Some people have already been talking to me
about how the facts of what God has
done has warmed their hearts.
Well, I'm not surprised at this.
It may be a surprise to you, but
of course I've seen this sort of thing
happen in other parts of the world and
elsewhere around this country.
But the reason is that scripture tells us,
Psalm 78, we must tell our children's children
what the Lord has done, that they might
set their hope in God and forget not
his commandments.
It's commanded to do.
Yet so few people know anything about what
God has done for them in their national
life, in their city life, and the like.
Now, we're going to continue our studies.
There may be some folk here who are
here for the first time, who were not
here last night, so I ought to explain
that last night we considered the great awakening
of 1792 onward that followed the greatest national
backsliding and moral decline in the history of
the country.
It completely turned the tide.
Not only so, but it achieved a lot
of social reform, and it started the Bible
societies, the missionary societies, and the like.
Now, at Asbury College the other day, a
minister who was studying for a higher degree
said to me, well, doesn't the tide have
to go out first before it can start
coming in?
I said, that's only if you assume that
revival is just a tide that goes out
and in cyclically.
No, the fact is that following 1792 there
was revival for 30 years or more, and
then in 1830 there came another outpouring of
the Holy Spirit.
If you look at it from the human
point of view, you could say there were
waves of revival, another great wave came in,
but from the point of view of the
outpouring of the Holy Spirit, believers were convinced
that the Holy Spirit had been outpoured upon
the country from one end of the country
to the other in the year 1830.
So it teaches us a lesson.
We don't have to have the tide out
for God to bless us with an outpouring
of his Holy Spirit.
We can have blessing upon blessing.
When the tide is out, our hearts get
desperate and we cry for blessing, and then
we see a tremendous change.
But we can't make it just operate like
a tide.
We're dealing with a person, God, the Holy
Spirit, and he is sovereign.
So let me give you some of the
facts of this great movement.
It seemed almost too good to be true
that another awakening should come so suddenly about
the year 1830.
It was without extravagance wherever it was reported.
The revival began in Boston, New York, and
other cities in early summer or late spring
of 1830, and it swept the country from
coast to frontier.
I was going to say from coast to
coast.
Of course, in 1830, California wasn't settled, other
than a few Spanish missions.
Now this is most important that we understand
how it began.
First of all, let me, as a good
Baptist, tease the Congregationalists for a little while.
The Congregationalists and the Presbyterians got together and
they said, let's not compete.
We're much the same sort of denomination.
One has a Presbyterial sort of government, the
other a Congregational government.
So let's divide the country equally.
So they divided the country right down the
middle, by the Hudson River.
New Englanders still think that the Hudson River
is the middle of the country.
I was studying at Harvard University at the
chaplain school during World War II, and what
we might call a back bay dowager said
to the wife of one of the chaplains,
where do you come from, my dear?
She said, I'm from Idaho.
Oh, dear, should we call that Ohio?
You know, when you go back to the
eastern states, they're quite surprised to find that
Californians talk about going east to Colorado.
To a New Englander, going across the Hudson
is going west.
Ohio is west, and of course California is
very far away indeed.
So the Congregationalists, who were very strong in
New England, said to the Presbyterians, you will
build no Presbyterian churches in New England, and
we'll build no Congregational churches in the other
half of the country.
And this became what they called the Plan
of Union.
However, they did share the same missionary societies.
Home Missions, for instance.
They were both helping the American Board of
Commissioners for Foreign Missions, and they were both
helping in an organization called the American Home
Missionary Society.
It was a home mission for both the
Presbyterians and the Congregations.
The Congregations in New England, the Presbyterians in
the other half of the country.
Now, I found to my great surprise, this
was a total surprise to me, I thought
I knew a great deal about the history
of revival in the United States.
When I came across a Presbyterian Congregational report,
with feelings of reverential gratitude, it becomes us
to make mention of the blessings of the
Most High poured out upon the churches of
our country.
From one end of the land to the
other, points of light are appearing amid the
darkness.
In some districts, these luminous points are becoming
so numerous as to blend their brightness so
that the pathways of the Spirit may be
distinctly traced by the glory which attends its
visitation.
I looked at the date again, 1830.
This was about the month of June this
report appeared.
But I never heard of the 1830 revival.
So I began to study, and I got
the facts.
By the middle of 1830, the awakening had
become general.
The Presbyterians and Congregations were receiving reports of
revival from every quarter, east, west, north, and
south.
Thirty Presbyteries west of the Hudson rejoiced in
torrents of blessing.
The General Associations of Connecticut and Massachusetts reported
overcrowded churches, while the General Conventions of Vermont
and New Hampshire told of great numbers turning
to the Lord and extensive revivals of religion.
In Boston, the metropolis of New England, it
was said, God is raining down righteousness upon
the people.
The evangelical churches—and Boston, that meant Park Street
and Old South Church, the others had become
Unitarian— were instructing 600 inquirers, who soon became
1,500 converts.
It's an interesting thing in times of revival,
you don't have a falling away or a
losing of numbers between people professing and people
being added to the church.
In evangelistic campaigns, perhaps you may have a
wonderful evangelistic campaign, 3,000 so many professed
their side for Christ.
But about a year later, when you go
around the church, you find maybe only 2
,227 actually stayed with it.
But in times of revival, it's the very
opposite.
The number who make professions and the number
who join the church is in the opposite
relationship.
Far more join the churches than actually make
professions outwardly at first.
It was noticed that the Methodists and Baptists
were united with their congregational and Presbyterian colleagues
in the work, and there was utter harmony.
In these great outpourings of the Holy Spirit,
at first there is utter harmony.
It seems as if those who are lukewarm
about revival and those who are not evangelical
in heart are dumbfounded by what they see,
and they don't start to criticize until some
short time afterwards.
This is also true of great evangelists who
rise in times of revival.
You'll agree with me, those of you who
are old enough to remember, that Billy Graham
had a kind of honeymoon period of about
a year or two years when nobody said
anything against him at all.
Everyone was praising Billy Graham for his work,
but then they began to find fault from
right and from the left.
Now the reports from Boston announced there was
a cloud of mercy resting on the city.
Several churches were engaged in days of fasting
and prayer.
In New York, souls were being added daily
to almost all the churches—Baptists, Dutch Reformed, Methodists,
Presbyterian, and some Episcopal congregations.
I mention some Episcopal congregations because you know
the Episcopal church was almost wiped out by
the Revolution.
You see, the Episcopal church supported the mother
country, and their clergy were compelled by ecclesiastical
law to pray for the king.
And to pray for George III in the
wake of the American Revolution was not at
all popular until they began to change things,
and then they began to catch up.
The revival swept Maine, Vermont.
I find one of the most thorough awakens
began in Charlestown, Massachusetts, just across the river
from Boston, and it began with prayer meetings
for ministers.
For those of you who know something about
this, I would say a la guesswind, if
you know what I mean by that.
Pastors getting together to pray for reviving in
their own congregations and their own hearts.
One interesting thing was that this revival spread
to Cape Cod and was most effective in
a town called Hyannis, which of course we
know as the home of the Kennedy family
today.
It began in Hyannis among the children, and
more than 200 adults were converted in this
children's revival.
Now for something else that's significant, the first
intimation of a growing seriousness in the city
of New York was not found in great
congregations, nor in the ordinary assemblies of the
Saints, but in little praying circles that were
discovered multiplying, and the movement was spontaneous and
entirely interdenominational.
Great awakenings swept Long Island.
I found mentioned Southampton, Westhampton, Oyster Ponds.
Up the Hudson River all the little towns
were touched.
Along the Mohawk westward, all those little cities,
the revival was intense.
There was a most extraordinary movement in Rochester.
Now the awakening in New York State was
already considered by the summer a glorious work.
The reports to summarize them—crowded churches, powerful intercession,
convicting preaching, immediate conversions, encouraging additions in New
York, Albany, Troy, Utica, Rochester, and a score
of other towns.
I told you that in New York the
Presbyterians were dominant.
The congregation was given way to them in
return for a free hand in New England.
But in first, second, third, and fourth Presbyterian
churches in Albany, the capital city of New
York, the revival sweeping the congregations and many,
many conversions.
I got the pastors' names—Campbell, Sprague, Lockhead, and
Kirk.
Sprague became such an enthusiast for revival, he
wrote a great volume on revival.
You'll find it's a standard work.
You may find it in some old bookshops
these days.
Now here's something that's most important.
I found from the Rochester newspapers that in
the last week of 1830 there was unabated
interest in things spiritual, and a large proportion
of the recent converts were among the citizens
of First Intelligence and High Station.
Now you may wonder why I single out
Rochester.
The evangelist of the Rochester revival was Charles
Grandison Finney, and that's a name that's well
known in evangelical circles today.
Charles Finney was a converted lawyer.
He was used to present in truth in
a logical way.
He believed in persuading people, but he also
believed that the word would convict them.
He developed a quarrel with his own denomination.
He was a Presbyterian.
The Presbyterians and many of the Congregationalists of
that time believed in winning people to Christ.
But if after a meeting someone came up
and said, I'm in great distress of soul,
I'm a lost sinner, can you help me?
They would say, keep on praying brother, and
perhaps God will extend his mercy to you.
Maybe you will find your name among the
elect, and keep in touch with me.
I'll pray for you, and you keep in
touch with me.
Maybe Francis Samuel J.
Mills, whom I mentioned last night, took him
three years to receive the assurance of salvation.
Finney said, this is utterly wrong.
God commands men to repent.
It's a repentance now.
And he preached for immediate decision.
And in this matter, of course, I would
heartily endorse what he said.
Rochester was the first big town that Finney
had a real campaign in.
He had preached in, if you read his
autobiography, in tiny little towns like Evans Mills,
population 250, that sort of thing.
Also he held meetings for individual pastors in
Philadelphia, where he stirred up some of the
hyper-Calvinistic brethren by his emphasis.
But of the 10,000 inhabitants of Rochester,
1,000 were converted, one in ten, and
450 of them joined the Presbyterian churches.
According to all the reports, this lessened crime
so much in Rochester that prosecutions dropped one
third while the population traveled.
Now in the San Jose prayer conference we
had last fall, Armand Guestwine, Bill Bright, myself
and others, one man mentioned that in Finney's
Rochester campaign there were 100,000 people converted.
I said to him as discreetly as I
could afterwards, that poses a problem for me.
How could you have 100,000 converts in
a town of 10,000?
Oh, excuse me, he said a quarter of
a million.
I said, how could you have a quarter
of a million converts in a town of
10,000?
Well, he said, that is difficult.
I never thought of that.
So he went and looked it up, he
came back and apologized.
He said, I got the wrong figure.
There were 100,000 converts.
But I said, even that poses a problem.
In a town of 10,000, before railroads,
when you could only reach the town by
horse and buggy, or on horseback, or walking,
or by canal, how could there be 100
,000 converts in a town of 10,000?
Yet I have seen dozens of times that
in Finney's great revival in Rochester there were
100,000 conversions.
It's a case of misrepresenting or misreading facts.
Now, Finney says in his autobiography, the very
fame of the work at Rochester was an
efficient instrument in the hands of the Spirit
of God in promoting the greatest revival of
religion that this country had until then ever
witnessed.
In other words, Finney, in a nice way,
was saying he gave God the praise that,
thanks to the Rochester revival, it resulted in
a nationwide revival of 100,000 converts.
Then, in his lectures on the revival of
religion, he quotes Lyman Beecher, the great congregational
divine, saying of this revival, that was the
greatest work of God and the greatest revival
of religion the world has ever seen in
so short a time.
100,000 were reported as having connected themselves
with churches as a result of that great
revival.
This is unparalleled in the history of the
Church and of the progress of religion.
So you see, putting those things together, Finney
doesn't say there were 100,000 converted in
Rochester.
He says there were 100,000 converted as
a result of the Rochester campaign.
But I discover this isn't true.
Finney's campaign ran from the last week of
September right into about March of 1831.
And the revival began at least six months
before that.
I was just describing it to you.
What can you make of that?
Now, I'm not taking an isolated case.
There's a book you'll find in the Fuller
Bookshelves.
Maybe your pastor got a copy of it.
The German title is Geschichte der Evangelisation.
It's by Professor Paulus Scharf of Frankfurt.
It's been translated by Helga Henry, wife of
Dr. Carl Henry, and it's called The History
of Evangelism.
I think it was financed by Billy Graham.
In the German, he says, Der kritische Dialoge,
Dr. Lyman Beecher, Wurzelt, Finneys, Wirken, Alste, Grusten,
Religius, Erwecken.
If you understand all that, he's saying it
was the greatest religious revival in so short
a space of time.
And 100,000 people were converted, so even
the Germans have picked this up.
Whereas actually, so far as I can tell,
there was a general outpouring of the Holy
Spirit.
In the first year, there were 100,000
conversions, and towards the end of that first
year, Finney won 1,000 to the Lord.
Now this is worth keeping in mind, because
most people think that Charles Finney was the
Billy Graham of his day.
I find he was more a John Stott
or Raymond Ortlund of his day.
He was a pastoral evangelist.
In fact, in 1832, Mrs. Finney said she
was tired of all that travel, and he
settled down and took a pastorate in New
York, the Broadway Tabernacle.
Did a great work in New York.
And Finney never was what Moody was, a
campaigner for all these churches together.
You say, well then, how do you account
for his great influence?
He became president of Oberlin College in Ohio.
And when he was there, he wrote lectures
on revivals of religion.
One of the best textbooks on such movements
that I know.
The tactics are splendid.
I don't know that I agree with one
point of his strategy.
He says revival is nothing more than the
right use of the appropriate means.
Revival is something for man to do.
Jonathan Edwards, on the other hand, said of
the revival at Northampton, Massachusetts, it is the
work of God.
Both are true.
In these great movements of the Spirit, man
has something to do.
But he doesn't control the power, and he
doesn't initiate the movement.
This is worth asking questions about, because the
mood of our country today is, give us
the plan, give us the blueprint, show us
how to do it, and we'll whop up
a revival of our own.
Whereas these movements all came about through intense
prayer and beseeching God to do it.
I hope that no one will think I
was denigrating in any way the work of
Charles Finney.
You see, he was such a logical preacher,
and he did such a good work in
Rochester, that he became an authority in this
field of evangelism.
And what he said of revival, I would
say of evangelism.
Evangelism is nothing more than the right use
of the appropriate means.
I still remember 1949, being in Billy Graham's
company, when Dawson Troughton said to Billy, Now
Billy, the Lord is really blessing you.
But you've got to treat the converts a
lot differently than Billy Sunday did.
Billy Sunday used to preach in these tabernacles
with a sawdust trail, and to be converted,
you just simply went up and shook Billy
Sunday by the hand.
In some cases, decision cards were used, but
there was no real follow-up.
And it was Dawson Troughton that sold Billy
Graham on the idea of scripture memorization as
a means of confirming people in the faith.
That's what you call the right use of
the appropriate means.
That pertains to evangelism.
But revival, the reviving of God's people, the
awakening of the masses, is the work of
the Holy Spirit.
And we cannot organize that or even schedule
it.
Now, there was a whole series of revivals
in the colleges at this time.
Kenyon College, Ohio Episcopalian Institution, sweeping revival with
50 volunteers for the Episcopal ministry.
Union College, Schenectady, Western Reserve, Jefferson College, another
great awakening in Williams College, Massachusetts.
In Yale, a college revival of great power
brought about 50 conversions at once, began in
the senior class, and spread until the college
administration reported that 100 only of the 350
students were unaffected.
350, yes, that was the student population of
Yale in those days.
They were small colleges.
At Brown University, that's a Baptist institution in
Rhode Island, it was noted that 70 of
the student enrollment of 130 had been pious
before the revival.
30 had become pious in the revival, and
the hope was expressed that the other 30
would experience a change of heart and become
pious.
The word pious was a word they used,
I suppose, for finding the Lord.
We have our expressions.
Well, I'll say no more about the college
revivals, but here's an interesting thing.
Remember I described last night some of the
extravagant behavior on the frontier, where people fainted
and trembled, where they jerked, where they sobbed
and wept, and when they were delivered where
they danced for joy?
I was curious to know what this next
revival would do in Kentucky, where all these
things had happened.
The revival in 1830 began in a town
called Glasgow.
It's just about 90 miles south of Louisville.
For instance, 1500 new converts joined the Baptist
church there.
No extravagances, nor any mentioned anywhere in Kentucky
or Tennessee.
They said in the trans-Appalachian country there
is a strange stillness, in which some sinners
wept and some trembled under conviction of sin.
But they were quite convinced it was an
outpouring of the Holy Spirit.
So some of these extravagances are not at
all indispensable to the work.
By the way, I'm going to digress to
tell you of something interesting.
When I took a course in Chicago under
William Warren Sweet, who was Professor of American
Church History at the University of Chicago, he
told of the frontier awakens in Kentucky, and
he mentioned, besides what I've described to you,
the barking.
I wonder if anyone here has ever heard
of the barking exercise in the revival?
Yes, some.
But in every theological seminary you hear about
this because it's part of American Church History.
William Warren Sweet told the class, of which
I was a member, that those people were
illiterate.
They meant well, but they had strange ideas.
They would get down on their hands and
knees at a tree, and they'd bark at
the tree like dogs keeping an apostle up
a tree.
They figured they had the devil up the
tree, and they wanted to keep him up
there while the preacher was preaching.
And of course, the students thought this was
excruciatingly funny, and they laughed so heartily.
Not many of these students were at all
evangelical, and they put it down like religion
on the frontier type of thing.
Now that intrigued me, because these other symptoms
I had seen in secular life.
For instance, I have seen a schoolboy threatened
with expulsion.
Knowing when he went home his father would
give him a thrashing, he just trembled.
Have you ever seen a person tremble?
Well, that's psychologically explained.
I've seen a soldier at a court-martial
faint.
He thought he was going to be shot,
and he fainted, passed out.
That happens in courtrooms sometimes when the person
is convicted, he just goes into a dead
faint.
The dancing for joy.
Have you ever seen some of these women
on these giveaway programs when they win a...
Well, these things you can explain.
But barking.
I've never seen anyone bark on one of
these giveaway shows.
I've never seen a schoolboy bark when the
headmaster threatened to expel him.
I've never seen a soldier bark at the
colonel.
Never.
Seemed to be out of place.
So I decided to investigate this.
I got a book called Primitive Traits in
Religious Revivals by a man called Davenport.
And he said, mentioning the trembling and the
jerking and the weeping and so forth, he
said there was also barking on the frontier,
but it was not too common.
I thought, now how did he know?
He wrote a hundred years afterwards.
I looked for footnotes.
No footnotes.
Forty years after that, 140 years after the
movement, Professor Alice Phelp Tyler of the 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.
Whom did she cite?
Davenport.
Whom did he cite?
Nobody.
Then I got a book by a Jesuit
scholar, Francis Xavier Curran, and he said there
was barking on the frontier, it was altogether
disgraceful.
Who does he cite?
Tyler and Davenport.
You must concede they read each other's books.
So I thought, well, I've got to go
back and find out the whole secret of
historical research is to go back to the
original sources.
I found David Benedict, the great Baptist historian
of New England.
David Benedict was in touch with all the
Baptists.
His history of the Baptists is like an
encyclopedia.
He could tell you how many Baptist members
there were in some tiny village in Kentucky
and so forth.
He wrote to them all.
They wrote to him, and he compiled his
encyclopedia of the Baptists.
But he said the Baptists did not bark,
but the Presbyterians did.
So I thought, now how did he know
what the Presbyterians did?
So I got Presbyterian documents and I couldn't
find any record of this except for one
case.
Richard McNamara, a Presbyterian minister who became fanatical
and joined the Shakers.
You've heard of the Shakers?
They died out.
They didn't believe in sex, so you understand
why they died out.
They believed in universal celibacy, and so they
died out.
But McNamara said that some Kentucky men fancied
themselves as dogs and barked.
But now, he didn't say where it happened.
He didn't say he heard it.
He didn't say he saw it.
He didn't mention any place.
It's hearsay.
But Barton Stone, one of the founders of
the Disciples of Christ, a Presbyterian minister, said
there was no barking on the frontier.
He lived there.
He was in all these great camp meetings.
And Cossett, who wrote the history of the
Cumberland Presbyterian Church, said there was no barking
on the frontier.
They said the story was circulated by Unitarians
to discredit the Revival.
So where did the story come from?
According to Barton Stone, an aged Presbyterian minister
in his eighties was deeply convicted of the
Lord for his shortcomings as a minister.
He was sobbing and crying, and because he
was so old and nearly fell over, he
held on to a little tree and sighed
and sobbed.
And that was the basis of the report
of the barking.
Now I brought this up at the Conference
on Faith and History at Capital University in
Ohio, before three hundred secular and church historians.
They fell on me like a ton of
bricks.
They said, or you're spoiling good classroom fun.
In other words, it's hard to teach history
to some people, so if you want to
lighten the class a little bit, tell them
about the barking.
But it's not true.
Well, the Revival swept Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, North
Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia.
Virginia is a great Baptist state, as you
know.
It reached Richmond in July of 1831.
On the first Sunday, they baptized thirty in
the river—twenty white, ten black.
Two weeks later, they had twelve white and
ten black.
And before many weeks, First Baptist Church received
480 into fellowship, and Second Baptist Church 152.
And this movement spread throughout the South.
It's a very interesting thing.
You find that the blacks were deeply moved,
although they were still in slavery.
You find that the numbers increased.
I can give you a little example of
that.
In 1797, there were 3,700 white Methodists
in South Carolina and only a thousand black.
However, in 1807, there were 14,000 white
and 5,000 black.
1818, 21,000 white, 11,000 black.
1828, 35,000 white, 18,000 black.
But by 1838, there were 24,016 white,
23,498 black.
I wish I could get a black American
to research the history of the work of
God among his own folk.
I've talked to many of them.
One of the troubles is the blacks in
those days didn't have much education and not
many records, but there's quite a story.
Every time a revival swept the country, it
affected the blacks as well as the whites.
Now, I'd better not mention names, but a
very godly Methodist church historian wrote an article
in preparation for Key 73, in which he
said that the churches ought to pull up
their socks.
The title of the article was, Will the
Third Great Awakening Miss the Churches?
And the idea he had was, if we
don't do something as denominations, it'll break out
among the Jesus people or something like that.
It was a good article, but I was
intrigued over his saying, Will the Third Great
Awakening Miss the Churches?
The Third Great Awakening was this awakening began
in 1830, and in case you think of
that as the only one, then there was
the Fourth Great Awakening in 1858, and the
Fifth Great Awakening in 1905.
I wrote to the good professor and asked
him about it.
He never answered my letter.
I got his private address from a phone
book in the library.
I wrote to him again, still didn't get
an answer.
Finally, I wrote an article of criticism of
his article.
I put on it Not Yet Published, and
then he answered me.
He said if it made me any happier,
he would not refer to the Third Great
Awakening, but the Next Great Awakening.
Now, he thought, and maybe some of you
think, well, what's the good of fussing over
a number?
After all, what does it matter whether it's
the Third or whatever?
Let me say this.
Supposing President Ford or some Democratic contender for
the presidency were to say, the armed forces
of the United States have been engaged in
war only two times, and since 1820 we've
never heard a shot fired.
He'd say, well, what about the Civil War?
What about the Spanish-American War?
What about World War I?
What about World War II?
What about the Korean War?
Now, I heard that this good man was
coming to speak in Los Angeles in St.
Paul's Church.
When I got there, I found myself the
only man among two hundred nuns in the
Roman Catholic Church.
The only other men there were the priest
who was chairman and this good Methodist historian.
And he made the same statement.
He said, the tragedy of American life is
that since 1800 or thereabouts, we have had
no Great Awakening.
I wrote to him again and I told
him, did you know that in the Great
Awakening of 1830, which lasted about twelve years,
in the last two years your denomination increased
from 580,098 to 1,171,356.
Could you imagine a denomination doubling in two
years?
A hundred percent increase in two years.
Yet there's no record of the Third Great
Awakening in American Church history books.
None at all.
Now, I must round this out very quickly
for you.
The revival affected all denominations.
Then it broke out in England under an
Irish-American called James Coffey.
We would pronounce that Coffey, C-A-U
-G-H-E-Y.
It broke out in Scotland under William Chalmers
Burns, one of the most remarkable revivals Scotland
ever knew.
It broke out in Wales.
The same revival broke out in Sweden under
George Scott, followed by a great man called
Rosenius, who was a born Swede.
The same revival felt all around the world,
wherever there's an evangelical cause.
Perhaps what will interest you most of all
was that this revival swept Polynesia, especially Hawaii.
At the beginning of the 1830s, the total
membership of the congregational churches in Hawaii was
577.
All around the world, people were praying for
revival.
In 1835, the congregational missionaries were moved to
appeal to Christians in the United States to
pray for a baptism from on high for
the Hawaiian field.
And they promised to pray for the rest
of the world.
Now, at Hilo, on the Big Island of
Hawaii, there was a blind man called Pua
Aiki.
He was called the leader of the praying
ones.
A congregational minister called Titus Cohen was sent
to Hilo.
He was a great man of prayer.
And within two years, the Great Awakening had
begun in Hawaii.
In the first congregational church of Hilo, Titus
Cohen took in one Sunday 1,705 members
who had been on probation for six months.
Before the movement ended, he took into one
church at Hilo 7,557.
As far as his own ministry was concerned,
he won 13,000 for the Lord.
Now you might say, was this one of
these people movements when people all came along
and said, we'd like to become Christians?
Oh, no.
Let me describe Titus Cohen in the work.
He said, the sea of faces, all hushed,
except when sighs and sobs broke out here
and there, was a scene to melt the
heart.
The word fell with power, and sometimes with
a feeling deepened, the vast audience was moved
and swayed like a forest in a mighty
wind.
The word became the fire and hammer of
the Almighty, the spirit quick and powerful.
This movement spread throughout the Hawaiian islands.
After 20 years, 19,679 of the converts
were still in good standing, so that King
Kamehameha granted the country a Bill of Rights
and said, Hawaii is now a Christian country.
And the Congregational Mission, the American board, pulled
out and said, Hawaii is now Christian.
And the Hawaiians took over the evangelization of
Micronesia and other parts of the world.
You say, why is Hawaii not Christian today?
The Hawaiians were dying of Western diseases like
smallpox and German measles and the like.
And to work in the plantations, they began
importing Japanese, Chinese, Filipinos, and others.
Orientals.
Consequently, today, Hawaiians are less than ten percent
of the population of the islands.
All Hawaiians are Christianized.
The Japanese and the Chinese are still largely
Buddhist, but with considerable Christian minorities among them.
I could describe these revivals in other places,
in the Netherlands, Indies, in Armenia, in Assyria,
in South Africa, South India, but I've given
you enough.
This great awakening was another outpouring of the
Holy Spirit, and it came about the same
way as the second one, through prayer, which
brought an intense conviction of sin.
Before we sing another hymn, is there any
question you'd like to ask on this historical
treatment?
Anything I missed or anything I didn't make
clear, just raise your hand on the historical
part.