I was telling a group of ministers today
that one day in New Zealand, a man
came to me and said, you know, Mr.
Rohr, it must be a benefit to your
ministry that people are so disappointed when they
see you first.
I wasn't sure what I should say.
Then he said, I'm sorry, I didn't mean
to put it that way.
I mean that after people have read your
books or heard about you, then they see
you for the first time, they realize that
only God could use you.
So that's the kind of start that I
get in life.
For those who are for the first time
in this series, I should explain that each
evening we follow a certain pattern.
I take the first 15 or 20 minutes
allotted to me to tell someone of God's
wonderful works in this country.
That's a scriptural commandment.
We should tell our children's children what God
has done, that they might set their hope
in God and forget not his commandments.
Then later in the evening, I bring a
message from the word related to this subject
of revival and awakening.
It had been my hope to deal each
evening with a different awakening in the United
States.
But because there are only these weeknights, I'm
not going to be able to cover them
all.
So tonight, instead of dealing with the great
revival of 1830, which lasted about 12 years,
we'll skip that movement and move on to
the one in the mid-century.
Now, I've been asked the question, I was
asked today, why do these revivals not last?
Well, of course they do last.
I remember when I was last preaching in
Wales, I asked the pastor of the Mount
Pleasant Baptist Church in Swansea, how long did
the Welsh revival last here?
Well, said he, we were bringing in extra
chairs for 20 years.
That's fair.
You say, well then why isn't the revival
in Wales today?
All those people who were revived are dead
and gone.
There could scarcely be a convert of the
Welsh revival who's not over 90 years of
age.
I was speaking at a campus crusade summer
staff meeting about college revivals, when a young
student, not converted very long, said, why don't
these college revivals last?
I said, you have a point.
I said, 20 miles across the mountains there
is a place called Forest Home.
In 1947 and in 1949, there were visitations
of the Holy Spirit at that place.
Now, if you were to drive up to
Forest Home and say, where's the revival?
They'd look at you.
Just as if you were to drive to
Asbury College today and say, where's the revival?
They'd say, are you referring to the revival
of 1970?
All those students have gone.
There's still a warm memory among the faculty.
But I said, in one sense the revival
continues.
I said there was a young man, a
Presbyterian minister, deeply moved at Forest Home.
But why didn't he stay with it?
Today he's chairman of World Vision.
He's the director of the presidential prayer breakfasts.
I preached for him a couple of years
ago when he was minister of Fourth Presbyterian
Church.
He's chaplain of the United States Senate.
Richard Halverson.
Well, why didn't it last with him?
It did last.
There's another young fellow revived at Forest Home,
among so many.
He got some idea of reaching students on
Campus for Christ.
He started an organization called Campus Crusade for
Christ.
His name was Bill Bright.
Why didn't it last?
Well, I saw him the other day.
He's still on the ball.
I remember in Forest Home, 1949, a young
evangelist came to talk to me at one
o'clock in the morning about the filling
of the Holy Spirit.
He said he felt a lack in his
life.
He went off into the woods to pray.
He came back again.
He told me he had met with God
in a new way.
Now, why didn't it last?
His name was Billy Graham.
Do you see that these times of spiritual
excitement are the times the Holy Spirit recruits
people for a lifetime?
Human nature being what it is, we need
to be stirred up sometimes.
Otherwise, we never get doing anything.
Well, we'll skip 1830.
And I'm going to deal with the mid
-century, the mid-19th century awaiting, to my
mind, the most wholesome revival that this country
ever experienced.
This is the 125th anniversary this year.
More than a million people were converted and
added to the churches out of a population
of 30 million.
Now, perhaps another million were converted who were
already church members.
When a man who's a member of a
church gets converted, he doesn't resign and join
again, so it doesn't show in the statistics.
But one million outsiders were converted and added
to the churches in 1858.
The Protestant Episcopal Bishop of Ohio, Charles McElwain,
said of the 1858 revival, it is a
work so extensive, so remarkable in its rise
and progress and influence, I have no doubt
whence it cometh, it is the Lord's doing.
You'll find the majority of Christians in the
United States shared that opinion.
But of course, today we live in the
age of debunking.
People love to debunk anything that's held sacred.
I find varied opinions today, expressed by people,
of course, who were not alive at that
time, and who seem to select what facts
please them.
There was a brilliant professor in Harvard called
Perry Miller.
He made no profession of faith.
Someone told me he was an atheist.
Another man said no, he was a seeker.
But he was very objective as an historian.
He wrote an excellent book on the Puritans
that surprised people.
His widow published, after he died, The Life
of the Mind in America, a very sophisticated
book dealing with the development of intellectualism in
this country.
And in that magnum opus, he has a
whole section dealing with the 1858 revival, which
he entitled The Event of the Century.
On the other hand, there's a professor at
Brown University who writes the articles on revivalism
in the Encyclopedia Britannica, an author of a
book called Modern Revivalism, and he called the
revival of 1858 the religious excitement that scarcely
deserved to be called an awakening, a revival
organized by panic-stricken businessmen.
Now, I wrote to him.
I said, D.
L.
Moody died 1899, one of the world's greatest
evangelists.
He was shrewd, he was objective, he was
in touch with the whole Christian world.
He wrote just before he died, I would
like, before I go hence, to see the
whole Church of God quickened as it was
in 1857, and a wave going from Maine
to California that will sweep thousands into the
kingdom of God.
Now, I said, I think it's fair to
deduce from that last prayer of Moody that
in forty years of superb evangelism, he had
seen nothing to equal what he saw during
that revival.
Most historians would say that Moody's greatest year
of evangelism was 1893, when for six months
he had a great campaign at the Chicago
World Exposition.
He brought men from Germany, from Australia, from
all over the world, and a great team
of evangelists presented the gospel there throughout the
whole of that exposition.
But Moody didn't say, I would like, before
I go hence, to see the whole Church
of Christ quickened as it was in 1893.
He said 1857.
That was the revival in which he served
his apprenticeship.
So I think if you examine the opinions
of people who were alive at that time,
there is general agreement that it was the
greatest spiritual revival since the days of the
apostles.
Now you might say, what about the Reformation?
The Reformation was not only a reviving of
spirituality, but a great political movement too, and
chiefly the reform of the Church.
Among evangelicals, those who speak well of the
1858 revival, they tell it in a simple
way.
There was a man called Jeremiah Lanthier who
started a prayer meeting in Manhattan.
He used the upper room of the Dutch
Reformed Church, the corner of Fulton and Williams
Streets, close to Wall Street and Broadway.
They met on a Wednesday, 23 September, out
of a population of a million in New
York and Brooklyn.
Nobody showed up except Jeremiah Lanthier himself, until
at half past twelve he heard a step
on the stairs, and at twenty-five to
one there were six men who prayed turnabout
and then round again until one o'clock.
That was the beginning of the remarkable Fulton
Street prayer meeting.
Now in October there came a bank crash,
probably the most severe in American history except
the bank failures of 1929.
The banking system of the United States collapsed
and every bank in the country was closed
for two months.
Now if you heard there was going to
be a run in the bank, you'd go
and try to get your money out.
But if everyone did it at the same
time, that would cause a panic.
Now we have the Federal Reserve System whereby
savings are guaranteed by the government.
That was designed to prevent this sort of
thing happening.
But on the fourteenth of October, the banking
system of the United States collapsed.
By that time the six had become twenty,
and then the next week forty, and then
on the day all the banks closed, one
hundred men met in prayer.
Dr. McLaughlin, whom I mentioned already, says that
this was the bank panic revival.
The implication was that people lost their money
and got hysterical and started to pray in
prayer meetings.
But I would say a hundred people out
of a million is not a panic.
They grew rather steadily for about four months,
and it wasn't until late in February of
the next year they overflowed the premises.
They filled the upper room and the basement
of the church and overflowed the John Street
Methodist Church.
That was the beginning of a great widespread
multiplication of prayer meetings for businessmen.
Most people trace the widespread revival of 1858
to the Fulton Street prayer meeting.
I decided to do some research on my
own since November last year, and I made
some remarkable discoveries.
First of all, before the American bank panic,
the first touch of revival power was felt
in Hamilton, Ontario, in what was then called
Canada West.
Not affected by the American banking system at
all.
Canadians didn't put their money in American banks.
Nobody lost any money in Hamilton.
But there was such a revival that the
mayor of Hamilton was converted, doctors and lawyers
converted, drunkards and prostitutes converted, the whole town
shaken.
And a series of revivals spread over Canada.
Now, if I were to ask you in
the United States itself, which was the class
of people who would be least affected by
a bank panic, what would you say?
Well, think of it for a moment.
The slaves.
Not one of them had a dime in
a bank.
Not one.
But by October 1857, there were vast movements
of revival in Virginia and the Carolinas, beginning
among the dispossessed, the blacks.
For instance, I read that in Virginia the
churches were too small to hold the crowds,
so they took over the tobacco factories and
warehouses.
The overseers in those places presided over the
meetings.
Hundreds converted.
The second largest church in the world was
the African Church in Richmond, Virginia.
But it was passed that year by a
Baptist church in Beaufort, South Carolina.
The Carolinians call that Beaufort.
It's Beaufort.
That's a single Baptist church that baptized 428
believers, of whom 422 were black.
They baptized 556 people that year, the largest
number of any single Baptist church in the
country.
And it made the Baptist church in Beaufort
the world's largest Baptist church.
At the same time, a remarkable revival broke
out in Charleston, South Carolina, in the Anson
Street Presbyterian Church.
The pastor was the Reverend John Gerardo.
By the way, in that church the black
communicants outnumbered white 5 to 1.
John Gerardo was so concerned about the need
of revival in the country, he called together
what he designated a protracted prayer meeting, not
a protracted preaching service.
He said, we'll pray, we'll do nothing but
pray night after night until God visits us.
One night he was sitting in his chair
leading the meeting, the prayer meeting, when suddenly
it was as if he was struck by
an electric bolt.
This was a rather uncommon experience for Presbyterian
ministers.
He was staggered.
Finally he got up.
He had told them, no preaching until the
Lord visits us.
He got up and said, we will start
preaching tomorrow night.
I believe the Holy Spirit has come in
power.
He announced the hymn, pronounced the benediction, but
nobody moved.
They all sat down again.
They noticed some were sobbing.
It suddenly struck him, the Lord has touched
them too.
He wasn't prepared to preach, but he started
exhorting them in the name of the Lord,
and the power of God fell in that
meeting.
For 15 weeks he was preaching between 1
,500 and 2,000 people in that church.
Converts in large numbers, by the hundreds, white
and black, were converted and went back to
their churches, so that the whole Presbytery, not
only the Presbytery, but the Baptists and the
Methodists in Charleston, all enjoyed this great time
of revival.
By the way, I take it you saw
the program Roots, Alex Haley's production, when they
showed the cruel way that black slaves were
treated and worshipped, they were not exaggerating.
But there were one or two impressions there
that I find were not quite historical.
The impression was given that most plantation owners
denied religion to their black slaves, whereas I
find this isn't true.
Every time a Great Awakening came in the
States, multitudes of black people were converted.
For example, the Methodists were always good at
keeping statistics.
In 1798, there were about seven times as
many white Methodists in South Carolina as black
Methodists.
But by 1838, after a whole generation of
revivals, the numbers were practically equal, about 24
,000 white Methodists and 23,997 black Methodists.
By 1858, there were more blacks who were
Methodists in South Carolina than whites.
And I find that during the 1858 revival,
I've gone over the statistics very carefully, about
100,000 Negro converts were added to the
memberships of the churches.
In the meantime, the prayer meeting in Fulton
Street was going on, but they weren't the
only ones praying.
The synods of western Pennsylvania, eastern Ohio, and
Wheeling, West Virginia—four synods got together in Pittsburgh,
December 1, 1857, for three days of prayer
for revival.
Every church sent its minister and one elder.
Not only so, but the Baptists in New
York set aside one day a month for
all Baptists to gather to pray for revival.
The Methodists, the Congregationalists, all did the same.
And I find that in the fall of
1857, each one of those denominations reporting extraordinary
local revivals.
Now, I'm not using the word revival in
the sense of just holding meetings.
I'm using the word revival in the sense
that Americans use the word real revival, a
visitation of God's Spirit.
For instance, the Baptist Watchmen in Boston and
the Methodist Christian Advocate in New York cited
unusual numbers of revivals breaking out.
And on the 28th of January, 1858, the
Methodist Christian Advocate—now, the Methodists were the largest
denomination in the states at that time.
They said this revival seems to be quite
different to all previous ones.
First of all, few sermons need to be
preached.
Second, the laymen are taking such a part
in it.
Third, seekers come easily.
Then almost all who come are blessed.
The experiences seem to remain clear.
Converts witness boldly, and religion is talked of
all over time.
Family alters strengthened, and seriousness prevailed.
All this happened before the great climax in
New York City at the end of February.
Now, I can tell you, not only of
things like this happening among Methodists and Baptist
congregations, but I was up at Gettysburg Lutheran
Seminary two days ago, and I found that
the same thing was being reported by the
Lutherans.
There is a town close by Frederick called
Middletown.
An extraordinary revival broke out in the Lutheran
church there.
One of the ministers this morning told me,
there is a huge Lutheran church there now.
But they were reporting revivals as far west
as Iowa.
That was very far west in those days.
Now, there were two leading editors in New
York in 1858.
One was a man called James Gordon Bennett,
who had a very skeptical attitude towards religion.
When he heard of these businessmen's prayer meetings,
he began writing little editorials that were sarcastic.
His main rival was Horace Greeley, editor of
the New York Tribune.
Horace Greeley was a man that coined the
phrase, go west, young man.
Everyone has heard of Horace Greeley.
There is a town in Colorado called Greeley,
named after Horace Greeley.
Somebody must have taken his advice and gone
west.
Now, whenever Gordon Bennett began ridiculing the revival,
Horace Greeley decided to support it.
He sent a reporter with horse and buggy
racing around the businessmen's prayer meetings at the
end of February.
In one hour he could only visit twelve.
I suppose he just simply rushed into John
Street, counted the number of men present, rushed
out again and sent his horse to a
gallop and went off to the Plymouth church
and counted the number of men praying there,
and off to the YMCA, and so on.
He counted 6,110 in one hour.
Horace Greeley saw there was news in this.
He put it in his front news page,
and this caused a landslide of interest.
They began filling up not only every church,
but they took over the biggest theaters, Burton's
Theater on Chamber Street in New York.
Five thousand people, packed.
A minister got up in one of these
prayer meetings and said, I was here until
three o'clock yesterday dealing with people who
wished to find Christ as Savior.
I'm sure there must be many more, but
you have to go back to work.
It's hard to get a job these days.
So I would like to announce that my
church will be open from tonight onwards indefinitely
for the preaching of the gospel.
And soon every church in New York was
opened and filled.
You see, every church, even the Roman Catholic
churches were affected, because the Catholics were excited
when their workmates got excited about religion.
They didn't think they should go to a
Protestant service, so they went to their own
church.
The churches sometimes had to send for special
preachers from the monastery in Pennsylvania that belonged
to the Passionist Order.
They'd come and hold preaching services.
Of course, they didn't call for conversions the
way Protestants do, they just called them to
confession.
They had attendances of up to five thousand
in some parish churches.
The hierarchy was not in favor of the
revival, but this is what was happening just
the same.
The leading boxer of that day was a
man called Orville Gardner, better known as Awful
Gardner.
Wonderfully converted, that caused a sensation among certain
people in town.
That revival spread up into New England.
At that time Charles Finney was holding meetings
in Park Street, Boston.
But he says in his autobiography that the
revival that swept the city became, quote, too
general to keep any account at all of
the number of converts.
All over New England the church bells were
ringing several times a day to bring people
to six-thirty morning prayer meetings, twelve noon
prayer meetings, six-thirty evening prayer meetings.
In Newark, New Jersey, a population of only
seventy thousand, but in the first two months
two thousand seven hundred and eighty-five converts
were added to the churches, and the minister
said, most of them heads of families.
It was a usual thing to see a
sign that said, Closed.
We'll reopen at the close of the prayer
meeting.
In sixty smaller towns there were six thousand
converts enrolled in the first two months.
The same sort of revival swept Pennsylvania.
They had a businessmen's prayer meeting.
It didn't start until about the twenty-third
of November.
They met in the Methodist church, but they
never got more than thirty people.
They seemed to have difficulty keeping it going.
But in March they moved to Chestnut Street,
downtown Philadelphia, and took a committee room in
Jane's Theater, a big hall.
Then a flood of interest came.
They filled the downstairs of the theater, then
the next day they took away the partitions,
filled the platform, then they filled the first
gallery, then the second gallery.
One of the leaders was an Episcopal rector
called Dudley King, a godly man.
He had a farm out in the country,
and his gown got caught in a threshing
machine, pulled his arm in and mangled it.
He died.
He told one of his friends, George Duffield,
a Presbyterian minister, Tell the men in Jane's
Hall to stand up for Jesus.
So George Duffield wrote a hymn, Stand up,
stand up for Jesus, ye soldiers of the
cross.
I would love to have heard three thousand
men sing that for the first time.
This prayer meeting began in November, but the
great flood of interest was four months after
the bank panic, and so I don't think
you can say it was caused by businessmen.
Great revival in Pittsburgh, great revival all over
the place.
I know you must be interested in Maryland
and Washington, and I happen to have the
notes I'm making at the present time here,
so I'll just give you one or two
little points.
Before very long there were reporting revivals as
far away as Nashville and New Orleans, Mobile,
Savannah, Augusta, Columbia, South Carolina, and Raleigh, North
Carolina.
It said it was rendered morally fragrant by
the shower of grace.
South of the Mason-Dixon line, the revival
began in December 1857.
Sixty conversions reported in a town called Havre
-de-Grâce.
Then more than a hundred people converted in
the Monroe Circuit in Baltimore.
In 1853 the Methodists in Baltimore numbered 73
,101.
Four years later, 73,622.
That means in four years they increased by
521.
That's .1 percent per year, one-tenth of
one percent a year.
But in 1858 the Baltimore Conferences reported a
gain of 6,587 one year, as compared
to 521 in four years.
They had 13,102 on trial.
When a man got converted in the Methodist
churches in those days, he was put on
probation before he was received into full membership.
The same thing was happening among the Baptists.
In Fredericksburg, Maryland, there was an Episcopal rector
called J.
P.
McGuire.
He kept preaching continuously to the people, not
only his own church, but he stirred up
the Episcopalians in Spotsylvania, Stafford, Essex, Carolina, Culpeper,
and Orange Counties, speaking with biblical authority.
I read the biography of a bishop that
mentioned that once in Carolina, with the Rev.
J.
W.
Cook and John P.
McGuire, about 1,400 people gathered on Sunday,
crowding the church and filling the churchyard.
Great feeling was shown and many tears were
shed and souls were saved.
In Baltimore, in the spring of 1858, following
the New York meetings, they started a daily
prayer meeting, started by the YMCA.
By the end of April they were turning
2,000 away from the prayer meeting.
Revival in all parts of the state.
There was revival in Wilmington, in Delaware.
But what about the District of Columbia?
They had five daily prayer meetings.
The population of Washington at that time was
only 57,000.
But they had five daily prayer meetings starting
at 6.30 in the morning, 10 in
the morning, 5 p.m., and 7 p
.m., with the YMCA and the churches sponsoring
the efforts.
The National Intelligence—that was the biggest Washington daily—described
the meetings as still and solemn.
On the first of April they said editorially,
the religious excitement in the city is unabated.
Five thousand people attending the prayer services in
the Academy of Music Hall.
They also had prayer meetings in the United
States Congress chambers.
And as late as October, the interest was
still evident.
Since I came to Washington, I went down
to Wesley Seminary and got a hold of
the copies of the Methodist Protestant newspaper, in
which they said, there is no doubt there
has been an outpouring of the Holy Spirit
on all the churches of Washington.
So that happened in the nation's capital.
But one of the debunkers, a man called
Russell Francis, wrote a dissertation for the University
of Pennsylvania, and he said Washington appeared forsaken
in the revival.
The Lord wouldn't have anything to do with
the politicians.
Something like that.
But that was just his opinion.
Charles Finney, the great evangelist, stated of the
South that throughout the southern states there was
very little touch of revival.
He said because the people there were so
addicted to their peculiar institution, meaning slavery, there
was no place for the Holy Spirit in
their hearts.
Finney was trained as a lawyer.
Lawyers are supposed to sift evidence.
Finney apparently didn't seem to realize that revival
was sweeping the South from Richmond, Virginia to
Waco in Texas.
Sweeping the whole of the South.
Why did he say that?
He was such an ardent abolitionist, he just
couldn't believe God could bless those people down
there.
The revival went over the Alleghenies, down the
line of the Ohio.
First of all, it went up the Hudson,
down the Mohawk.
The Baptists in the Mohawk cities had so
many candidates for believers' baptism, they couldn't get
them into their churches.
For instance, connected they went down to the
river, cut the big square hole in the
ice, baptized them in the cold water.
And as I've said before, when Baptists do
that, they really are on fire.
In Kalamazoo in Michigan, an Episcopal layman convened
the first businessmen's prayer meeting in the town
hall.
He called upon the Episcopal Rector to read
the scripture and the Methodist minister to lead
in prayer.
Then he said, there are so many people
packing this hall, you won't have a chance
to pray, so would you write your request
in a slip of paper, pass it up
to me, I'll read it, someone will pray
for you.
The purpose of this meeting is prayer.
The first request was, a praying woman asked
the prayers of this company for the conversion
of her husband who is far from God.
Immediately, a blacksmith stood and said, my wife
prays for me, I know I'm far from
God, would somebody help me?
A lawyer stood up and said, I think
it was my wife that wrote that note,
because I'm far from God.
Somebody else stood up, six husbands converted immediately.
In evangelism, the evangelist seeks the sinner.
In these times of revival, the sinners come
running to God.
Chicago had a population of 100,000 at
the time.
It was the boomtown of the United States.
Yet, there are 2,000 men meeting for
prayer in what is now the Loop in
the Metropolitan Hall.
First Baptist Church had prayer meetings at 6
.30 in the morning, 12.00 noon, and
6.30 in the evening, and then they
had all days of prayer.
They said that many people came to Chicago
in business and forgot what they'd come for.
They were so caught up in this movement
of God.
A young shoe salesman went to the superintendent
of a Sunday school on the near north
side of Chicago and said he'd like to
teach Sunday school.
The superintendent said, I'm sorry, young fellow, we've
got 16 teachers and only 12 pupils.
Well, he said, what am I supposed to
do?
He said, we'll put you on the waiting
list, unless you'd like to start a class.
How would I start a class?
He said, get some boys, take them out
for a while, get control of them first,
then bring them here.
So he brought 17 urchins to that place.
And other teachers said, could I take them?
So he went out and got another school.
That was the beginning of the life work
of Dwight Lyman Moody.
That's how Moody got started.
The same revival swept California.
I told you, out of a population of
30 million, there were 1 million converts.
I have the figures.
I'm not quite sure what the last figure
I came up with, because I'm still adding
to it.
1,108,785.
Outsiders added to the major denominations.
That revival swept the country, 1857, 1858, 1859.
I always supposed it died away then, but
to my amazement recently I found that these
sort of revivals were continuing even during the
Civil War.
And what is hardest of all to understand
is, in the Army of Northern Virginia, the
Confederate Army, Robert E.
Lee's command, more than 150,000 Confederate soldiers
were converted in 1862-63.
After the Civil War was ended, revivals broke
out.
For instance, in 1864, the Presbyterians reported revivals
in 72 out of 92 Presbyteries.
Now the effect of this revival was for
40 years.
It lasted until the end of the century.
It jumped the Atlantic and broke out in
Northern Ireland.
My grandfather and grandmother converted the same year,
1859.
In 1959, I was invited by all the
churches of Ireland to come and help celebrate
that movement.
I even preached in St. Patrick's Cathedral in
Dublin.
It still felt 1859-1959.
It jumped the North Channel and broke out
in Scotland.
Out of the 3 million population of Scotland,
300,000 converts, including James Chalmers, the modern
missionary of the South Seas, Mary Schleser, Calabar,
John McNeill, the great evangelist.
The same revival broke out in Wales.
The same revival swept England.
Out of it came the China Inland Mission.
Out of it came the Salvation Army.
The same revival was felt in Australia, all
of 1959.
It didn't break out in South Africa until
1860.
Some American missionaries who belonged to the American
board came from Boston late in 1858, early
1859, and told the South Africans of the
revival in America.
They weren't very impressed.
They said, anything can happen in America.
A lot of people say that about the
States.
Anything can happen over there.
But when they heard that the Church of
Scotland was having revival, they were deeply impressed.
I direct a conference at Oxford University every
summer, and we had a very ardent American
fundamentalist attending, and he told us when he
was up in Scotland, he thought to himself,
I wonder how they worship in these big
churches.
So he went to St. Giles Cathedral.
That's John Knox Kirk.
The true Presbyterians won't call it the cathedral,
but most people call it St. Giles Cathedral.
He said the service was very formal, but
the preacher preached such an evangelical message the
American couldn't help but he shouted, Praise the
Lord!
A Scottish elder appeared at his shoulder, tapped
him on the shoulder and said, well don't
praise the Lord in this church.
But the Church of Scotland in General Assembly
for five years running passed a vote of
confidence, a vote of thanks to Almighty God
for the mighty blessings upon Scotland.
Do you know that the Bishop of London
and the Dean of Westminster and friendly competition
ran evangelistic meetings every Sunday night for five
years in St. Paul's Cathedral and Westminster Abbey
for the upper classes?
Where did the poor go?
They filled all the great theatres, Sadler's Wells,
Covent Garden, the Garrick Theatre, the old Victoria,
packed out every Sunday with people hearing the
gospel.
Spurgeon built his tabernacle during that revival.
There's a book called Spurgeon's Revival Sermons published
that year.
That revival, well I was telling you about
South Africa and I didn't finish what I
was saying.
Three hundred and seventy-four ministers came together
at Worcester, a hundred miles up from Cape
Town to discuss the revival at Easter 1860.
Seven weeks later at Whitsuntide the young people
in the Dutch Reformed Church were having their
youth meeting in their own youth hall.
The leader was a young man called Jan
Christian de Vries.
There was a Fingo girl there, that meant
a black girl who spoke the Xhosa language.
She asked if she might speak.
They gave her permission.
It was a meeting for Europeans.
She spoke so sweetly there was a sense
of the presence of God.
Dead silence.
Then de Vries said he heard what sounded
like an approaching tornado.
He thought the whole building shook.
All those young Dutch people began praying aloud
simultaneously.
There was an elder called Jan Rabbe walking
by.
He peeped in and didn't like this, rushed
up to the parsonage to tell the minister.
He came down with a silk hat and
frock coat, the way they dressed in those
days for Sunday service.
He came in and said to de Vries,
what is going on?
He murmured something about the presence of God.
The minister said, I hold you responsible.
So he lifted his voice and said in
Dutch, Mensa blijst du.
Everyone be quiet.
Nobody took any notice.
He said, I am your minister appointed by
Presbytery.
He was a new minister, just recently inducted.
The Dutch Reformed have a respect for their
dominees, but they didn't even see him.
He went back to de Vries and said,
start a hymn.
The two men started singing in Dutch.
Nobody joined them.
The minister walked out and said, God is
a God of order.
This is nothing but confusion.
He went back and told his wife, we
prayed for revival.
Is this revival?
In the meantime, prayer meetings multiplied like wildfire
over the Wagamakers Valley.
The minister decided he must do something about
it to assert his authority.
So he announced a united prayer meeting Saturday
night in the schoolhouse which seated a thousand.
The place was packed, hundreds standing outside.
He read the scripture, gave a short commentary,
offered prayer, and then making eye contact with
all his congregation, said the meeting is now
open for prayer.
Dead silence.
Then he heard the sound of a rushing
wind, and they were all praying aloud again.
An outsider pushed his way in, touched him
on the shoulder, and said in English, are
you the minister of this congregation?
He said, I am.
He said, be careful what you do.
This is the outpouring of the Spirit.
The name of that minister was Andrew Murray.
I never met Andrew Murray.
I knew his grandsons, but Opa Douglas, who
wrote his biography, told me when Andrew Murray
was a mellow old saint, three times moderate
of the Dutch Reformed Church, famous in the
United States as well as the United Kingdom,
around the world, still famous today by his
books on absolute surrender and so on.
When he was an old man, his friends
used to tease him and say, Dr. Murray,
tell us how you tried to stop the
revival.
And he always smiled.
That revival was felt everywhere in the world
that there was an evangelical cause.
Why couldn't God do something like that again?