The Stammering Century

by Gilbert Seldes

  To the Catholic and the Anglican there can be no such thing as dullness in church, since the service depends on an appointed ritual; and certain sacraments, administered with propriety by priests who hold from God, constitute the major function of worship. To the Catholic, the Mass can never be barren. To the Protestant, a whole year of church-going may be entirely fruitless. The more pedantic and less enthusiastic preachers in the Protestant churches of the 1820’s, although they sought to defend themselves against the accusation, were finally convicted of lowering the religious vitality of their flocks. Again and again they protested that the evangelist and the itinerant brought the regular clergy into disrepute and over and over again the revivalists pointed to their own ingatherings and baptisms of the spirit. Gradually the revivalists persuaded the ministers and carried with them another doctrine: that professors of Christianity who had not actively felt the presence of the Holy Spirit were not really saved. These “cold and lazy professors” were held to stand in the way of Christ. Until they had been “seriously exercised,” they could not count themselves among the children of God.

  To all criticism the revivalist replied that evangelism was God’s own plan. Quite apart from the direct inspiration of God, which many evangelists claimed, the whole terminology of revivalism was worked out of the New Testament and, in particular, from the description of the descent of the Holy Ghost at Pentecost. Scoffers on that occasion thought that the receivers of grace had drunk of a heady wine. The opponents of revivalism accused the preacher of hysteria. The very accusation seemed to prove the Pentecostal origin. A defender of revivalism goes further and cites the following passages as an exquisite representation of a revival: “Drop down ye heavens from above, and let the skies pour down righteousness. . . . I will pour water upon him that is thirsty, and floods upon the dry ground: I will pour my spirit upon thy seed, and my blessing upon thine offspring: and they shall spring up as among the grass, as willows by the water-courses. One shall say, I am the Lord’s; and another shall call himself by the name of Israel.”

  “The divine economy of revivals” is proved by the following points: first, that from the beginning God has wrought permanently through revivals; second, that scriptural utterances assume revivals; third, that God’s providences are adapted to move people in masses; fourth, that by revivals atheists are rebuked; and so on. It is hardly necessary to examine these defenses of “the Work.”

  Notably this divine plan functioned five times according to the canon. From the day of Pentecost to the Reformation, revivals are not counted. In the Protestant churches, Luther stands as the first great evangelist. The second work of God is the Puritan revival, in which John Bunyan is the best known figure. Fifty years later came the great awakening in England and America which has already been noted in connection with Jonathan Edwards. After another lapse of fifty years, the fourth revival period began with the camp-meeting and continued until about 1840. The fifth and last important one ran from 1857 to 1860. Whether the tremendously organized revivals of Moody and Torrey and Sunday can be considered as great national awakenings is questionable. Except for an elaboration of publicity and management they added very little to the technique of revivalism.

  This technique was a long development. We have seen it already at its best and at its worst, and can now observe it in the average. If we return to the early days, we find the “spiritual pickpocket,” Whitefield, preëminently an orator. It was of him that Garrick said he could pronounce the syllables of the word “Mesopotamia” and draw tears. He was the great persuader and, as he was collecting funds for the first orphanage to be established in this country, it is said that people would empty their pockets before attending his sermons. The skeptic Benjamin Franklin not only yielded and contributed to the project but wrote that it seemed as if all the world was growing religious, “so that one could not walk through Philadelphia in the evening without hearing psalms in different families of every street.” Admirers followed Whitefield from Philadelphia as far as New Brunswick and there, according to the preacher, “God’s power was so much amongst us in the afternoon sermon that the cries and groans of the people would have drowned my voice.” This was a much more emotional preaching than that of Edwards and it gave rise to those “distempers” of which Edwards was sincerely dubious. In New England, in fact, Whitefield was never cordially received. A critic said that the flagrant enthusiasm and ill-pointed zeal of Whitefield and his adherents cost the people of Boston one thousand pounds every time he spoke. The “testimony” of the Harvard faculty accused him of being an “enthusiast . . . uncharitable, censorious, and slanderous man” and, in regard to the orphanage, a “deluder of the people.” His fellow-worker, William Tennent, escaped the worst of these accusations. His preaching rather resembled the close arguments of Edwards. “It was frequently both terrible and searching . . . his laying open their many vain and secret shifts; their refuges, counterfeit resemblances of grace, delusive and damning hopes, their utter impertinences and impending dangers of destruction.” The methods of the camp-meeting preachers we have already noted. McGready’s camp-meetings ran people distracted and took them from work, according to embittered South Carolinians who wrote him threatening letters in blood and tore away and burned his pulpit. So much for modified Calvinism. The Methodist William Burke “fell senseless to the floor and knew nothing until he found himself on his feet giving glory to God”; and William McFee, a Presbyterian, “would sometimes exhort after the sermon, standing on the floor or sitting, or lying in the dust, his eyes streaming and his heart so full that he could only ejaculate ‘Jesus, Jesus.’” About the same time, fumbling approaches were made to the “anxious seat.” Preachers would invite those who felt inclined to accept Christ, but did not yet have any assurance, to come up and be prayed for.

  Part of the process of persuading them was to have others tell their experiences, thus providing two of the established features of modern revivals. These methods were a new departure and the conservative ministry opposed them with all its power. Asahel Nettleton, Finney’s great rival in the 1830’s, rejected the anxious seat and refused to call for testimony. “With great solemnity and directness he proclaimed the saving truths of the Gospel. He then followed this up with the inquiry meetings for the anxious . . . and with personal conversations. . . . There was an indescribable awe upon his congregation while he was preaching, making them feel that God was in the house and there was an indescribable charm in his conversations . . . in the ‘anxious circle.’ ” Nettleton’s was a decorous method, for the worried soul was not asked publicly to come forward and therefore could not be harried and prodded into a public commitment. The anxious circle consisted of those in the audience who were moved to stay after the exhortation was over. This was considered a superior method by the quieter evangelists and, in the hands of Moody, developed into an extraordinary and elaborate instrument. Its great advantage was that it did not encourage “forwardness, ostentation and rashness.” It helped to maintain at least the form of an intellectual questioning in the midst of an emotional upheaval. Daniel Baker, who was like Nettleton a college man, was also extremely cautious in the use of the anxious seat. In spite of references to Christ and Nicodemus, to Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch, the inquiry system seemed always a little like dragooning and those preachers who were finicky always rejected it. Nettleton used his meetings as a psychological check on the progress of the success his revival was making. He was a severe preacher and “never allayed the fears of inquirers,” assuring them only that they need not wait for an overwhelming sense of sin, nor go through a protracted period of sorrow or of waiting for the heart to be changed. They had only to wish to be Christians. It was not for them to lay out a plan by which God could change them nor were they to expect any sudden or marvelous change at all. In this he was again on the side of the quiet revivalist and directly opposed to Wesley who believed that all conversions were instantaneous. The opportunities for exhibitionism, for vanity and false conversions
is so great in the anxious bench and in all forms of “hitting the trail” that laymen and revivalists alike tend to over-emphasize this picturesque and dramatic episode. It remains, however, only an episode, an additional touch of melodrama in the real drama of conversion.

  In order not to have to return to it again I insert here a description of two inquiry meetings as they were practiced much later. The evolution of trail-hitting is too familiar to need description:

  “It is at the close of the Tabernacle service. The anxious had been urged to enter the inquiry room. The merely curious had been specially urged not to disturb the solemn place by their presence. Mr. Moody in opening the meeting assumes there are only two classes present, the seekers and the workers. By a call for the inquirers to rise, he ascertains their number, and at once distributes them in different parts of the room and assigns a ‘worker’ to each inquirer, or in some cases gathers two or three of similar circumstances and spiritual condition around one judicious and competent teacher. In a few moments the whole room presents a hushed and solemn scene. The Bible, without which no ‘worker’ is welcome in that place, is freely opened, earnest faces bend together over its pages. In many cases the teacher and the inquirer study its promises on their knees, and then engage in prayer. In almost every case the inquirer is urged to pray for himself, and if unable to form the sentences, the teacher makes the prayer, which sentence by sentence is solemnly repeated. In half an hour Mr. Moody goes to the platform, asks all to kneel while two or three prayers are offered, that the hour may be one of universal decision. ‘Now,’ says the leader, ‘there are many souls here buffeting the waves; let us throw out planks to them. Mr. A., can you tell these people how they may be saved now?’ The Christian addressed, in brief words or illustrations, points out the path of life. Another, and then another is called on to throw out some plank from God’s Word or his own experience. These testimonies are briefly, rapidly, given while eager souls drink in the counsel they contain. Then Mr. Moody, after explaining the solemn character of the decision to which he has urged the inquirers, calls on those who are ready to accept Christ at once to say so. In various phrases, from all parts of the room, comes the common purpose henceforth to live a Christian life, here from the lips of a child a word of trust in Jesus, here the balanced words of manhood, long tossed on the sea, but now deliberately at rest in Christ, and here the heart-broken confessions of a wanderer, who has once more set his face to his Father’s house. While others are hesitating between life and death, Mr. Moody asks all who can sing, ‘I will trust Him,’ to rise and unite in that chorus. . . . He calls for another singing of the same verse, perhaps changing it thus: ‘I do trust Him,’ and ‘He has saved me’ and then the young converts having been earnestly commended to God in prayer, the meeting is promptly closed.”

  The other inquiry meeting is at the close of a church service.

  “Mr. Whittle has invited the inquirers and all who were willing to converse with them into the lecture-room. After an opening prayer, he presents three distinct points for the consideration of inquirers: First, that Christ came to save guilty and condemned sinners. Having proven this point from the Bible, he asks all who subscribe to it to signify it by holding up their right hand. Bible statements are incontrovertible and every hand is raised. Second, that all in the room are thus guilty and condemned and need this Savior. Scripture passages proving this point are read, and those who assent to it are asked, as before, to signify their assent. Third, renouncing my sin, I accept the Savior as my Savior. This duty is affectionately urged and illustrated, and all who can assent to this final test are asked to hold up their hands in solemn covenant with God. The path has been made so plain, the inquirer has been so shut in to the necessity of accepting or rejecting the Savior, that very many make it the moment of their supreme choice. Then follow prayers, testimonies and personal counsels and the meeting, without formal close, by the silent retiring of one group after another, slowly dissolves.”

  Out of the ruck of revivalists in the 1820’s and 30’s there rise three figures; the conservative Nettleton; Lyman Beecher the compromiser; and Charles Grandison Finney, enemy to both, the reputed brigadier-general of Jesus Christ who stormed through the western counties of New York, broke into the citadels of New England, converted millionaires in New York City, and swept westward with unparalleled force until his energy finally spent itself and he rested quietly as a professor at Oberlin College. Finney is not only the great typical revivalist; he is the personification of the whole revivalist spirit of two decades. He is so much more important than any of his rivals that, although it may not be strict justice, one may call him responsible for the madness of religious feeling which later broke out in such diverse movements as Mormonism and Perfectionism and the impostures of Matthias. Finney was not by any means the most violent or the most radical of the revivalists, but he was the only innovator sufficiently trained in logic and doctrine to defend himself. If Beecher and Nettleton had had to struggle only with the Littlejohns and Boyles, they could have wiped out the “new measures” in a day. But when they were driven to condemn the fury of revivalism itself, Finney smashed their attack and triumphantly invaded their own territory.

  James Boyle could whip up excitement, could make souls sweat in anguish and then could write to Finney that, three months after he left “a field,” he had returned to find the people like dead coals. It was recorded that, although every church in which he worked quickly increased its membership, it as quickly fell into decay. He began as a Roman Catholic, went through most of the congregational sects, and ended, after he had been excommunicated by the latter, as a kind of perfectionist attached to the “infidel abolitionist” William Lloyd Garrison. The almost illiterate Littlejohn was always in trouble on account of doctrinal unsoundness and imprudent conduct. Long after the revivals had exhausted themselves he too was excommunicated. Asa Mahan, after all his labors, looked back and found that, except for Finney and Father Nash, all the evangelists of that period were soon disqualified for their office and that many were vicious and dangerous.

  Finney alone combined violence in method with a cool head in argument. A man of sturdy build, he was possessed by an energy which he worked to the point of exhaustion. Then, recuperating, he began again his remorseless trampling of the vineyard. He was threatened with death and excommunication, but nothing daunted him. He was of a granite obstinacy. Two days after his marriage he was called away from home, and, as the work enjoined a revival, he prosecuted it for six months before he returned to his bride. The sculptural lines of his face were all unyielding. The eyes, with which he seems to have exerted some hypnotic power, were cold and deep set. The jutting nose and the firmly held lips give the impression of a hard man and a severe, possibly even an angry one. He was proud of his capacity to face people down.

  Finney was born in Warren, Connecticut, in 1792, but when he was a little child the family moved to Oneida county, New York, then a wilderness sparsely populated by emigrants from New England. He was then in the center of his future activities, in that extraordinary little section of country which was to give birth to every variety of cult and fad and movement. He had a common school education, taught school in New Jersey, and was about to found an academy in the South, but was persuaded by his parents to study the law. An orthodox Calvinist perplexed him to such an extent that he began to read the Bible in order to answer his own questions on religion. The first of these was on the inefficacy of prayer. Pursuing the subject to a biblical reply, he came face to face with the question whether he “would accept Christ as presented in the Gospel or pursue a worldly course in life.”

  Finney was self-converted. In his autobiography he describes his labors to break down his pride and tells also of the inward voices which asked him, “What are you waiting for? Did you not promise to give yourself to God? Are you not endeavoring to work out a righteousness of your own?”

  “Just at this point the whole question of Gospel salvation opened to my mind in
a manner most marvelous to me at the time. I think I then saw, as clearly as I ever have in my life, the reality and fullness of the atonement of Christ. I saw that his work was a finished work; and that instead of having, or needing, any righteousness of my own to recommend me to God, I had to submit myself to the righteousness of God through Christ. Gospel salvation seemed to me to be an offer of something to be accepted; and that it was full and complete; and that all that was necessary on my part, was to get my own consent to give up my sins, and accept Christ. Salvation, it seemed to me, instead of being a thing to be wrought out, by my own works, was a thing to be found entirely in the Lord Jesus Christ, who presented himself before me as my God and my Savior.”

  Like Edwards he withdrew to the woods to wrestle with his spirit. He was overwhelmed with a sense of his own wickedness and so discouraged that he was almost too weak to stand. Presently he was aware of his difficulty. He had intellectually believed the Bible, but had not known that faith implied a voluntary trust instead of an intellectual state. He addressed himself directly to God and, what with inward voices and passages of Scripture dropping into his mind with a flood of light, we are assured that God directly answered him. “I told the Lord that I should take him at his word; that he could not lie, and that therefore I was sure that he heard my prayer, and that he would be found of me.