The Stammering Century

by Gilbert Seldes

  And wag your tails about.

  After Watt’s and the four thousand hymns of Wesley, singing at revivals was fully established and we have records of Philip Phillips, the singing pilgrim, and of Paul Bliss whose melodeon Edward Eggleston put into a book. Every event and every form of exhortation was used by the hymn writers. “O, mean may seem this house of clay” was written by Gill, “fresh from the contemplation of the anarchy and misery of Shelley’s life.” “Hold the fort, I am coming—W. T. Sherman,” was the source of another hymn, and Sankey put “a sweet, wild melody” to Elizabeth Clephane’s Ninety and Nine.

  In 1875, enthusiasts found four weeks insufficient for one of Moody’s revivals, when he preached at Dr. Talmage’s tabernacle in Brooklyn; but he had to hurry on to Philadelphia, for John Wanamaker had bought the railroad station at 13th and Market streets and, cannily calculating that his future patrons ought to be made familiar with the new site, offered it to Moody for the Cause of Christ, in which the eminent merchant was a livelong enthusiast. A few months later, Wanamaker and Dom Pedro, the former king of Brazil, were both on the platform of the old Hippodrome in New York which had served successively as a menagerie, as a railroad depot, and as the home of Gilmore’s concerts. “Even a great emperor,” cried Moody, “cannot save his soul with all his wealth and power unless he bows himself at Christ’s feet and accepts him.” Dom Pedro, in an audible voice, gave instant and hearty assent. In all, Moody spoke effectively to a million and a half people, in spite of the disconnected and rambling style to which the New York press objected. Favorable accounts also appeared. “Make him the best-read preacher in the world,” said one paper, “and he would instantly lose half his power. Put him through a systematic training in systematic theology and you fasten big logs of fuel to the driving-wheels of his engine. . . . We shall not soon forget his incomparable frankness, his broad denominationalism, his sledge-hammer gestures, his profuse diction which stops neither for colons nor commas, his trueness which never becomes conventional, his naturalness which never whines, his abhorrence of Pharisaism and of ecclesiastical Machiavellism, his mastery of his subject, his glorious self-confidence, his blameless life, and his unswerving fealty to his conscience and to his work.”

  Moody’s methods were extremely simple and his comparisons were always to known things in the daily life of his hearers:

  “Will you stay to-night and accept this invitation? Don’t make light of it. I can imagine some of you saying, ‘Well, I never got so low as to make light of religion.’ Suppose I get an invitation to dinner from a citizen of Chicago for to-morrow and I don’t answer it; I tear the invitation up. Would not that be making light of it? Suppose you pay no attention to the invitation to-night; is not that making light of it? Would anyone here be willing to write out an excuse something like this: ‘The Tabernacle, October 29th. To the King of Heaven: While sitting in the Tabernacle to-day I received a very pressing invitation from one of your servants to sit at the marriage supper of the Son of God. I pray you have me excused.’ Is there one person in this assembly would take his pen and write his name at the bottom of it? Is there a person whose right hand would not forget its cunning, and whose tongue would not cleave to his mouth if he were trying to do it? Well, you are doing this if you get up and go right out after you have heard the invitation. Who will write this? ‘To the Lord of Lords and King of Glory: While sitting in the Tabernacle this beautiful Sabbath evening, October 29th, 1876, I received a pressing invitation from one of your servants to be present at the marriage supper. I hasten to accept.’ Will anyone sign it by the grace of God? . . . Are there not some here to-night who will accept that invitation?”

  When Moody went to Boston, a Tabernacle was built for him on Tremont Street. Like Finney before him, he felt that Boston had been too daintily handled by revivalists who stood in terror of its reputation for intellectualism and who did not dare to come out, in the full fire of old Christianity, against established Unitarianism. He told the Bostonians that they had the same old nature that all sinners have and brutally confronted them with a God who, he said, “could shake Boston as easily as a mother shakes her child.” Evangelism had traveled a long way from the terror and majesty of Jonathan Edwards.

  A longer way still had been traversed by hundreds of unwearied evangelists before the technique of organizing revivals reached the point to which Moody had brought it. The propaganda in the press began months in advance. Committees of every sort were established and people were made at once familiar with Moody’s method and expectant of his miracles. Thousands of semi-miraculous instances of conversion were reported and the word NOW in huge letters was prominently displayed. Moody, during the revival at Boston, brought Frances Willard with him to speak at outlying meetings and, when attendance fell off, he appointed no less than two thousand men and women to make personal visitations and bring people to the tabernacle. Seventy thousand families were promptly visited and the attendance picked up again. His energy was exceptional. He preached mornings, afternoons, and evenings, held inquiry meetings, and went out to the crowded corners of city streets to hold prayer meetings for workers in the dry goods and clothing trades, for cabmen, grocers, fishermen, and furniture dealers. He held meetings “for women only.” Above everything, he was urgent. “Now, now, now is the time to repent,” he seemed to cry. “To-morrow will be too late. To-day is bargain day in salvation. To-morrow the price goes up. Look, it’s yours for the asking, but if you refuse it now the price will rocket up. Come in on the ground floor and get your dividends from the first day. This offer may be withdrawn at any moment. It’s your big chance.” He had to face the demon of evolution. Into the question box which was a feature of each meeting, came the query: “Why do the evangelists know so little about science? Without a moment’s hesitation and with an enthusiasm which was positively electric he cried out, ‘Because we have something better.’ Of course there was nothing left of that question.” He had to face the accusation of ignorance and emotionalism. It was said that his revivals lacked those elements of law and conscience which had characterized the earlier ones. He brushed this aside with a story of a man who had been acquitted of a crime, became converted, and confessed his guilt, cheerfully bearing a sentence of three years in a penitentiary. He drowned out opposition with a shout of “harvest-home.” He had five hundred singers and thousands of workers. He collected vast sums of money and—to the surprise of a modern reader—it is generally understood that he devoted this money, not to his own purposes, but to the Y.M.C.A. and to the spread of the gospel. When people talked to him of dignity and of doctrine, he replied with a vast spectacular melodrama of salvation and, at the end of it, amid hoarsely cheering multitudes, he eclipsed himself through a trapdoor on the platform.[1]

  He was, according to a hostile critic, a past master in the art of hypnotism; but, if so, it was hypnotism used as an element in the drama which he staged.

  After Moody and his immediate successors, the swine ran headlong into the sea. Even if they came within the scope of this study, it would hardly be worth while to continue the record of decline and degeneration. One can only note the stages and wonder what the causes were. For nearly two centuries evangelism has run like a prairie fire—this is the usual revivalist term—over the United States. It has been a blessing or an affliction, as prairie fires may be, but the notable thing to the detached observer is the remorseless falling off of revivalism, not in numbers, but in dignity and in passion. We have noted that revivals had their source in a great intellect and an austere soul. From Edwards as a beginning, we mark the slow degeneration of all his excellent qualities and, as a natural parallel, the growth and exaggeration of all his weaknesses. Whatever is disciplined and calls for ardor and devotion is shuffled out of sight, and the cards that do turn up are either sinister or tawdry. If there was morbidity in Edwards, it was controlled by a severe intellectual discipline. In the later revivalists it breaks into a deliberately evoked hysteria, adopted rather from the bucolic cam
p-meetings than from the theological thunders of Edwards or Wesley or Whitefield. In the same period the organization of revivalism, the business of creating fervor and frenzy, was perfected. The great tabernacle and the choir and the advertising and whipped-up excitement of the present day have developed in perfect harmony with the intellectual vulgarity and the spiritual barrenness of the later revivalists. In the perspective of time, with Billy Sunday as foreground, Dwight Moody seems a giant of decency and intelligence; but if we compare his characteristic utterances with those of Edwards, the result is pitiful; and from Moody to the present day the decline is headlong and unbroken. The camp-meetings were “a noise and a flash and a sudden flame.” Omitting them we can trace the decline of revivalism from Edwards to Finney, from Finney to Moody, from Moody to the present day. We find that the Sundays and McPhersons and Uldine Utleys of our own time are the inheritors of the evangelists of the past. They inherit, however, because there are no direct descendants, and what they inherit is only the débris of a great estate. The revivalists of the 1820’s and 30’s were the last to have any profound effect on the social and intellectual life of the American people. The penitential outbreak in 1857, after the panic of that year, does not appear to have had any serious effect on the progress of Abolition. After that, the revivals besides their personal effects in the lives of individual converts seem to have had no social effects except to encourage whatever was negative and prohibitory in the nature of the American reformer. Out of the 1830 revivals, came colleges and cults; the succeeding ones “make no pretense to intellectual eminence and scholarship sublime.” If they created or encouraged a Sunday school league, their object seemed to be fulfilled.

  There must be significant reasons for this decline in the quality and in the effectiveness of American revivalism. Obviously, everything in the social history of the country can be claimed as a cause. The change in the racial composition, the changes in economic status; the triumph of the mechanical arts and the slow progress of scientific theory; the very cults which had their source in evangelism; the spread of education and the tremendous impulses to secularism given by press and school; even sports and lithography may have contributed. In a sense everything which has interested the American and occupied his thoughts, everything which has given him pleasure and withdrawn him from the pursuit of sanctity; everything which has fed and clothed and prospered him and removed him from the shadow of fear, has helped to make him irreligious and to make the work of the evangelist harder. But after all these things have been noted, the suspicion remains that some of the causes of its decline were inherent in the nature of revivalism itself. The system changed. It adapted itself to the dominant mood of the country. It became big business. It flung itself into the tabloids. It created its own scandals and tabernacles and radio stations. Nevertheless, some of the old phenomena persisted. The preaching of Uldine Utley parallels the testimony of little girls at the camp-meetings. The recent outbreak of Pentecostalism in the Calvary Baptist Church of New York, where the son of the pastor spoke in strange tongues and men and women writhed in prolonged agony, calls us back to the very first days of the descent of the Spirit in America. Yet there is a difference, hidden, internal. To uncover it one has to disregard the outward manifestations entirely, and inquire into the motives of revivalism, its secret springs and its obscurer meanings.

  What were they after, these tireless and angry artillery-men of the Gospel? They themselves would have said that they were working for the regeneration of mankind, for the quick coming of Christ; but they had a more immediate end in view. With all their shouting and thumping, with their cries, promises, and threats, they were trying to effect one of the most delicate of psychological crises through which the human soul can pass, to bring about a momentous change in the spiritual nature, to overthrow the accepted system of purposes and habits by which men lived and to substitute another. They tried to reproduce in masses and in a single moment of time the psychological experience which the great saints have gone through in solitude and after long travail. Purely for the purpose of contrast, the rapture of the saint and the thrashing and foaming of the hysterical moron at a Kentucky revival may be accepted as the two extremes of conversion. The danger in this view is that it takes a human experience out of the range of the normal human being. In spite of the grand pioneer work of James in The Varieties of Religious Experience, he is a little unsatisfactory because he has chosen his examples (for a very excellent reason) at these extremes. The obstinate agnostic rejoices in this and dismisses all conversions as manifestations of nervous or sexual disorders. But scientists have shattered this theory as convincingly as they have broken down the revivalist’s claim of universal inspiration. Neither explanation accounts for the universality of the phenomenon. Conversion has been found in some form among savage tribes and in the experience of intellectuals. It has worked on happy sinners and on the morosely pure. The mechanism of the revival has tended so to debase it that intelligent people generally look upon conversion as an adolescent exercise or as a manifestation of that form of virtue which has its source in envy or sterility. But we can understand neither the success of revivalism, nor its terrible abuses, unless we have a more ordinary conception of its crisis. It is a natural thing, a process through which, in one form or another, millions of human beings have passed. What its nature is I propose to indicate neither psychologically nor doctrinally, but by two parallels, both of them extremely obvious. Conversion is a drama. It is also a rather formalized counterpart to a process of psychoanalysis.

  James’ analysis of conversion reduces it essentially to two elements. First an uneasiness, the sense that there is something wrong about us; and second, a solution of this uneasiness, in the sense that we are saved from the wrongness by making proper connection with higher powers. The something wrong is interpreted by the doctrinaires of Christianity as a sense of our separation from God and of our guilt before him because of man’s first disobedience. The doctrinaires of psychoanalysis interpret it as the lack of harmony between our desires and our ability to express them. James himself suggests that there is lack of harmony between various mental systems which make up our conscious and subconscious lives. In all of these cases, in any interpretation, we may say that the uneasiness is due to a conflict, either within ourselves, or between ourselves and another power; and conflict is the essence of drama. The solution comes when the conflict ceases, when there is harmony within us, when our conflicts have been resolved, when our relations with God or nature or the world are harmonious. Such a solution corresponds with the catharsis of the classical tragedy. It is some momentous turn in the course of the drama of our life. And, when we think of the psychopathic cases, we can say, with a modern sense added to the words of Aristotle, that such a catharsis purges us of pity and terror. The solution of our mortal uneasiness is a deliverance (escape is the favorite word, at the moment) from disharmony and the sense of sin. In the Christian system, it is accepted through the intercession of a power outside ourselves. In psychoanalysis, it is effected by bringing up and releasing certain complexes from the depths of the unconscious. These two symbols are not as far apart as they may seem. James warns us that “it is one of the peculiarities of invasions from the subconscious region to take on objective appearances.” If we are conscious of being blocked in our path by a sense of sin and cry out, “Who shall roll the stone away?”, it matters very little in one sense whether Christ or the psychoanalyst is the intermediary.

  According to certain divines, no ethical life is possible if we are not possessed by this sense of our own guilt. There are no doubt a happy few so utterly healthy-minded and so fortunately placed in the world that they have no sense of strain or hindrance, no feeling of futility, no frustrations and no expectations which they cannot fulfill. Their bodies live in a perpetual state of animal health and happiness and, if they ever uncover their soul to the eye of any save the most expert psychoanalyst, he is likely to be baffled and, rather pathetically, to announce tha
t they “have no complexes.” At worst such people suffer only from the incorrigible hostility of things. They lack money a little, or their mistresses are unfaithful, or the last bottle of wine was slightly “corked.” If they have any sin to regret, it is a specific sin. They have failed to attend mass regularly, or were absent without leave, or left town without paying the butcher, or did not marry the girl. But of Weltschmerz they know nothing whatever. They have no great abstract “moral hangovers.” They may know regret, but hardly remorse. Repentance sits lightly and gracefully upon them. The others, and in northern countries they tend to be overwhelmingly in the majority, have to be “born again.” This phrase, the special sense of which James borrowed from Francis W. Newman, is particularly applicable in the phenomenon of conversion. All the Christian phrases point to the same psychological facts. In conversion one is “born again,” or regenerated, after having gone through a death of the spirit in sin. The man who feels the need of letting the old Adam within him die out, may approach the matter easily. He may say to himself as Luther did, “Martin, thou shalt not be utterly without sin, for thou hast flesh; thou shalt therefore feel the battle thereof.” In this way he may make the best of both worlds and intensify his aliveness by enjoying the struggle between his lust of experience and his desire for purity. Or he may come to this crisis with such an appalling sense of his own ugliness and unworthiness that everything he does seems tainted and corrupt and nothing can save him but the grace of God.

  We can see a little more clearly into the matter if we substitute other words for the sense of sin, and banish from our minds all association with the seventh commandment and the denunciations of moralists. If for the Protestant sense of guilt, we substitute the Hellenic feeling of life as a magnificent contest between man and fate in which man may fight gloriously, but is certain to be defeated; or if we substitute the feeling which many noble and healthy men have had that life is largely made up of woe, that it is all trivial when it is not terrible; or, even the modern tragic sense of life in which we say that, though life is tragic, the tragedy itself gives us deep satisfaction: in any of these cases we still come back to the feeling that, if we could be “born again,” we could lose the sense of tragedy and emerge into a happier world. We listen to an extremely successful man, such as Goethe, worshiped by a nation, adored by a sex, and admired by the world, all in his own lifetime, and we hear him say that, at bottom, his life has been “nothing but pain and burden,” and he can affirm that “during the whole of my seventy-five years I have had four weeks of genuine well-being.” If to Goethe life was nothing more than “the perpetual rolling of a rock that must be raised up again forever,” what can it be for the common run of mankind? The observer who withdraws from religious controversy can note with amusement the irony of the last century, in which all the Scriptural authorities for universal damnation were destroyed by scientists at the very moment when science was creating hells of its own: the hell of the struggle for existence, the hell of heredity and, last of all, the hell of the unconscious. The doctrine of predestination goes out and the doctrine of prenatal influence comes in, to check whatever grandiose illusion a man may have of his own freedom. Before there is an end to determinism, we begin to believe that the taboos of our primal ancestors and the sights and sounds of our infancy can create the “immitigability of our mortal predicament.” One might as well be damned with Calvin as with Schopenhauer, by Edwards as well as by Freud. We want deliverance. The energetic want only deliverance from difficulties; the feeble, deliverance from sin; the merely neurotic, deliverance from themselves. It remained for a psychoanalyst to assure us that, deep within ourselves, all of us crave, from the day of our birth, deliverance from life itself; that death is not only the end of life, but its purpose and culmination.