The closing years of the eighteenth century show the lowest low-water mark of the lowest ebb-tide of spiritual life in the history of the American church. The demoralization of army life, the fury of political factions, the catchpenny materialist morality of Franklin, the philosophic deism of men like Jefferson, and the popular ribaldry of Tom Paine, had wrought, together with other untoward influences, to bring about a condition of things which to the eye of little faith seemed almost desperate.

From the beginning of the reaction from the stormy excitements of the Great Awakening, nothing had seemed to arouse the New England churches from a lethargic dullness; so, at least, it seemed to those who recalled those wonderful days of old, either in memory or by tradition. We have a gauge of the general decline of the public morals, in the condition of Yale College at the accession of President Dwight in 1795, as described in the reminiscences of Lyman Beecher, then a sophomore.

In the Middle States the aspect was not more promising. Princeton College had been closed for three years of the Revolutionary War. In 1782 there were only two among the students who professed themselves Christians. The Presbyterian General Assembly, representing the strongest religious force in that region, in 1798 described the then existing condition of the country in these terms:

From the point of view of the Episcopalian of that day the prospect was even more disheartening. It was at this time that Bishop Provoost of New York laid down his functions, not expecting the church to continue much longer; and Bishop Madison of Virginia shared the despairing conviction of Chief-Justice Marshall that the church was too far gone ever to be revived.[232:1] Over all this period the historian of the Lutheran Church writes up the title "Deterioration."[232:2] Proposals were set on foot looking toward the merger of these two languishing denominations.

Even the Methodists, the fervor of whose zeal and vitality of whose organization had withstood what seemed severer tests, felt the benumbing influence of this unhappy age. For three years ending in 1796 the total membership diminished at the rate of about four thousand a year.

Many witnesses agree in describing the moral and religious condition of the border States of Kentucky and Tennessee as peculiarly deplorable. The autobiography of that famous pioneer preacher, Peter Cartwright, gives a lively picture of Kentucky society in 1793 as he remembered it in his old age:

The people that walked in this gross darkness beheld a great light. In 1796 a Presbyterian minister, James McGready, who for more than ten years had done useful service in Pennsylvania and North Carolina, assumed charge of several Presbyterian churches in that very Logan County which we know through the reminiscences of Peter Cartwright. As he went the round of his scattered congregations his preaching was felt to have peculiar power "to arouse false professors, to awaken a dead church, and warn sinners and lead them to seek the new spiritual life which he himself had found." Three years later two brothers, William and John McGee, one a Presbyterian minister and the other a Methodist, came through the beautiful Cumberland country in Kentucky and Tennessee, speaking, as if in the spirit and power of John the Baptist, to multitudes that gathered from great distances to hear them. On one occasion, in the woods of Logan County, in July, 1800, the gathered families, many of whom came from far, tethered their teams and encamped for several days for the unaccustomed privilege of common worship and Christian preaching. This is believed to have been the first American camp-meeting—an era worth remembering in our history. Not without abundant New Testament antecedents, it naturalized itself at once on our soil as a natural expedient for scattered frontier populations unprovided with settled institutions. By a natural process of evolution, adapting itself to other environments and uses, the backwoods camp-meeting has grown into the "Chautauqua" assembly, which at so many places besides the original center at Chautauqua Lake has grown into an important and most characteristic institution of American civilization.

We are happy in having an account of some of these meetings from one who was personally and sympathetically interested in them. For in the spring of the next year Barton Warren Stone, a Presbyterian minister serving his two congregations of Concord and Cane Ridge in Bourbon County, and oppressed with a sense of the religious apathy prevailing about him, made the long journey across the State of Kentucky to see for himself the wonderful things of which he had heard, and afterward wrote his reminiscences.

Profoundly impressed by what he had seen and heard, Pastor Stone returned to his double parish in Bourbon County and rehearsed the story of it. "The congregation was affected with awful solemnity, and many returned home weeping." This was in the early spring. Not many months afterward there was a notable springing up of this seed.

The sober and cautious tone of this narrative will already have impressed the reader. These are not the words of a heated enthusiast, or a man weakly credulous. We may hesitate to accept his judgment, but may safely accept his testimony, amply corroborated as it is, to facts which he has seen and heard.

But the crucial test of the work, the test prescribed by the Lord of the church, is that it shall be known by its fruits. And this test it seems to bear well. Dr. Archibald Alexander, had in high reverence in the Presbyterian Church as a wise counselor in spiritual matters, made scrupulous inquiry into the results of this revival, and received from one of his correspondents, Dr. George A. Baxter, who made an early visit to the scenes of the revival, the following testimony:

A sermon preached in 1803 to the Presbyterian synod of Kentucky, by the Rev. David Rice, has the value of testimony given in the presence of other competent witnesses, and liable thus to be questioned or contradicted. In it he says:

That same year the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church, in its annual review of the state of religion, adverted with emphasis to the work in the Cumberland country, and cited remarkable instances of conversion—malignant opposers of vital piety convinced and reconciled, learned, active, and conspicuous infidels becoming signal monuments of that grace which they once despised; and in conclusion declared with joy that "the state and prospects of vital religion in our country are more favorable and encouraging than at any period within the last forty years."[238:1]

In order successfully to study the phenomena of this remarkable passage in the history of the church, it is necessary to bear in mind the social conditions that prevailed. A population perfervido ingenio, of a temper peculiarly susceptible of intense excitement, transplanted into a wild country, under little control either of conventionality or law, deeply ingrained from many generations with the religious sentiment, but broken loose from the control of it and living consciously in reckless disregard of the law of God, is suddenly aroused to a sense of its apostasy and wickedness. The people do not hear the word of God from Sabbath to Sabbath, or even from evening to evening, and take it home with them and ponder it amid the avocations of daily business; by the conditions, they are sequestered for days together in the wilderness for the exclusive contemplation of momentous truths pressed upon the mind with incessant and impassioned iteration; and they remain together, an agitated throng, not of men only, but of women and children. The student of psychology recognizes at once that here are present in an unusual combination the conditions not merely of the ready propagation of influence by example and persuasion, but of those nervous, mental, or spiritual infections which make so important a figure in the world's history, civil, military, or religious. It is wholly in accord with human nature that the physical manifestations attendant on religious excitement in these circumstances should be of an intense and extravagant sort.

And such indeed they were. Sudden outcries, hysteric weeping and laughter, faintings, catalepsies, trances, were customary concomitants of the revival preaching. Multitudes fell prostrate on the ground, "spiritually slain," as it was said. Lest the helpless bodies should be trampled on by the surging crowd, they were taken up and laid in rows on the floor of the neighboring meeting-house. "Some lay quiet, unable to move or speak. Some talked, but could not move. Some beat the floor with their heels. Some, shrieking in agony, bounded about, it is said, like a live fish out of water. Many lay down and rolled over and over for hours at a time. Others rushed wildly over the stumps and benches, and then plunged, shouting 'Lost! Lost!' into the forest."

As the revival went on and the camp-meeting grew to be a custom and an institution, this nervous epidemic took on certain recognizable forms, one of which was known as "the jerks." This malady "began in the head and spread rapidly to the feet. The head would be thrown from side to side so swiftly that the features would be blotted out and the hair made to snap. When the body was affected the sufferer was hurled over hindrances that came in his way, and finally dashed on the ground, to bounce about like a ball." The eccentric Lorenzo Dow, whose freaks of eloquence and humor are remembered by many now living, speaks from his own observation on the subject:

There is nothing improbable in the claim that phenomena like these, strange, weird, startling, "were so much like miracles that they had the same effect as miracles on unbelievers." They helped break up the apathetic torpor of the church and summon the multitudes into the wilderness to hear the preaching of repentance and the remission of sins. But they had some lamentable results. Those who, like many among the Methodists,[241:1] found in them the direct work of the Holy Spirit, were thereby started along the perilous incline toward enthusiasm and fanaticism. Those, on the other hand, repelled by the grotesqueness and extravagance of these manifestations, who were led to distrust or condemn the good work with which they were associated, fell into a graver error. This was the error into which, to its cost, the Presbyterian Church was by and by drawn in dealing with questions that emerged from these agitations. The revival gave rise to two new sects, both of them marked by the fervor of spirit that characterized the time, and both of them finding their principal habitat in the same western region. The Cumberland Presbyterians, now grown to large numbers and deserved influence and dignity in the fellowship of American sects, separated themselves from the main body of Presbyterians by refusing to accept, in face of the craving needs of the pastorless population all about them, the arbitrary rule shutting the door of access to the Presbyterian ministry to all candidates, how great soever their other qualifications, who lacked a classical education. Separating on this issue, they took the opportunity to amend the generally accepted doctrinal statements of the Presbyterian churches by mitigating those utterances which seemed to them, as they have seemed to many others, to err in the direction of fatalism.

About the same time there was manifested in various quarters a generous revolt against the existence and multiplication of mutually exclusive sects in the Christian family, each limited by humanly devised doctrinal articles and branded with partisan names. How these various protesting elements came together on the sole basis of a common faith in Christ and a common acceptance of the divine authority of the Bible; how, not intending it, they came to be themselves a new sect; and how, struggling in vain against the inexorable laws of language, they came to be distinguished by names, as Campbellite Baptist, Christ-ian (with a long i), and (κατ' ἐξόχην) Disciples, are points on which interesting and instructive light is shed in the history by Dr. B. B. Tyler.[242:1]

The great revival of the West and Southwest was not the only revival, and not even the earliest revival, of that time of crisis. As early as 1792 the long inertia of the eastern churches began to be broken here and there by signs of growing earnestness and attentiveness to spiritual things. There was little of excited agitation. There was no preaching of famous evangelists. There were no imposing convocations. Only in many and many of those country towns in which, at that time, the main strength of the population lay, the labors of faithful pastors began to be rewarded with large ingatherings of penitent believers. The languishing churches grew strong and hopeful, and the insolent infidelity of the times was abashed. With such sober simplicity was the work of the gospel carried forward, in the opening years of this century, among the churches and pastors that had learned wisdom from the mistakes made in the Great Awakening, that there are few striking incidents for the historian. Hardly any man is to be pointed out as a preËminent leader of the church at this period. If to any one, this place of honor belongs to Timothy Dwight, grandson of Jonathan Edwards, whose accession to the presidency of Yale College at the darkest hour in its history marked the turning-point. We have already learned from the reminiscences of Lyman Beecher how low the college had sunk in point of religious character, when most of the class above him were openly boastful of being infidels.[243:1] How the new president dealt with them is well described by the same witness:

It may be doubted whether to any man of his generation it was given to exercise a wider and more beneficent influence over the American church than that of President Dwight. His system of "Theology Explained and Defended in a Series of Sermons," a theology meant to be preached and made effective in convincing men and converting them to the service of God, was so constructed as to be completed within the four years of the college curriculum, so that every graduate should have heard the whole of it. The influence of it has not been limited by the boundaries of our country, nor has it expired with the century just completed since President Dwight's accession.

At the East also, as well as at the West, the quickening of religious thought and feeling had the common effect of alienating and disrupting. Diverging tendencies, which had begun to disclose themselves in the discussions between Edwards and Chauncy in their respective volumes of "Thoughts" on the Great Awakening, became emphasized in the revival of 1800. That liberalism which had begun as a protest against a too peremptory style of dogmatism was rapidly advancing toward a dogmatic denial of points deemed by the opposite party to be essential. Dogmatic differences were aggravated by differences of taste and temperament, and everything was working toward the schism by which some sincere and zealous souls should seek to do God service.

In one most important particular the revival of 1800 was happily distinguished from the Great Awakening of 1740. It was not done and over with at the end of a few years, and then followed by a long period of reaction. It was the beginning of a long period of vigorous and "abundant life," moving forward, not, indeed, with even and unvarying flow, yet with continuous current, marked with those alternations of exaltation and subsidence which seem, whether for evil or for good, to have become a fixed characteristic of American church history.

The widespread revivals of the first decade of the nineteenth century saved the church of Christ in America from its low estate and girded it for stupendous tasks that were about to be devolved on it. In the glow of this renewed fervor, the churches of New England successfully made the difficult transition from establishment to self-support and to the costly enterprises of aggressive evangelization into which, in company with other churches to the South and West, they were about to enter. The Christianity of the country was prepared and equipped to attend with equal pace the prodigious rush of population across the breadth of the Great Valley, and to give welcome to the invading host of immigrants which before the end of a half century was to effect its entrance into our territory at the rate of a thousand a day. It was to accommodate itself to changing social conditions, as the once agricultural population began to concentrate itself in factory villages and commercial towns. It was to carry on systematic campaigns of warfare against instituted social wrong, such as the drinking usages of society, the savage code of dueling, the public sanction of slavery. And it was to enter the "effectual door" which from the beginning of the century opened wider and wider to admit the gospel and the church to every nation under heaven.