Starbuck also analyzed the motives of conversion and found that the fear of death and hell was higher when conversions took place in a revival than when they were brought about by other means, and that the non-revival conversions showed altruistic and moral motives more frequently than the revival ones.
The severest of preachers, or even the earliest revivalist, could not refuse to suffer little children to come unto Christ, but he exercised due caution and insisted upon delay and deliberation before accepting childish excitement as the equivalent of a true conviction. The cult of the child, which sprang up very early in the 19th century and led to experiments in discipline and education, helped to break down the Calvinist theory of infant damnation and, at the same time, exalted the child as the receiver and transmitter of God’s word. To the evangelist the child was always another soul saved, a marvelous medium for jerks and gibberings, another item to be rung up on his cash register of sales. The original objectives and the methods of revivalism were both degenerating and in the process each helped the other to slip down until, at the end, the propriety of revivalism as a method was no longer accepted as self-evident. At a very early time Edwards had written: “It is worthy also of our further notice, that when many profane sinners, and formal professors of religion have been affrighted out of their present carelessness and stupidity by some astonishing terrors approaching them, those religious appearances have not been so durable, nor the real change of heart so thoroughly affected: many of this sort of sudden converts have dropped their religious concerns in a great measure when their fears of the threatening calamity were vanished.”
To this doubt was added the charge of insincerity—that people went through the form of conversion without feeling its meaning. Like his father before him, Henry Ward Beecher was suspicious of sudden outbursts of religious enthusiasm: “My own observation,” he says, “has led me to the conclusion that more persons become true Christians without sudden joy and without the consciousness . . . of a great change, than with it,” and adds that men should not “lie in a bath of conviction [of sin] as clothes lie in a dyeing vat until they are thoroughly stuck through.” Calvinism from the very beginning stressed qualities which the revivalists tended to ignore. The upright Dr. Chauncy who led his “old lights” against Edwards, held that conviction of sin is followed by a real secret work of God and that a new Christian character is shown in a cessation of sin and a high degree of joy and love. The only means to attain this are the appointed means of grace— prayer, and the reading and hearing of God’s Word—none of which gratify the instincts of ostentation and all of which tend to keep a firm discipline on the mind. When he brought charges against Davenport, Chauncy pointed out the excitement caused by Davenport’s “pretending some extraordinary discovery and the assurance of the very near approach of the end of the world.” That was one way in which normal self-control was broken down for, if the end was near, one need not go on living in the discipline of every-day life. This threat was outlawed by the opponents of evangelism from the very beginning. Later, as the conditions of living grew more secure, revivalists found that our subconscious fears, our inherited animal phobias, could not be so easily touched. Instead of appealing to the freer intellect, they began to practice suggestion. Frederick Morgan Davenport, himself a former Methodist minister, says of the revival: “Its normal tendency is not to strengthen the intellect and the will, but rather to submerge both under billows of suggestion and emotion. It is a thing of impulse rather than of reason. When allowed full sway in a population, its manifestations become primitive and ultimately so gruesome and grotesque that they can no longer be associated in the thought of earnest men with soundness of method or of mind. Whenever in the past, as has sometimes happened, genuine good has been done in society through the revival, it has been directly in proportion to the control which the reflective processes of individual leaders have exercised over what is essentially impulsive social action.”
The bill of accusation against revivalism remains unanswered. Archibald Alexander, a critic of the system who cherished its true fruits, notes that the beauty of a great work of the spirit “will be marred, and its progress retarded by every . . . spurious mixture” of enthusiasm and disorder. “The Church,” he continues, “is not always benefited by what we call revivals; but sometimes the effects of such commotions are followed by a desolation which resembles the work of a tornado. I have never seen so great insensibility in any persons as in those who had been subjects of violent religious excitement; and I have never seen any sinners so bold and reckless in their impiety as those who had once been loud professors and foremost in the time of revival.”
Excesses of religious excitement break down the will but not always in the sense of rendering it impotent. The will is broken by abasement, but it is afterwards exalted. The release of the subconscious, which runs with every conversion, affords strange fuel for the will to feed upon. This disruption of the will is the supreme danger of revivalism. Even if one grants all its good effects, this black mark remains. The steadiness of human life depends on the balancing of impulses, the expression of some and the subjection of others. In the process of conversion, balance is temporarily lost and, together with the impulse to sanctity, a hundred other desires swim up to the surface. No power of the will remains to sort them and give them precedence and there is every chance that evil desires, long suppressed, will at last be gratified. At the same time conversion, as practiced in revivals, gives encouragement to the wildest mysticism. From the strange sexual theories of Perfectionism to the strange Orientalism of New Thought, we see these effects of revivalism at work.
[1] At least once, at the end of the great Chicago revival.
†The American Monthly Magazine published “Room for the Leper! Room!” by N. P. Willis. † Half a million dollars was offered to the owners of White Sulphur Springs for their concessions; ice-cream was served at the hotels there. †It was noted “that people of New England do good by mania.” †An American breakfast consisted of buttered toast, hot biscuit, coffee; beef steak, apple sauce, hot potatoes, cheese, butter, and two large dishes of eggs. †It was considered that “all American ladies should know how to clear starch and iron; how to keep plate and glass; how to cook dainties; and if they understand the making of bread and soup, so much the better.” †Mrs. Hannah Moore was the most popular British writer in America with Scott, Bulwer, and Miss Edgeworth in high esteem. Wordsworth was deeply respected and Sartor Resartus, which was anonymous, was having a great influence. †There was a universal faith in the coming of a great American writer, but although the North American Review puffed almost all books, only a few writers made impressions; among them—Irving, Cooper, Bryant, and Judge Hall. †The coeducational college at Oberlin, Ohio, was opening in 1833. A Boston magazine suggested that mild intellectual interests would serve to prevent the decay of female beauty so often remarked by Europeans. There was an excess of women in the East and those who went into the factories found them horrible. †Before 1830 the tenement house had become a problem. †Fannie Kemble noted with horror that women wore berets when riding horseback. †When the Black Hawk War was over the defeated chief was paraded through the streets. †The death of Goethe, who was called “a distinguished individual,” was appropriately noted and Washington Irving had a great reception when he returned to America after an absence of seventeen years.
†N. P. Willis was sending letters from abroad and James Fenimore Cooper complained “that our country is deficient in the materials of society most pertinent to the purpose of the novelist.” The North American Review defended Washington Irving’s predilection for English subjects. †It was announced that Byron’s daughter was about to be launched in English society. †The militia went into training twice a year. †After hearing violent anti-catholic sermons a Boston mob, believing rumors that girls were held there by force, burned the Ursuline Convent. †Fresh air, soap, and water were becoming familiar, but baths were far from popular and women complaine
d constantly of weak chests and delicate lungs.
X. The Perfect Communist.
IN the last week of February, 1834, Polly Hayes Noyes, aunt of a future President of the United States, received a letter from her son, who had just begun to enjoy a license to preach at New Haven. It was before the days of cheap postage and letters often meant bad news. Mrs. Noyes did not stop to use the kitchen towel. Holding the letter in her wet hands she read it through and exclaimed to her daughter, “What does John mean?”
He meant that he was perfect. He meant literally, seriously, and religiously that he was then and forever free from all sinfulness and that, no matter what he did in the future, he would still be without sin. His mother was an imaginative woman. In her self-examinations she was conscious of dreadful shortcomings. She had joined a Congregationalist church, in spite of the cool indifference of her husband, because that church accounted for sin and gave some hope of future forgiveness. It is no wonder that the announcement from her son surprised her. She read:
“The burden of Christian perfection accumulated upon my soul, until I determined to give myself no rest while the possibility of the attainment of it remained doubtful. At last the Lord met me with the same promise that gave peace to my soul when first I came out of Egypt: ‘if thou wilt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved.’ By faith I took the proffered boon of eternal life. God’s spirit sealed the act, and the blood of Christ cleansed me from sin.”
His mother had not been the first to hear of John Humphrey Noyes’ perfection. To her he wrote in the accepted words of doctrine, but to a student of divinity at Yale, he had expressed himself so curtly and drastically that the student went off to spread the news: “Noyes says he is perfect.” Before the day had passed, it was common knowledge in New Haven that “Noyes is crazy.”
If he was, it was the strangest madness among all the afflictions of the stammering century. For Noyes put his belief into action and, before he was through, had founded the most successful of American communities, had built up a great business organization which can still make frequent appearances on the back cover of the Saturday Evening Post, had practiced a form of and probably originated the term “free love,” had done a great deal for the progress of eugenics in connection with a sexual practice which was called abominable, had enlisted the support of Garrison and Greeley, and had startled and horrified the entire country. With penetrating intelligence, he had discovered the weakness in all previous communities and avoided it. A student himself, he engaged in industry and manufactured the best steel trap in the country, so that the path to his door at Oneida was beaten by the footprints of thousands of visitors every year. He put his peculiar ideas into practice with great caution and, although he was an extremist, he cannily managed to avoid being swept away by the other fads and cults of his time. He practiced vegetarianism, and studied Spiritualism and phrenology, but always kept his own theories free from entangling alliances, so that he could be judged by them alone. He passed through three phases and, perhaps because a supreme harmony of character gave them unity, he surpassed in each of them the other prophets who spent their whole force in any one of the three. He began as a religious leader, and built a community on his idea that the Second Coming of Christ had already taken place and that, therefore, man can be perfect in this life. He carried the community forward until it became an experiment in sexual relations with spiritual wives, a kind of regulated promiscuity, eugenics, and a new method of cohabitation, all interwoven and all related to the idea of perfection. On the foundation of his religious and sexual innovations, he built an industrial organization, abolishing private property and wages. Combining the three, he created the perfect communism which, he asks us to believe, banishes Death. The conception is grandiose; its architecture is amazing; and the man behind it most amazing of all.
The family tradition is that Noyes is an English corruption of the name of William Des Noyers, a Norman baron in the army of William the Conqueror. A dissenting rector of a church in Wiltshire, in 1585, heads the actual genealogy. There is a strain of noble blood in the family tradition coupled with dissent from ecclesiastical orthodoxy. Perhaps these facts, according to the popular concept of heredity, account for two of the dominant strains in the life of the American descendant. The sons of the dissenter came to America, presumably not on the May flower since they settled in Medford. In 1635 they moved to Newburgh. A century later a shipbuilding grandson was living in that vicinity. In 1795, John Noyes was graduated from Dartmouth and began teaching in that college. When his son, the Perfectionist, was a student at Dartmouth a distinguished alumnus said to him, “Young man, I wish I could do as much for you as your father did for me.” But it is not on record that Daniel Webster ever did do anything for John Humphrey Noyes. The elder Noyes tried the ministry, but his health failed. He was in Congress for one term. At forty, being then a clerk in a store at Brattleboro, he married Polly Hayes, aunt of Rutherford B. Hayes. The next generation was a distinguished one. Of the nine children, one founded Oneida; one became the mother of Larkin Mead the sculptor, of William Mead (of the firm of McKim, Mead, and White), and of Elinor Mead, who married William Dean Howells; one became a successful banker; and three devoted themselves to their brother’s community.
When he was sixteen, a thoughtful and imperious boy, he was told by his mother that she had never seen anyone so improved as Henry Smith who had returned to Putney, where the Noyes family then lived, after having been converted in one of the early revivals of the new preacher, Charles G. Finney. Henry and his brother Hervey were ideal converts for they promptly started a revival themselves, using all of Finney’s methods and astonishing the little town by the force and directness of their attack. John Humphrey withstood them; but he did not forget them. The ideas they absorbed from Finney, particularly Finney’s experience of sinlessness at his conversion, moved the boy deeply. But he was going to Dartmouth. He was going to be a lawyer. And one year later, when he had already begun the study of law, he deliberately resolved “to indulge the lust of the eye and the pride of life for the present, and risk the consequences; in short, to jump the life to come.” He was just twenty, but the springtide he felt in his blood was not yet to rise. His determination to be a voluptuary is pathetic. He tells us with the sincerity which marks all his confessions, though not as bluntly as usual, that he had lived a pure life. His roistering at Dartmouth was not vicious. In his senior year, he passed through a period of doubt and change at which he himself marveled. He was still virginal, but he decided to give himself to lust. Four weeks later, he had given himself to Christ; had, like Finney, abandoned the law for divinity; and had become a student at Andover Theological Seminary.
What had happened? He tells us: “After a painful process of conviction, in which the conquest of my aversion to becoming a minister was one of the critical points I submitted to God and obtained spiritual peace. With much joy and zeal I immediately devoted myself to the study of the Scriptures, and to religious testimony in private and public. The year of 1831 was distinguished as ‘the year of revivals.’ New measures, protracted meetings, and New York evangelists had just entered New England, and the whole spirit of the people was fermenting with religious excitement. The millennium was supposed to be very near. I fully entered into the enthusiasm of the time; and seeing no reason why backsliding should be expected or why the revival spirit might not be maintained in its full vigor permanently, I determined with all my inward strength to be ‘a young convert’ in zeal and simplicity forever. My heart was fixed on the millennium, and I resolved to live or die for it. Four weeks after my conversion I went to Andover and was admitted to the Theological Seminary.”
Taken in connection with the text he quoted three years later in his letter to his mother, this account, while it leaves obscure the spiritual change in Noyes and its psychological reasons, gives us an insight into his mental processes. He had breathed the ex
citing air of revivalism. As a little girl, Frances Willard had been terrified merely by reading Finney’s orations. Noyes was not frightened. In the mêlée of Pentecostalism he drove directly at the one thing to which he was to cling for ever after: the idea that by accepting Christ he could attain perfection. The only shortcoming in this first conversion was that, when he accepted Finney’s experience of being sanctified, he also accepted his idea of the Second Coming—that it was an event of the future. By the time the Millerites with their millennium, in the 1840’s, had made this a dogma, Noyes had come to reject it entirely.
A miracle (of a minor order) advised Noyes to quit Andover and go to New Haven where he entered as a student, was soon licensed to preach and established a Free Church. Again a revivalist influenced him for, in 1834, Noyes invited James Boyle to preach to his congregation and this fellow-worker of Finney’s gave them doctrine which, a year later, was to lead the Presbytery to suspend him from the ministry. The inter-relation of Boyle and Noyes is hard to determine. Noyes invited Boyle because the latter was reaching toward the same sort of Perfectionism that he, himself, was seeking. Later, when Noyes had outstripped Boyle in audacity of thought, Boyle allowed himself to be converted by the younger man to outright Perfectionism.
Slowly Noyes worked away from the idea that perfection is merely a possibility, and toward his final position that it is an accomplished fact. The light dawned in 1834, on February 20,—a date which Oneida Community considered as the “high tide of the spirit.” The antipodal date, August 20, was considered the high tide of the flesh and annually, on that day, special precautions against temptation were taken.[1]
The Stammering Century Page 21