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EDITOR’S NOTE.
EDITOR’S NOTE.
The only changes made in revising this work are in the local allusions to England as “our country,” etc., and in a few phrases and expressions naturally arising from the original preparation of the chapters for successive numbers of a magazine. If any reader thinks that the Author’s enthusiasm in his subject has caused him to ascribe too great influence to the “Methodist movement,” and not to give due recognition to other potent agencies in the “great awakening” of the last century, let him reme
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PREFACE.
PREFACE.
The author of the following pages begs that they may be read kindly—and, he will venture to say, not critically. Originally published as a series of papers in the Sunday at Home , * * * they are only Vignettes —etchings. The History of the great Religious Movement of the Eighteenth Century yet remains unwritten; not often has the world known such a marvellous awakening of religious thought; and, as we are further removed in time, so, perhaps, we are better able to judge of the momentous circumst
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CHAPTER I DARKNESS BEFORE DAWN.
CHAPTER I DARKNESS BEFORE DAWN.
It cannot be too often remembered or repeated that when the Bible has been brought face to face with the conscience of corrupt society, in every age it has shown itself to be that which it professes, and which its believers declare it to be—“the great power of God.” It proved itself thus amidst the hoary and decaying corruptions of the ancient civilisation, when its truths were first published to the Roman Empire; it proclaimed its power to the impure but polished society of Florence, when Savon
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CHAPTER II FIRST STREAKS OF DAWN.
CHAPTER II FIRST STREAKS OF DAWN.
In the history of the circumstances which brought about the Great Revival, we must not fail to notice those which were in action even before the great apostles of the Revival appeared. We have already given what may almost be called a silhouette of society, an outline, for the most part, all dark; and yet in the same period there were relieving tints, just as sometimes, upon a silhouette-portrait, you have seen an attempt to throw in some resemblance to the features by a touch of gold. Chief amo
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CHAPTER III OXFORD: NEW LIGHTS AND OLD LANTERNS.
CHAPTER III OXFORD: NEW LIGHTS AND OLD LANTERNS.
It is remarkable that one of the very earliest movements of the new evangelical succession should manifest itself in Oxford—many minded Oxford—whose distant spires and antique towers have looked down through so many ages upon the varying opinions which have surged up around and within her walls. Lord Bacon has somewhere said that the opinions, feelings, and thoughts of the young men of any present generation forecast the whole popular mind of the future age. No remark can be more true, as exhibi
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CHAPTER IV CAST OUT FROM THE CHURCH—TAKING TO THE FIELDS.
CHAPTER IV CAST OUT FROM THE CHURCH—TAKING TO THE FIELDS.
It was field-preaching, preaching in the open air, which first gave national distinctiveness to the Revival, and constituted it a movement. Assuredly any occasions of excitement we have known, give no idea whatever of the immense agitations which speedily rolled over the country, from one end to the other, when these great revivalists began their work in the fields. And the excitement continued, rolling on through London, and through the counties of England, from the west to the north, not for d
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CHAPTER V THE REVIVAL CONSERVATIVE.
CHAPTER V THE REVIVAL CONSERVATIVE.
Lord Macaulay’s verdict upon John Wesley, that he possessed a “genius for government not inferior to that of Richelieu,” received immediate demonstration when he came actively into the movement, and has been abundantly confirmed since his death, in the history of the society which he founded. It has been said that all institutions are the prolonged shadow of one mind, and that by the inclusiveness, or power of perpetuity in the institution, we may know the mind of the founder. Much of our last c
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CHAPTER VI THE SINGERS OF THE REVIVAL.
CHAPTER VI THE SINGERS OF THE REVIVAL.
Chief of all the auxiliary circumstances which aided the Great Revival, beyond a question, was this: that it taught the people of England, for the first time, the real power of sacred song. That man in the north of England who, when taken, by a companion who had been converted, to a great Methodist preaching, and being asked at the close of the service how he had enjoyed it, replied, “Weel, I didna care sae mich aboot the preaching, but, eh, man! yon ballants were grand,” was no doubt a represen
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CHAPTER VII LAY PREACHING AND LAY PREACHERS.
CHAPTER VII LAY PREACHING AND LAY PREACHERS.
There came with the work of the Revival a practice, without which it is more than questionable if it would have obtained such a rapid and abiding hold upon the various populations and districts of the country; this was lay preaching. The designation must have a more inclusive interpretation than we generally apply to it; we must understand by it rather the work of those men who, in contradistinction to the great leaders of the Revival—men of scholarship, of universities, and of education—possess
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CHAPTER VIII A GALLERY OF REVIVALIST PORTRAITS.
CHAPTER VIII A GALLERY OF REVIVALIST PORTRAITS.
If we were writing a sustained history of the Revival, we might devote some pages, at this period, to notice the varied forms of satire and ribaldry by which it was greeted. While the noble bands of preachers were pursuing their way, instructing and awakening the popular mind of the country, not only heartless and affected dilettanti, like Horace Walpole, regarded it with the condescension of their supercilious sneers, but for the more popular taste there was The Spiritual Quixote , a book which
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CHAPTER IX BLOSSOMS IN THE WILDERNESS.
CHAPTER IX BLOSSOMS IN THE WILDERNESS.
The preceding chapters have shown that the Great Revival was creating over the wild moral wastes of England a pure and spiritual atmosphere, and its movements and organisations were taking root in every direction. Voltaire, and that pedantic cluster of conceited infidels, the Bolingbrokes, Middletons, and Mandevilles, Chubbs, Woolstons, and Collinses, who prophesied that Christian faith was fast vanishing from the earth, were slightly premature. It is, indeed, interesting to notice the contrast
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CHAPTER X THE REVIVAL BECOMES EDUCATIONAL.—ROBERT RAIKES.
CHAPTER X THE REVIVAL BECOMES EDUCATIONAL.—ROBERT RAIKES.
In the year 1880 was celebrated in England and America the centenary of Sunday-schools. The life and labours of Robert Raikes, whose name has long been familiar as “a household word” in connection with such institutions, were reviewed, and fresh interest added to that early work for the young. ROBERT RAIKES AND HIS SCHOLARS. Gloucestershire, if not one of the largest, is certainly one of the fairest—as, indeed, its name is said to imply: from Glaw , an old British word signifying “fair”—it is on
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CHAPTER XI THE ROMANTIC STORY OF SILAS TOLD.
CHAPTER XI THE ROMANTIC STORY OF SILAS TOLD.
Dr. Abel Stevens, in his History of Methodism , says, “I congratulate myself on the opportunity of reviving the memory of Silas Told;” and speaks of the little biography in which Silas himself records his adventures as “a record told with frank and affecting simplicity, in a style of terse and flowing English Defoe might have envied.” Such a testimony is well calculated to excite the curiosity of an interested reader, especially as the two or three incidents mentioned only serve to whet the appe
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CHAPTER XII MISSIONARY SOCIETIES.
CHAPTER XII MISSIONARY SOCIETIES.
Illustrating what we have said before, it remains to be noticed, that nearly all the great societies sprang into existence almost simultaneously. The foremost among these, [14] founded in 1792, was the Baptist Missionary Society. It appears to have arisen from a suggestion of William Carey, the celebrated Northamptonshire shoemaker, who proposed as an inquiry to an association of Northamptonshire ministers, “whether it were not practicable and obligatory to attempt the conversion of the heathen.
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CHAPTER XIII AFTERMATH.
CHAPTER XIII AFTERMATH.
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 hear
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APPENDIX A (Pages 9 and 97).
APPENDIX A (Pages 9 and 97).
The Puritans were men whose minds had derived a peculiar character from the daily contemplation of superior beings and eternal interests. Not content with acknowledging, in general terms, an overruling Providence, they habitually ascribed every event to the will of the Great Being, for whose power nothing was too vast, for whose inspection nothing was too minute. To know him, to serve him, to enjoy him, was, with them, the great end of existence. They rejected, with contempt, the ceremonious hom
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APPENDIX B (Page 21).
APPENDIX B (Page 21).
“‘The Vicar of Wakefield’ is a domestic epic. Its hero is a country parson—simple, pious and pure-hearted—a humourist in his way, a little vain of his learning, a little proud of his fine family—sometimes rather sententious, never pedantic, and a dogmatist only on the one favorite topic of monogamy, which crops out now and then above the surface of his character, only to give it a new charm. Its world is a rural district, beyond whose limits the action rarely passes, and that only on great occas
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APPENDIX C (Page 28).
APPENDIX C (Page 28).
The most interesting phases which the Reformation anywhere assumes, especially for us English, is that of Puritanism. In Luther’s own country, Protestantism soon dwindled into a rather barren affair, not a religion or faith, but rather now a theological jangling of argument, the proper seat of it not the heart; the essence of it skeptical contention; which, indeed, has jangled more and more, down to Voltairism itself; through Gustavus Adolphus contentions onward to French-Revolution cries! But o
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APPENDIX D (Page 36).
APPENDIX D (Page 36).
It has been said of Lady Huntingdon that “almost from infancy an uncommon seriousness shaded the natural gladness of her childhood,” and that, without any positive religious instruction, for none knew her “inward sorrows,” when she was a “little girl, nor were there any around her who could have led her to the balm there is in Gilead,” she devoutly and diligently searched the Scriptures, if haply she might find that precious something which her soul craved. During the first years of her married
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APPENDIX E (Page 71).
APPENDIX E (Page 71).
“It is easier to justify the heads of the restored Clergy upon this point [want of uniformity or unity in the Church of England], than to excuse them for appropriating to themselves the wealth which, in consequence of the long protracted calamities of the nation, was placed at their disposal. The leases of the church lands had almost all fallen in; there had been no renewal for twenty years, and the fines which were now raised amounted to about a million and a half. Some of this money was expend
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APPENDIX F (Pages 73 and 98).
APPENDIX F (Pages 73 and 98).
“The observant Frenchman to whom we have several times referred, M. Grosley, says of the ‘sect of the Methodists,’ ‘this establishment has borne all the persecutions that it could possibly apprehend in a country as much disposed to persecution as England is the reverse.’ The light literature of forty years overflows with ridicule of Methodism. The preachers are pelted by the mob; the converts are held up to execration as fanatics or hypocrites. Yet Methodism held the ground it had gained. It had
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APPENDIX (Page 114).
APPENDIX (Page 114).
“The ‘two brothers in song’ (John and Charles Wesley) began their issue of ‘Hymns and Sacred Songs’ in 1739, and continued at intervals to supply Christian singers for half a century. Thirty-eight publications appeared one after the other: now under the name of one brother, now under that of the other; some with both names, and others nameless. The two hymnists appear to have agreed that, in the volumes which bore their joint names, they would not distinguish their hymns.”— The Epworth Singers a
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APPENDIX (Note, Page 118).
APPENDIX (Note, Page 118).
Thomas Olivers, the author of the above hymn, lived to see the issue of at least thirty editions of it....
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APPENDIX (Page 236).
APPENDIX (Page 236).
From the “Memoirs of Howard, compiled from his diary, his confidential letters, and other authentic documents, by James Baldwin Brown,” it appears that in the year 1755, on a voyage to Portugal, the vessel in which he was, was captured by a French privateer, and carried into Brest, where he and the other passengers, along with the crew, were cast into a filthy dungeon, and there kept a considerable time without nourishment. There they lay for six days and nights. The floor, with nothing but stra
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APPENDIX (Page 253).
APPENDIX (Page 253).
At Michaelmas time, 1791, Mr. Buchanan was admitted a member of Queen’s College, Cambridge, having left London on the 24th October. He was then 25 years of age. In consequence of a letter from his mother he attended the preaching of John Newton, with whom he kept up a correspondence when at college. In one of his replies to Mr. Newton he wrote: “You ask me whether I would prefer preaching the Gospel to the fame of learning? Ay, that would I, gladly, were I convinced it was the will of God, that
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APPENDIX (Page 254).
APPENDIX (Page 254).
In the month of September, 1794, a paper was published in the Evangelical Magazine , urging the formation of a mission to the heathen on the broadest possible basis. The writer of that paper was the Rev. David Bogue, D.D., of Gosport, Hampshire, and two months after its appearance a conference, attended by representatives from several Evangelical bodies, was held to take action in the matter. The result was an address to ministers and members of various churches, and the appointment of a committ
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APPENDIX (Page 256).
APPENDIX (Page 256).
At a meeting held in Leeds, 5th October, 1813, it was resolved to constitute a society to be called “The Methodist Missionary Society for the Leeds District,” of which branches were to be formed in the several circuits, whose duty it should be to collect subscriptions in behalf of missions and to remit them to an already existing committee in London. It was from this point that, by general consent, the origin of the Wesleyan Missionary Society is reckoned....
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