passed through three great evangelical revivals.
The first, the period of the REFORMATION, whose force was latent there,
even before the waves of the great German revolution reached its shores,
and called forth the pen of a monarch, and that monarch a haughty Tudor,
to enter the lists of disputation with the lowly-born son of a miner of
Hartz Mountains. What that Reformation effected in England we all very
well know; the changes it wrought in opinion, the martyrs who passed
away in their chariots of fire in vindication of its doctrines, the
great writers and preachers to whose works and names we frequently and
lovingly refer.
Then came the second great evangelical revival, the period of
PURITANISM,[1] whose central interests gather round the great civil
wars. This was the time, and these were the opinions which produced some
of the most massive and magnificent writers of our language; the whole
mind of the country was stirred to its deepest heart by faith in those
truths, which to believe enobles human nature, and enables it to endure
“as seeing Him who is invisible.” There can be no doubt that it produced
some of the grandest and noblest minds, whether for service by sword or
pen, in the pulpit or the cabinet, that the world has known. Lord
Macaulay’s magnificently glowing description of the English Puritan, and
how he attained, by his evangelical opinions, his stature of strength,
will be familiar to all readers who know his essay on Milton.
Footnote 1:
Appendix A.
But the present aim is to gather up some of the facts and impressions,
and briefly to recite some of the influences of the third great
evangelical revival in the Eighteenth Century. We are guilty of no
exaggeration in saying that these have been equally deserving historic
fame with either of the preceding. The story has less, perhaps, to
excite some of our most passionate human interests; it had not to make
its way through stakes and scaffolds, although it could recite many
tales of persecution; it unsheathed no sword, the weapons of its warfare
were not carnal; and on the whole, it may be said its doctrine distilled
“as the dew;” yet it is not too much to say that from the revival of the
last century came forth that wonderfully manifold reticulation and holy
machinery of piety and benevolence, we find in such active operation
around us to-day.
All impartial historians of the period place this most remarkable
religious impulse in the rank of the very foremost phenomena of the
times. The calm and able historian, Earl Stanhope, speaking of it, as
“despised at its commencement,” continues, “with less immediate
importance than wars or political changes, it endures long after not
only the result but the memory of these has passed away, and thousands”
(his lordship ought to have said millions) “who never heard of Fontenoy
or Walpole, continue to follow the precepts, and venerate the name of
John Wesley.” While the latest, a still more able and equally impartial
and quiet historian, Mr. Lecky, says, “Our splendid victories by land
and sea must yield in real importance to this religious revolution; it
exercised a profound and lasting influence upon the spirit of the
Established Church of England, upon the amount and distribution of the
moral forces of that nation, and even upon the course of its political
history.”
Shall we, then, first attempt to obtain some adequate idea of what this
Revival effected, by a slight effort to realise what sort of world and
state of society it was into which the Revival came? One writer truly
remarks, “Never has century risen on christian England so void of soul
and faith as that which opened with Queen Anne, and which reached its
misty noon beneath the second George, a dewless night succeeded by a
dewless dawn. There was no freshness in the past and no promise in the
future; the Puritans were buried, the Methodists were not born.” It is
unquestionably true that black, bad and corrupt as society was, for the
most part, all round, in the eighteenth century, intellectual and
spiritual forces broke forth, simultaneously we had almost said, and
believing, as we do, in the Providence which governed the rise of both,
we may say, consentaneously, which have left far behind all social
regenerations which the pen of history has recited before. Of almost all
the fruits we enjoy, it may be said the seeds were planted then; even
those which, like the printing-press or the gospel, had been planted
ages before, were so transplanted as to flourish with a new vigour.
Our eye has been taught to rest on an interesting incident. It was in
1757 John Wesley, travelling and preaching, then about fifty years of
age, but still with nearly forty years of work before him, arrived in
Glasgow. He saw in the University its library and its pictures; but, had
he possessed the vision of a Hebrew seer he might have glanced up from
the quadrangle of the college to the humble rooms, up a spiral
staircase, of a young workman, over whose lodging was the sign and
information that they were tenanted by a “mathematical instrument maker
to the University.” This young man, living there upon a poor fare, and
eking out a poor subsistence, with many thoughts burdening his mind, was
destined to be the founder of the greatest commercial and material
revolution the world has known: through him seems to have been fulfilled
the wonderfully significant prophecy of Nahum: “The chariots shall rage
in the streets, they shall jostle one against another in the broad ways:
they shall seem like torches, they shall run like the lightnings.” This
young man was James Watt, who gave to the world the steam engine. A few
years after he gave his mighty invention to Birmingham; and the world
has never been the same world since. “By that invention,” says Emerson,
“one man can do the work of two hundred and fifty men;” and in
Manchester alone and in its vicinity there are probably sixty thousand
boilers, and the aggregate power of a million horses.
Let not the allusion seem out of place. That age was the seed-time of
the present harvest fields; in that time those great religious ideas
which have wrought such an astonishing revolution, acquired body and
form; and we ought to notice how, when God sets free some new idea, He
also calls into existence the new vehicle for its diffusion. He did not
trust the early christian faith to the old Latin races, to the selfish
and æsthetic Greek, or to the merely conservative Hebrew; He “hissed,”
in the graphic language of the old Bible, for a new race, and gave the
New Testament to the Teutonic people, who have ever been its chief
guardians and expositors; and thus, in all reviews of the development
and unfolding of the religious life in the times of which we speak, we
have to notice how the material and the spiritual changes have re-acted
on each other, while both have brought a change which has indeed “made
all things new.”
Contrasting the state of society after the rise of the Great Revival
with what it was before, the present with the past, it is quite obvious
that something has brought about a general decency and decorum of
manners, a tenderness and benevolence of sentiment, a religious interest
in, and observance of, pious usages, not to speak of a depth of
religious life and conviction, and a general purity and nobility of
literary taste, which did not exist before. All these must be credited
to this great movement. It is not in the nature of steam engines,
whether stationary or locomotive, nor in printing presses, or
Staffordshire potteries, undirected by spiritual forces, to raise the
morals or to improve the manners of mankind.
If sometimes in the presence of the spectacles of ignorance, crime,
irreligion, and corruption in our own day, we are filled with a sense of
despair for the prospects of society, it may be well to take a
retrospect of what society was in England at the commencement of the
last century. When George III. ascended the throne the population of
England was not much over five millions; at the commencement of the
present century it was nearly eleven millions; but with the intensely
crowded population of the present day, the cancerous elements of
society, the dangerous, pauperised, and criminal classes are in far less
proportion, not merely relatively, but really. It was a small country,
and possessed few inhabitants. There are few circumstances which can
give us much pleasure in the review. National distress was constantly
making itself bitterly felt; it was the age of mobs and riots. The state
of the criminal law was cruel in the extreme. Blackstone calculates that
for no fewer than one hundred and sixty offences, some of them of the
most frivolous description, the judge was bound to pronounce sentence of
death. Crime, of course, flourished. During the year 1738 no fewer than
fifty-two criminals were hanged at Tyburn. During that and the preceding
years, twelve thousand persons had been convicted, within the Bills of
Mortality, for smuggling gin and selling it without licence. The
amusements of all classes of people were exactly of that order
calculated to create a cruel disposition, and thus to encourage crime;
bear-baiting, bull-baiting, prize-fighting, cock-fighting: on a Shrove
Tuesday it was dangerous to pass down any public street. This was the
day selected for the barbarity of tying a harmless cock to a stake,
there to be battered to death by throwing a stick at it from a certain
distance. The grim humour of the people took this form of expressing the
national hatred to the French, from the Latin name for the cock,
_Gallus_. It was in truth a barbarous pun.
With abundant wealth and means of happiness, the people fell far short
of what we should consider comfort now. Life and liberty were cheap, and
a prevalent Deism or Atheism was united to a wild licentiousness of
manners, brutalising all classes of society. For the most part, the
Church of England had so shamefully forgotten or neglected her duty—this
is admitted now by all her most ardent ministers—while the
Noncomformists had sunk generally into so cold an indifferentism in
devotion, and so hard and sceptical a frame in theology, that every
interest in the land was surrendered to profligacy and recklessness,
and, in thoughtful minds, to despair. Society in general was spiritually
dead. The literature of England, with two or three famous exceptions,
suffered a temporary eclipse. Such as it was, it was perverted from all
high purposes, and was utterly alien to all purity and moral dignity. A
good idea of the moral tone of the times might be obtained by running
the eye over a few volumes of the old plays of this period, many of them
even written by ladies; it is amazing to us now to think not only that
they could be tolerated, but even applauded. The gaols were filled with
culprits; but this did not prevent the heaths, moors, and forests from
swarming with highwaymen, and the cities with burglars. In the remote
regions of England, such as Cornwall in the west, Yorkshire and
Northumberland in the north, and especially in the midland
Staffordshire, the manners were wild and savage, passing all conception
and description. We have to conceive of a state of society divested of
all the educational, philanthropic, and benevolent activities of modern
times. There were no Sunday-schools, and few day-schools; here and
there, some fortunate neighbourhood possessed a grammar-school from some
old foundation. Or, perhaps some solitary chapel, retreating into a
bye-lane in the metropolitan city, or the country town, or, more
probably, far away from any town, stood at some confluence of roads, a
monument of old intolerance; but, as we said, religious life was in fact
dead, or lying in a trance.
As to the religious teachers of those times, we know of no period in our
history concerning which it might so appropriately be said, in the words
of the prophet, “The pastors” are “become brutish, and have not sought
the Lord.” In the life of a singular man, but not a good one, Thomas
Lord Lyttleton, in a letter dated 1775, we have a most graphic portrait
of a country clergyman, a friend of Lyttleton, who went by the
designation of “Parson Adams.” We suppose him to be no bad
representative of the average parson of that day—coarse, profane,
jocular, irreligious. On a Saturday evening he told Lyttleton, his host,
that he should send his flocks to grass on the approaching Sabbath. “The
next morning,” says Lyttleton, “we hinted to him that the company did
not wish to restrain him from attending the Divine service of the
parish; but he declared that it would be adding contempt to neglect if,
when he had absented himself from his own church he should go to any
other. This curious etiquette he strictly observed; and we passed a
Sabbath contrary, I fear, both to law and to gospel.”
If we desire to obtain some knowledge of what the Church of England was,
as represented by her clergy when George III. was king, we should go to
her own records; and for the later years of his reign, notably to the
life of that learned, active, and amiable man, Dr. Blomfield, Bishop of
London, whose memory was a wonderful repository of anecdotes, not
tending to elevate the clergy of those times in popular estimation.
Intoxication was a vice very characteristic of the cloth: on one
occasion the bishop reproved one of his Chester clergy for drunkenness:
he replied, “But, my lord, I never was drunk on duty.” “On duty!”
exclaimed the bishop; “and pray, sir, when is a clergyman not on duty?”
“True,” said the other; “my lord, I never thought of that.” The bishop
went into a poor man’s cottage in one of the valleys in the Lake
district, and asked whether his clergyman ever visited him. The poor man
replied that he did very frequently. The bishop was delighted, and
expressed his gratification at this pastoral oversight; and this led to
the discovery that there were a good many foxes on the hills behind the
house, which gave the occasion for the frequency of calls which could
scarcely be considered pastoral. The chaplain and son-in-law of Bishop
North examined candidates for orders in a tent on a cricket-field, he
being engaged as one of the players; the chaplain of Bishop Douglas
examined whilst shaving; Bishop Watson never resided in his diocese
during an episcopate of thirty-four years.
And those who preached seem rarely to have been of a very edifying order
of preachers; Bishop Blomfield used to relate how, in his boyhood, when
at Bury St. Edmund’s, the Marquis of Bristol had given a number of
scarlet cloaks to some poor old women; they all appeared at church on
the following Sunday, resplendent in their new and bright array, and the
clergyman made the donation of the marquis the subject of his discourse,
announcing his text with a graceful wave of his hand towards the poor
old bodies who were sitting there all together: “Even Solomon, in all
his glory, was not arrayed like one of these!” This worthy seems to have
been very capable of such things: on another occasion a dole of potatoes
was distributed by the local authorities in Bury, and this also was
improved in a sermon. “He had himself,” the bishop says, “a very
corpulent frame, and pompous manner, and a habit of rolling from side to
side while he delivered himself of his breathing thoughts and burning
words; on the occasion of the potato dole, he chose for his singularly
appropriate text (Exodus xvi. 15): ‘And when the children of Israel saw
it, they said one to another, It is manna;’ and thence he proceeded to
discourse to the recipients of the potatoes on the warning furnished by
the Israelites against the sin of gluttony, and the wickedness of taking
more than their share.”
When that admirable man, Mr. Shirley, began his evangelistic ministry as
the friend and coadjutor of his cousin, the Countess of Huntingdon, a
curate went to the archbishop to complain of his unclerical proceedings:
“Oh, your grace, I have something of great importance to communicate; it
will astonish you!” “Indeed, what can it be?” said the archbishop. “Why,
my lord,” replied he, throwing into his countenance an expression of
horror, and expecting the archbishop to be petrified with astonishment,
“he actually wears white stockings!” “Very unclerical indeed,” said the
archbishop, apparently much surprised; he drew his chair near to the
curate, and with peculiar earnestness, and in a sort of confidential
whisper, said, “Now tell me—I ask this with peculiar feelings of
interest—does Mr. Shirley wear them over his boots?” “Why, no, your
grace, I cannot say he does.” “Well, sir, the first time you ever hear
of Mr. Shirley wearing them over his boots, be so good as to warn me,
and I shall know how to deal with him!”
We would not, on the other hand, be unjust. We may well believe that
there were hamlets and villages where country clergymen realised their
duties and fulfilled them, and not only deserved all the merit of
Goldsmith’s charming picture,[2] but were faithful ministers of the New
Testament too. But our words and illustrations refer to the average
character presented to us by the Church; and this, again, is illustrated
by the vehement hostility presented on all hands to the first
indications of the Great Revival. For instance, the Rev. Dr. Thomas
Church, Vicar of Battersea, in a well-known sermon on charity schools,
deplored and denounced the enormous wickedness of the times; after
saying, “Our streets are grievously infested; every day we see the most
dreadful confusions, daring villanies, dangers, and mischiefs, arising
from the want of sentiments of piety,” he continues: “For our own sakes
and our posterity’s everything should be encouraged which will
contribute to suppressing these evils, and keep the poor from stealing,
lying, drunkenness, cruelty, or taking God’s name in vain. While we feel
our disease, ’tis madness to set aside any remedy which has power to
check its fury.” Having said this, with a perfectly startling
inconsistency he turns round, and addressing himself to Wesley and the
Methodists, he says, “We cannot but regard you as our most dangerous
enemies.”
Footnote 2:
Appendix B.
When the Great Revival arose, the Church of England set herself,
everywhere, in full array against it; she possessed but few great minds.
The massive intellects of Butler and Berkeley belonged to the
immediately preceding age. The most active intellect on the bench of
bishops was, no doubt, that of Warburton; and it is sad to think that he
descended to a tone of scurrility and injustice in his attack on Wesley,
which, if worthy of his really quarrelsome temper, was altogether
unworthy of his position and his powers.
Thus, whether we derive our impressions from the so-called Church of
that time, or from society at large, we obtain the evidences of a
deplorable recklessness of all ordinary principles of religion, honour,
or decorum. Bishop Butler had written, in the “Advertisement” to his
_Analogy_, and he appears to have been referring to the clerical and
educated opinion of his time: “It is come, I know not how, to be taken
for granted, by many persons, that Christianity is not so much as a
subject of inquiry; but that it is, now at length, discovered to be
fictitious;” and he wrote his great work for the purpose of arguing the
reasonableness of the christian religion, even on the principles of the
Deism prevalent everywhere around him in the Church and society. Addison
had declared that there was “less appearance of religion in England than
in any neighbouring state or kingdom, whether Protestant or Catholic;”
and Montesquieu came to the country, and having made his notes,
published, probably with some French exaggeration, that there was “no
religion in England, and that the subject, if mentioned in society,
excited nothing but laughter.”
Such was the state of England, when, as we must think, by the special
providence of God, the voices were heard crying in the wilderness. From
the earlier years of the last century they continued sounding with such
clearness and strength, from the centre to the remotest corners of the
kingdom; from, the coasts, where the Cornish wrecker pursued his strange
craft of crime, along all the highways and hedges, where rudeness and
violence of every description made their occasions for theft, outrage,
and cruelty, until the whole English nation became, as if instinctively,
alive with a new-born soul, and not in vision, but in reality, something
was beheld like that seen by the prophet in the valley of vision—dry
bones clothed with flesh, and standing up “an exceeding great army,” no
longer on the side of corruption and death, but ready with song and
speech, and consistent living, to take their place on the side of the
Lord.
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