During the bicentenary, my wife and I were
listening to a well-known Christian lady being
interviewed on television, and she said, It is
about time that the American people knew that
this republic was founded by men of God
and men of prayer.
I said to my wife, That's only half
true.
There were men of God and men of
prayer who helped found this republic, but there
were others who were neither men of God
nor men of prayer.
Who could call Thomas Paine a man of
God?
He was a blasphemer, died in disgrace.
He did write some useful literature, Common Sense,
for example, that pamphlet that helped shape the
future of this country.
Thomas Jefferson was a much higher character than
Thomas Paine, but he was a deist.
He didn't believe in the God and Father
of the Lord Jesus Christ.
I understand that when he wrote the Declaration
of Independence, some Christians ganged up and said,
You've got to mention God in this.
And rather reluctantly he worked it in.
We hold these truths to be self-evident
that all men are created equal, that they
are endowed by their Creator.
He would concede that all right.
He spoke of nature's God.
But he didn't believe in prayer.
He wouldn't let anyone pray with him when
he was dying.
General Charles Lee, one of the heroes of
the Revolution, said, Let us tear down the
churches.
They stand in the way of progress.
And it's not commonly known that in the
wake of the Revolution there was a moral
slump.
Out of a population of five million, three
hundred thousand were confirmed drunkards, fifteen thousand of
them dying annually.
There was an increased sexual license resulting in
greater illegitimacy and venereal disease.
There was a surfeit of lawlessness, a multiplication
of robberies that became a daily occurrence.
Profanity increased, truthfulness declined.
A committee of Congress examined the conditions in
Kentucky and discovered that when only one court
of justice held in five years, they simply
couldn't bring the criminals to justice.
In fact, the decent people formed what we
would call today vigilante regiments and fought a
pitched battle with the outlaws and lost.
Peter Cartwright, a whimsical Methodist evangelist, said when
his father settled in Logan County, Kentucky, it
was known as Rogue's Harbor.
If a man committed a murder in Massachusetts
or perjury in Pennsylvania, all he needed to
do was get across the Alleghenies.
Nobody could lay a finger on him.
Now the church people were dismayed about this.
What were they doing?
The largest denomination was congregational.
Take a typical example.
The Reverend Samuel Shepard of Lenox, Massachusetts, complained
that in sixteen years he had not added
one young person to the congregation.
He was more like a chaplain to a
funeral parlor or an old people's home.
The second largest denomination was Presbyterian.
The first order of business of General Assembly
was to deplore the ungodliness of the country.
The most aggressively evangelistic were the Methodists, but
in the 1790s, many a year, they were
losing more than they were gaining, even though
there was immigration coming across the Atlantic.
The Baptists confessed that they had the worst
season.
The Lutherans were so languishing, they discussed uniting
with the Episcopalians so they could prop each
other up.
The Episcopalians were the worst off.
You see, during the Revolution, they had been
unpopular because their prayer book required them to
pray for King George III, who was not
at all popular with Americans at that time.
Samuel Provost, Bishop of New York, quit functioning.
He had confirmed no one for so long
he decided he was out of work, so
he better look for other employment.
But John Marshall wrote to the Bishop of
Virginia and said, The Church is too far
gone ever to be redeemed.
Voltaire said, Christianity will be forgotten in thirty
years' time.
And Tom Paine was repeating this gleefully all
over the country.
What about the colleges?
They took a poll at Harvard, and discovered
not one believer in the whole student body.
Now Princeton was much more of an evangelical
foundation, and at Princeton they discovered only two
believers, and only five who did not belong
to the filthy speech movement of that day.
The new president of Yale was Timothy Dwight,
and he bewailed at the dregs of infidelity
had been vomited upon this country from Europe.
Frenchmen subscribed millions of francs at a time
when the franc was equal to the dollar
to propagandize young Americans.
Christians were so few on campus, and so
persecuted, they met in secret like a communist
cell and kept their minutes in code so
that no one could harass them.
Well, those were the conditions.
In case this sounds like the hysteria of
the moment, Kenneth Scott Latourette, the great Church
historian who died a few years ago, said,
It seemed as if Christianity were about to
be ushered out of the affairs of men.
Now in the wake of the American Revolution
came the French Revolution.
The difference between the two was that the
French Revolution was anti-Christian.
Oh true, they were in favor of liberty,
equality, and fraternity, but they were anti-Christian.
Practically every church in France was closed.
They crowned a Parisian prostitute goddess of reason
in Notre Dame Cathedral, so that in Europe
conditions were bad too.
Now in 1784, some time before this, John
Erskine of Edinburgh republished a book written by
some Scottish Presbyterian ministers, A Plea for Prayer
for Revival.
They suggested that Christians should meet one day
a month to pray for revival.
They sent a copy to Jonathan Edwards, who
was still alive.
That's when he was prompted to write his
response.
I've already quoted the title, A Humble Attempt
to Promote Explicit Agreement and Visible Union of
All God's People, an Extraordinary Prayer for the
Revival of Religion and the Extension of Christ's
Kingdom According to Scriptural Promise and Prophecies Concerning
the Last Days.
After Jonathan Edwards died, John Erskine republished the
two books together.
He sent a copy to Dr. John Ryland,
the editor of the Baptist Register in Bristol
in England.
You may never have heard his name, but
surely you remember a story about William Carey,
who read a paper to Baptist ministers stressing
the obligation of Christians to evangelize the heathen.
The moderator said, sit down, young man.
When God decides to evangelize the heathen, he'll
do it without any help from you or
me.
That was Dr. John Ryland.
He was a very important Baptist churchman.
Now, when he received two copies of this
little book, he couldn't drop them in the
vertical file.
His conscience wouldn't let him do that, so
he thought, who will I give them to?
He sent one to Andrew Fuller, a Baptist
pastor, and the other to another Baptist pastor
called John Sutcliffe.
Andrew Fuller took leave of absence from his
church and visited practically every Baptist congregation in
England, Wales and Scotland, urging them to set
aside one day a month to pray for
revival.
John Sutcliffe could not travel for domestic reasons,
but he had a teenager in his congregation,
a young man who was very precocious.
His name was William Carey.
He was a shoemaker.
But he had mastered Latin at the age
of fifteen, and Greek at the age of
sixteen, and Hebrew at the age of seventeen.
By the way, he was a genius.
Between them, they started what was called the
Union of Prayer, whereby they'd get congregation after
congregation to promise to set aside one day
a month to pray for a spiritual awakening.
Soon they were joined by the Independents, now
called Congregationalists, then by Methodist Societies, then by
Evangelicals in the Church of England and the
Church of Scotland, by Moravians and others, until
Great Britain was interlaced with a network of
prayer meetings.
This was in the 1780s.
1789 came the French Revolution.
John Wesley died 1791, still in harness, but
in 1792 came the first outbreak of revival.
By the way, there is a fad—I can't
use any other word for it—in American theological
seminaries, that what we call revivalism has originated
on the frontiers and has been brought to
the cities.
The implication is that only uneducated people get
excited about these things.
Actually, the revival of 1792 onwards, what we
call the Second Great Awakening, began in the
industrial heart of England, in Yorkshire.
I won't go into details.
It began first among the Methodists, but it
spread to the other denominations.
It spread all over the British Isles.
It affected the Anglicans as well as the
free churches.
It affected the Church of Scotland.
Two brothers called Haldane traveled the length and
breadth of Scotland.
They were nephews of Admiral Lord Duncan, who
succeeded Lord Nelson, the hero of the Battle
of Trafalgar.
Lord Duncan was quite a famous man.
These two nephews served in the Royal Navy,
and then when they got their discharge, they
sold their property, bought carriages and horses, printed
their own tracts, and traveled up and down
Scotland.
Often were arrested for preaching in the open
air.
Whenever they discovered it was a nephew of
Lord Duncan, no one was going to lock
them up.
They let them go again.
It was pre-Venian grace in that particular
respect.
Revival spread throughout Wales, so that you could
say from 1792 onward, there was revival in
Great Britain.
Don't forget that Britain was fighting Napoleon almost
alone, and in 1812, fighting the United States
as well.
Now, I won't worry you with detail.
You know that Norway has more missionaries per
head of population than any other country in
the world?
You can trace that back to Hans Nielsen
Hauge, a Norwegian farmer, called of God during
that time of revival.
He turned Norway upside down.
The same sort of thing happened in Denmark
and in Sweden.
It also broke out in Finland under Paavo
Ruutselainen.
That's what made these Lutherans of the Northern
Kingdom so evangelical.
Why didn't revival break out in Germany, in
Switzerland, and other places like that?
Napoleon controlled the whole of Europe until 1815.
Revival had to wait until he was defeated.
By the way, Robert Haldane, the Scot, went
to France as soon as the Battle of
Waterloo had been fought.
He found no churches open, but he went
on to Switzerland and found the citadel of
Calvin, Geneva, dominated by rationalists.
So he took lodgings and invited students at
the theological faculty in Geneva to come and
listen to him.
He used an interpreter at first until he
got fluent in French.
And the rumor went around, come and hear
a man who knows his Bible like John
Calvin.
One of the professors, a professor, was so
furious, he stood outside Robert Haldane's lodgings and
took the names of students who attended these
informal meetings and failed them in their examinations.
But that started what was called the Revée,
the great revival in Switzerland that spread to
France and then to Holland, and then in
1816 swept the whole of Germany.
Now, of course, you're much more interested in
what happened on this side of the Atlantic.
There were preliminary revivals.
It's a very interesting thing, I've discovered, that
ten years, generally, before the coming of a
general revival, the Lord sends little local revivals
to prepare leadership, to give people a taste
of what is going to happen.
So you can find from about 1782 onwards
local revivals such as at Hampden-Sydney College
in Virginia, places like that.
Now, in 1794, a godly New England pastor,
Isaac Bacchus, addressed a general letter to the
ministers of every Christian denomination in the United
States.
They knew their backs were to the wall.
It seemed as if the churches were about
to be lost completely, dying out because the
young people were alienated from their elders.
He urged them to set aside one day
a month to pray for revival.
They didn't call it the Union of Prayer.
The American term was the Concert of Prayer—in
other words, to pray concertedly.
The Presbyterian Synods of New York, New Jersey,
and Pennsylvania adopted this for all their churches.
The Congregational Associations likewise, the Baptist Associations also.
Bishop Asbury accepted it for all the Methodists,
and soon there was a network of prayer
meetings all over the United States.
Now conditions were bad, but in 1797 revival
broke out in the Connecticut Valley.
Mark you, it didn't begin on the frontier.
If you read the chief debunker of revivals,
Professor McLaughlin of Brown University, he says the
second great awakening began in the camp meetings
of Kentucky and Tennessee.
That is not so.
They began in the old, settled part of
the country and spread to the frontier last.
But the movement was without extravagance throughout the
whole of New England and the Middle Atlantic
states.
In church after church, you find for instance
a church of 200 members suddenly became a
church of 800 members.
In New Jersey they adopted a new principle.
They founded what they called Aaron and Hur
societies.
You remember the story of how Israel fought
Amalek?
While Moses held his hands, Israel prevailed.
But when he got tired, the tide went
against Israel, so Aaron and Hur came and
propped up his hands in prayer.
The Presbyterian ministers in Elizabethtown and other towns
in New Jersey asked the praying members of
their congregation to pray for them while they
preached.
And they preached with great power.
Now that revival swept the whole of the
eastern seaboard.
It was rather remarkable.
In each report there would be little references.
These meetings were conducted without ranting or without
extravagance of any kind.
Why did they say that?
Because in the wake of the first Great
Awakening there was extravagance.
I think I mentioned to you a man
called James Davenport, who thrived on exhibitionism.
He repented afterwards, but not until after damage
was done.
That revival turned the tide in the United
States.
But it went over the Alleghenies.
Now it's interesting, there was a Scotch-Irish
Presbyterian minister called James McGrady, whose chief claim
to fame was that he was so ugly
he attracted attention.
Nowadays you have to be good-looking to
be a Presbyterian minister, but in those days
people would stop in the street and say,
did you see that face?
What does he do?
They said, he's a preacher.
They reacted.
They said, then he really must have something
to say with the handicap of a face
like that.
Now he followed the immigrants over the Cumberland
Gap into the Kentucky settlements.
At that time there were practically no towns
in Kentucky, just clearings.
They were settling the land.
That was the West at that time.
He settled in Logan County.
He was pastor of three little box-like
churches.
He said the winter of 1799-1800 was,
for the most part, weeping and mourning with
the people of God.
It was like Sodom and Gomorrah.
He was such a man of prayer, not
only did he adopt what was called the
concert of prayer, one day a month to
pray for an awakening, but he asked his
Presbyterian members to pray for their pastor at
sunset on Saturday and at sunrise on Sunday
morning for half an hour.
I wondered why sunset and sunrise.
Those people didn't have watches or clocks.
They went by the sun.
So when the sun went down, pray for
your pastor Saturday evening, and when the sun
comes up on Sunday morning, pray for your
pastor.
Now you know, among Reformed people, they have
a quarterly communion.
You can judge McGrady's amazement when, in July
of 1800, 11,000 came to communion.
They came in their wagons, Conestoga wagons and
so forth, camped for days.
Thus began the great camp-meeting movement on
the frontier.
I read somewhere not so long ago that
the American addiction to camping in the summer
grew from those great religious meetings, but that's
not so.
Before the Revival, the Kentuckians and the Tennesseans
and others got together camping in what we
would call today woodstocks, huge rallies for drunkenness
and gambling and fighting and fornication.
But these meetings increased.
The military, of course, were interested.
This was the frontier, and they discovered sometimes
that 25,000 would come.
McGrady was very broad-minded.
He hollered as loudly as he could holler,
any preacher, any kind who loves the Lord
Jesus, come and help me.
So Baptists and Methodists and members of other
denominations would come along, and sometimes 12 preachers
would be preaching to 1,000 each in
a congregation of 12,000.
But in these meetings there were extravagances unlike
the Eastern Seaboard.
There were people, for instance, who screamed sometimes
under conviction.
Some who fainted, fell down.
That was called prostration.
There were people who trembled under conviction of
sin.
Sometimes the trembling got out of control and
became jerking.
Now, I've been interested in these phenomena, and
I remember I was preaching in Riga, Soviet
Latvia.
While I was conducting the meeting, a woman
in the congregation suddenly cried out and collapsed.
The pastor was interpreting for me.
I couldn't speak Latvian.
So he left me, and he and the
woman's husband and two deacons of the church
carried the woman out.
He came back still very upset.
He said, I don't know what this is
about.
He said, she's one of the pillars of
the church.
She's our superintendent of the Sunday school.
And she was crying about her sins.
Well, I thought of sin.
Well, I didn't do it.
Then I thought, what did I say?
Then I remembered I had just been saying
something about we can't cover secret sin up
forever.
That's when she collapsed.
We discovered next day what it was.
She and her husband had never been married
legally, and Latvia being such a small country,
it was embarrassing for them to get married
after they were already prominent in the church.
They had even thought of going off for
a vacation to Sweden and getting married there.
But you know, with a family of children,
all the rest of it just grew.
But she was under subconscious conviction and cried
out like that.
Now, you can understand when people collapse like
that.
For instance, I remember World War II, a
soldier collapsing at a court-martial.
He thought he was going to be shot.
He couldn't take it anymore.
He couldn't face it.
On the other hand, I've seen a schoolboy
tremble when he thought he was going to
be expelled.
As far as dancing for joy is concerned,
have you ever seen some women folk at
one of these giveaway programs on television?
Now, I could understand these things, but one
thing I couldn't understand was the report of
barking.
I mean, why would anyone bark?
So I decided to research this a called
Primitive Traits in Religious Revivals, in which he
said during the Kentucky Revival, there was jerking
and trembling and weeping and dancing for joy.
And then he said rather mildly, there was
some barking, but it was not too common.
Now, I looked for a footnote.
You see, when you write history, you document
it.
I would look to see, but he didn't
give a footnote.
He didn't say this happened at Cane Ridge
or this happened at Hogs Hollow or some
such place.
That was about a hundred years after the
Revival.
He wrote the book in the 1900s.
Then in 1940, Professor Alice Tyler, University of
Minnesota, wrote a book called Freedom's Ferment, in
which she said there was barking on the
frontier and it was altogether too common.
I don't know where she got that.
I looked for a footnote that said C.
F.
M.
Davenport, but he didn't say that.
Then I saw another footnote, I should say
another book, by a man called Francis Xavier
Curran.
Not a Southern Baptist, you could tell by
the name.
And he, I've forgotten the title of the
book, but he said there was barking on
the frontier and it was altogether disgraceful.
So I thought, now where did he get
that?
I looked for a footnote that said C.
Davenport and Tyler, and they didn't say that.
So what does an historian do?
I thought, I must read something written at
the time.
You go back to the source.
I thought, now, David Benedict, he wrote the
history of the Baptists.
He had a huge compendium of information about
Baptists up to about 1840.
He knew how many Baptists there were in
Islington and London, how many Baptists there were
in Hogs Hollow and Tennessee.
He wrote to them all, said, give me
your statistics, tell me when your church was
founded, what association you belong to, and so
forth.
I could hardly wait.
I turned to the Revival in Kentucky, and
sure enough, the Baptists did not bark.
But it said the Presbyterians did.
I thought, let's not be nasty to the
Presbyterians.
So I got David Rice's history of Presbyterianism
in Kentucky, no mention of barking.
There was mention of criticism of some of
the extravagances, but no mention of barking.
So I went around my various friends, where
did this come from?
One said, well, there was a man called
Richard McNamara.
I thought, yes, I have heard that name.
He was a Presbyterian minister, friend of Barton
Stone, who was one of the founders of
the Disciples of Christ.
But Richard McNamara joined a rather fanatical group
called the Shakers.
The Shakers died out because one of their
doctrines was deadly.
They didn't believe in sex.
That's why they died out, I suppose.
Well, I shouldn't say they died out, because
someone corrected me the other day.
There were four old ladies in Massachusetts, over
90 years of age, sitting on a fortune.
They had been heard of the whole of
the Shaker empire, as it were.
Richard McNamara joined them, and I got his
book, and sure enough, said in his book,
some Kentucky men fancied themselves as dogs and
barked.
But it didn't say where.
Barton Stone, on the other hand, a Presbyterian
minister at the time, said there was no
barking.
The nearest thing to barking was people who
sobbed.
You know the way when a child is
spanked?
Like that.
When people, for instance, sobbed and cried and
made grunting noises, that was the nearest thing
to barking.
The whole legend, you've heard the American legend
of barking up a tree, came from an
old Presbyterian minister, weeping before the Lord because
of his shortcomings, and because he was over
84, he was holding on to a little
tree for support, and gave somebody a chance
to start a tall tale.
I have read it in dissertations.
I saw in Northern Baptist Seminary a dissertation
written by a student which said, during the
Kentucky Revival, Christians went out like flocks of
spaniels and barked until they grew hoarse.
You see, British humor is understatement.
American humor is always exaggeration.
Tall tales.
The same can be said of Canadians, too.
They tell tall tales.
And this became one of the tales of
the frontier.
I raised this question at Capital University in
Ohio before 300 historians.
They jumped on me.
They said, oh, you're spoiling good classroom fun.
In other words, what they meant was church
history is rather a dry subject to teach.
So you have to throw in a few
jokes now and again, and you're spoiling it
for us.
Well, it's just a legend.
But, you know, the world loves those sort
of stories.
If someone were to make a documentary for
television on religion in America, you can be
sure they'd work in snake handlers.
Now, how many people here in this audience
have handled snakes as a religious exercise?
It's rare.
But they always work it in.
It's a way of knocking down the Christian
faith.
They can't resist it.
And that's how some of these stories...
But Kentucky was completely changed.
A very famous theologian, George Baxter, went up
from Philadelphia and visited Kentucky.
He said he'd never come across such a
moral place in the world.
Now, you say, what were these meetings like?
The revival spread from Kentucky through Tennessee down
to the Carolinas first, before it touched Virginia.
It broke out in North Carolina, South Carolina,
and often began through Presbyterian quarterly communions.
For instance, near what today is Spartanburg, South
Carolina, there was a Presbyterian church called Old
Waxhaw Presbyterian Church.
And in 1802, they had a communion service
there.
3,500 people came to that.
They came in wagons and carts and some
on foot.
But a lot of scoffers came too.
Some came fortified by strong drink.
And by the way, when you hear about
people being prostrated, someone said to me, well,
is that like at Catherine Kuhlman's meetings?
I said, no, not quite the same.
The people who were prostrated in this revival
were the scoffers, not the seekers.
I went twice to hear Catherine Kuhlman, and
I saw some people go forward praying for
healing, and they collapsed very gently on their
backs.
Nobody seemed to get hurt.
But these people, it was quite different.
They fell forward on their faces as if
the Lord had taken a baseball bat and
hit them with a smart crack in the
back of the head.
Some of them lay there for hours.
It had a very salutary effect on the
ungodly.
They'd go there to break up the meeting,
drinking whiskey out of a bottle, shouting abuse
at the minister leading the service, and so
forth.
Down at Old Waxhaw, for instance, one man
collapsed, and about two o'clock in the
morning, a Presbyterian minister went around to talk
to him.
And he said, Brother, you must pray for
yourself.
You must pray.
The man was still defiant.
He said, I'll be damned if I do.
So he just left him, and there were
too many others to deal with.
But at six o'clock in the morning,
when daybreak came, they saw this fellow creeping
away like a crab, pulling himself along by
the branches of the bracken.
It was a frightening experience.
Now, this revival completely changed life in the
United States, especially on the frontier.
You remember I mentioned that there's a lot
of ungodliness in the colleges?
At Williams College, Massachusetts, a group of six
students met in a maple grove one August
to pray.
I wondered why they chose a maple grove.
Maples are very leafy trees, so maybe it
hid them from the other students.
A thunderstorm threatened, so they raced to a
haystack to continue their prayer meeting.
And underneath the haystack, they promised God they'd
go anywhere in the world he would send
them.
You say, well, that happens at camp meetings
every summer.
In those days, there were no Protestant missionary
societies to take them.
When these young men finished their studies at
Andover, they went down to Boston and offered
their services to their denomination.
Some ministers said, who do they think they
are?
Why should we send them overseas?
No one said, we don't have the money
to do it anyway.
But one man said, if God has spoken
to these young men, we should help them.
They formed a committee called the American Board
of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, the first of
the American missionary societies.
That's how the whole missionary movement began.
I think there are 35,000 North American
missionaries on the field today.
That movement stemmed from that revival.
Remember I mentioned the revival in Wales?
There was a little Welsh girl called Mary
Jones, a servant girl, 15 years of age,
walked barefoot 30 miles to buy a Bible.
She had saved her pennies.
She got there, and they were all sold.
She came back in tears.
Thomas Charles, her pastor, was upset.
He went by coach up to London, went
around the various committees to see if they
wouldn't print Bibles.
But no one would do it, so they
formed a special committee to do it, and
they called it the British and Foreign Bible
Society, the first of the big Bible societies.
The American Bible Society fell in with that.
Out of that came all the missionary societies.
Out of that came the abolition of the
slave trade.
Out of that came the abolition of the
96-hour week.
People worked 16 hours a day, six days
a week.
Out of that came the abolition of the
use of women in coal mines.
They used women to drag the coal trucks.
A woman would creep on her hands and
knees with a leather belt around her waist
with an iron chain fastened at the navel
and passed between her legs.
She dragged it like a burden.
But in Britain they brought in legislation into
Parliament forbidding that.
Also forbade the use of children under six
years of age working in factories.
All these benefits came out of that.
They used to exhibit insane people in cages.
You've heard people say the place was like
Bedlam.
Bedlam was a mental hospital in London for
the sick people of the wealthy.
But if anyone was mentally afflicted among the
poor, they simply sold them to a circus.
And he was exhibited in a cage and
people threw rotten vegetables at him to throw
him into a rage.
That was abolished because of the revival.
Out of it came so much good, it's
incalculable.
And this was all felt in the Frontier
Society and the Agricultural Society of the United
States as well.
There's much more I can say about it,
but this came out of a concert of
prayer.
What happens when we pray?
The Lord says, no, I can use these
people.
And he calls them to do what he
wants them to do.
Whether to go into Parliament like Wilberforce and
fight the slave trade, or become an evangelist
or a missionary like William Carey to India.
That's what happens in times of revival.
Why do I tell you this?
Because it's our greatest need today.
Not more plans, not more committees, not more
organizations, but more prayer.