The effects of that great awakening which we have thus attempted concisely, but fairly, to delineate, are with us still; the strength is diffused, the tone and colour are modified. One chief purpose has guided the pen of the writer throughout: it has been to show that the immense regeneration effected in English manners and society during the later years of the last century and the first of the present, was the result of a secret, silent, most subtle spiritual force, awakening the minds and hearts of men in most opposite parts of the nation, and in widely different social circumstances. We would give all honour where honour is due, remembering that “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above.” There are writers whose special admiration is given to some favourite sect, some effective movement, or some especially beloved name; but a dispassionate view, an entrance—if we may be permitted so to speak of it—into the camera, the chamber of the times, presents to the eye a long succession of actors, and brings out into the clear light a wonderful variety of influences all simultaneously at work to redeem society from its darkness, and to give it a higher degree of spiritual purity and mental and moral dignity.

The first great workers were passing away, most of them, as is usually the case, dying on Pisgah, seeing most distinctly the future results of their work, but scarcely permitted to enter upon the full realisation of it. In 1791, in the eighty-fourth year of her age, died the revered Countess of Huntingdon; her last words, “My work is done; I have nothing to do but to go to my Father!” No chronicle of convent or of canonisation, nor any story of biography, can record, a more simple, saintly, and utterly unselfish life. To the last unwearied, she was daily occupied in writing long letters, arranging for her many ministers, disposing of her chapel trusts; sometimes feeling that her rank, and certain suppositions as to the extent of her wealth, made her an object upon which men were not indisposed to exercise their rapacity. Still, as compared with the state of society when she commenced her work, in this her closing year, she must have looked over a hopeful and promising future, as sweet and enchanting as the ineffably lovely scenery upon which her eyes opened at Castle Doddington, and the neighbouring beauties of her first wedded home.

In 1791, John Wesley, in his eighty-eighth year, entered into his rest, faithfully murmuring, as well as weakness and stammering lips could articulate, “The best of all is, God is with us!” Abel Stevens says, “His life stands out in the history of the world, unquestionably pre-eminent in religious labours above that of any other man since the apostolic age.” It is not necessary, in order to do Wesley sufficient honour, to indulge in such invidious comparisons. It is significant, however, that the last straggling syllables which ever fell from the pen in his beloved hand, were in a letter to William Wilberforce, cheering him on in his efforts for the abolition of slavery and the slave trade. Charles Wesley had preceded his brother to his rest in 1788, in the eightieth year of his age.

Thus the earlier labourers were passing away, and the work of the Revival was passing into other forms, illustrating how not only “one generation passeth away, and another cometh,” but also how, as the workers pass, the work abides. It would be very pleasant to spend some time in noticing the interior of many old halls, which were now opening, at once for the entertainment of evangelists, and for Divine service; prejudices were dying out, and so far from the new religious life proving inimical to the repose of the country, it was found to be probably its surest security and friend; and while the efforts were growing for carrying to far-distant regions the truth which enlightens and saves, anecdotes are not wanting to show that it was this very spirit which created a tender interest in maintaining and devising means to make more secure the minister’s happiness at home.

From many points of view William Wilberforce maybe regarded as the central man of the Revival in its new and crowning aspect; as he bore the standard of England at that great funeral which did honour to all that was mortal of his friend William Pitt, on its way to the vaults of the old Abbey, so, as his predecessors departed, it devolved on him to bear the standard of those truths and principles which had effected the great change, and which were to effect, if possible, yet greater changes. By his sweet, winning, and if silvery, yet enchaining and overwhelming eloquence, by his conversation, which cannot have been, from the traditions which are preserved of it, less than wonderful, and by his lucid and practical pen, he continued to give eminent effect to the Revival, and to procure for its doctrines acceptance in the highest circles of society. It is perhaps difficult now to understand the cause of the wonderful influence produced by his Practical View of Christianity; that book itself illustrates how the seeds of things are transmitted through many generations. It is a long way to look back to the poor pedlar who called at the farm door of Richard Baxter’s father in Eaton-Constantine, and sold there Richard Sibbs’s Bruised Reed, but that was the birth-hour of that great and transcendently glorious book, The Saint’s Everlasting Rest. The Saint’s Everlasting Rest was the inspiration of Philip Doddridge, and to it we owe his Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul. Wilberforce read that book, and it moved him to the desire to speak out its earnestness, pathos, and solemnity in tones suitable to the spirit of the Great Revival which had been going on around him. A young clergyman read the result of Wilberforce’s wish in his Practical View of Christianity, and he testifies, “To that book I owe a debt of gratitude; to my unsought and unexpected introduction to it, I owe the first sacred impressions which I ever received as to the spiritual nature of the Gospel system, the vital character of personal religion, the corruption of the human heart, and the way of salvation by Jesus Christ.” And all this was very shortly given to the world in those beautiful pieces, which it surely must be ever a pleasure to read, whether, for their tender delineation of the most important truths, or the exquisite language, and the delightful charm of natural scenery and pathetic reflection in which the experiences of The Young Cottager, The Dairyman’s Daughter, and other “short and simple annals of the poor,” are conveyed through the fascinating pen of Legh Richmond.

In this eminently lovely and lovable life we meet with one on whom, assuredly, the mantle of the old clerical fathers of the Revival had fallen. He was a Churchman and a clergyman, he loved and honoured his Church and its services exceedingly; but it seems impossible to detect, in any single act of his life or word of his writings, a tinge of acerbity or bitterness. The quiet and mellowed charm of his tracts—which are certainly among the finest pieces of writing in that way which we possess—appear to have pervaded his whole life. Brading, in the Isle of Wight, has been marvellously transformed since he was the vicar of its simple little church; the old parsonage, where little Jane talked with her pastor, is now only a memory, and no longer, as we saw it first many years since, a feature in the charming landscape; and the little epitaphs which the vicar himself wrote for the stones, or wooden memorials over the graves of his parishioners, are all obliterated by time. Several years since we sought in vain for the sweet verse on his own infant daughter, although about thirty-five years since we read it there:

But these little papers of this excellent man circulated wherever the English language was spoken or read, and the spirit of their pages penetrated farther than the pages themselves; while they seem to present in a more pleasant, winning and portable form the spirit of the Revival, divested of much of the ruggedness which had, naturally, characterized its earlier pens.

Indeed, if some generalisation were needed to express the phase into which the Revival was passing, at this, the earlier part of the present century, it should be called the “literary.” Eminent names were appearing, and eminent pens, to gather up the elements of faith which had moved the minds and tongues of men in past years, and to arrest the conscience through the eye. This opens up a field so large that we cannot do justice to it in these brief sketches. To name here only one other writer;—Thomas Scott, the commentator on the Bible, and author of The Force of Truth, is acknowledged to have exerted an influence the greatness of which has been described in glowing terms by men such as Sir. James Stephen and John Henry Newman.

No idea can be formed by those of the present generation of the immense influence Charles Simeon exercised over the mind of the Church of England. He was the leader of the growing evangelical party in the Church; his doctrines were exactly those which had been the favourite on the lips of Whitefield, Berridge, Grimshaw, and Newton. His family was ancient and respectable, he was the son of a Berkshire squire. He had been educated at Eton, and afterwards at King’s College, Cambridge; he became very wealthy. His accession to the life of the Revival seemed like an immense addition of natural influence: he was faithful and earnest, and, in the habits of his mind and character, exactly what we understand by the thorough English gentleman; almost may it be said that he made the Revival “gentlemanly” in clergymen. He opened the course of his fifty-six years’ ministry in Cambridge amidst a storm of persecution; the church wardens attempted to crush him, the pews of his church were locked up, and he was even locked out of the building. Through all this he passed, and he became, for the greater part of the long period we have mentioned, the most noted preacher of his town and university; and he published, certainly, in his HorÆ HomileticÆ a greater number of attempts at opening texts in the form of sermons, than had ever been given to the world. Simeon devoted his own fortune and means for the purchase of advowsons, in order that the pulpits of churches might be filled by the representatives of his own opinions. No history of the Revival can be complete without noticing this phase, which scattered over England, far more extensively than can be here described, a new order of clergyman, who have maintained in their circles evangelical truth, and have held no inconsiderable sway over the mind of the country.

We only know history through men; events are only possible through men, of whose mind and activity they are the manifestation. This brief succession of sketches has been very greatly a series of portraits standing out prominently from the scenery to which the character gave effect; but of this singular, almost simultaneous movement, how much has been left unrecorded! It remains unquestionably true that no adequate and perfectly impartial review of the Revival has ever yet been written.

The story of the Revival in Wales, what it found there, and what it effected, is one of its most interesting chapters. How deep was the slumber when, about 1735-37, Howell Harris began to traverse the Principality, exhorting his neighbours concerning the interests of their souls! another illustration that it was not from one single spring that the streams of the Revival poured over the land. It was rather like some great mountain, such as Plinlimmon, from whose high centre, elevated among the clouds, leap forth five rivers, meandering among the rocks in their brook-like way, until at last they pour themselves along the lowlands in broad and even magnificent streams, either uniting as the Severn and the Wye, or finding their separate way to the ocean. Whitefield found his way to Wales, but Howell Harris was already pouring out his consecrated life there; to his assistance came the voice of Rowlands, “the thunderer,” as he was called. Scientific sermon-makers would say that Harris was no great preacher; but he has been described as the most successful and wonderful one who ever ascended pulpit or platform in the Principality. By the mingling of his tears and his terrors, in seven years he roused the whole country from one end to the other, north and south; communicating the impulse of his zeal to many like-minded men, by whose impassioned words and indefatigable labours the work was continued with signal and lasting results.[20]

If the first throbbings of the coming Revival were felt in Northampton, in America, in 1734, beneath the truly awful words of the great Jonathan Edwards, it was from England it derived its sustenance, and assumed organisation and shape. The Boston Elm, a venerable tree near the centre of Boston Park, or common, whose decayed limbs are still held together by clamps or rivets of iron, while a railing defends it from rude hands, is an object as sacred to the traditions of Methodism in the United States, as is Gwennap Pit to those of Methodism in Western England. There Jesse Lee, the first founder of Methodism in New England, commenced the work in 1790, which has issued in an organisation even more extensive and gigantic than that which is associated with the Conference in England. As the United States have inherited from the mother country their language, their literature, and their principles of law, so also those great agitations of spiritual life to which we have concisely referred, crossed the Atlantic, and spread themselves with power there.[21]

It is not within our province to attempt to enumerate all the sects, each with its larger or lesser proportion of spiritual power, religious activity, and general acceptance among the people, to which the Revival gave birth;—such as the large body of the Bible Christians of the West of England; the Primitive Methodists of the North, those who called themselves the New Connection Methodists, or the United Free Church Association. All these, and others, are branches from the great central stem. Neither is it in our province to notice how the same universal agitation of religious feeling, at exactly the same time, gave birth to other forms, not regarded with so much complacency;—such as the rugged and faulty faith and following of that curious creature, William Huntington, who, singular to say, found also his best biographer in Robert Southey; or the strangely multifarious works and rationalistic development of Baron Swedenborg, which have, at least, the merit of giving a more spiritual rendering to the Christian system than that which was found in the prevalent Arianism of the period of their publication. Turn wherever we may, it is the same. There was a deeper upheaving of the religious life, and far more widely spread, than perhaps any age of the world since the time of the apostles had known before.

A change passed over the whole of English society. That social state which we find described in the pages of Fielding and Smollett, and less respectable writers, passed away, and passed away, we trust, for ever. The language of impurity indulged with freedom by the dramatists of the period when the Revival arose, and read, and read aloud, by ladies and young girls in drawing-rooms, or by parlour firesides, became shameful and dishonoured. In the course of fifty years, society, if not entirely purged—for when may we hope for that blessedness?—was purified. A sense of religious decorum, and some idea of religious duty, took possession of homes and minds which were not at all impressed, either by the doctrines or the discipline of Methodism. All this arose from the new life which had been created.

It was a fruitful soil upon which the revivalists worked. There was a reverence for the Bible as the word of God, a faith often held very ignorantly, but it pervaded the land. The Book was there in every parish church, and in every hamlet; it became a kind of nexus of union for true minds when they felt the power of Divine principles. Thus, when, as the Revival strengthened itself, the great Evangelic party—a term which seems to us less open to exception than “the Methodist party,” because far more inclusive—met with the members of the Society of Friends, they found that, with some substantial differences, they had principles in common. The Quakers had been long in the land, but excepting in their own persons—and they were few in number—they had not given much effect to their principles. Methodism roused the country; Quakerism, with its more quiet thought, gave suggestions, plans, largely supplied money. The great works which these two have since unitedly accomplished of educating the nation, and shaking off the chain of the slave abroad, neither could have accomplished singly; the conscience of the country was prepared by Evangelic sentiment. In taking up and working out the great ideas of the Revival, we have never been indifferent to the share due to members of the Society of Friends. We have already spoken of Elizabeth Fry, to whom many of the princes of Europe in turn paid honour, to whom with singular simplicity they listened as they heard her preach. There are many names on which we should like a little to dwell; missionaries as arduous and earnest as any we have mentioned, such as Stephen Grellet, Thomas Shillitoe, and Thomas Chalkley. But this would enter into a larger plan than we dare to entertain. Our object now is only to say, how greatly other nations, and the world at large, have benefited by the awakening the conscience, the setting free the mind, the education of the character, by bringing all into immediate contact with the Word of God and the truth which it unveils.

Situated as we are now, amidst the movements and agitations of uncertain seas of thought, wondering as to the future, with strong adjurations on every hand to renounce the Word of Life, and to trust ourselves to the filmy rationalism of modern speculation; while we feel that for the future, and for those seas over which we look there are no tide-tables, we may, at least, safely affirm this, that the Bible carries us beyond the highest water-mark; that, as societies have constructed themselves out of its principles they have built safely, not only for eternal hope, but for human and social happiness also; and we may safely ask human thought—which, unaided and unenlightened by revelation, has had a pretty fair field for the exercise and display of its power in the history of the world—to show to us a single chapter in all the ages of its history, which has effected so much for human, spiritual, intellectual, and social well-being, as that which records the results of the Great Revival of the Last Century.