As we come together now, we'll turn the
time over to Dr. Orr and ask God's
blessing upon him as he comes again.
Dr. Orr.
The question has been asked me, do we
have the right as a people to take
a promise made by God to the nation
of Israel and apply it to the United
States?
That's a good question.
And my answer is a very simple one,
that the history of our country shows that
when we do this, God honors the promise.
Now, don't misunderstand, I do not believe that
the United States of America stands in the
same relationship to God as the nation of
Israel did under the old covenant.
The nation of Israel was God's peculiar people.
Now, we call this God's own country, but
the Canadians called Canada God's own country, the
Australians call Australia God's own country, the Norwegian
feels the same about Norway, and the New
Zealander feels the same about New Zealand.
But when the people of God in this
country have taken a promise, such as the
one I referred to, and fled it before
God, God honors their prayer.
The promise is very simple.
If my people, called by my name, shall
humble themselves and pray and seek my face
and turn from their wicked ways, then I
will hear from heaven and will forgive their
sin and will heal their land.
I propose to illustrate this from the story
of the most wholesome awakening this country ever
experienced.
Now, by the 1850s, the tide was out
again in the United States.
You may say, why?
There were several reasons.
First of all, people were making money hand
over fist.
The Middle West was being developed, railroads were
being built.
When D.
L.
Moody, as a young man, moved from Boston
to Chicago to make his fortune, he was
able to get 18 percent return on his
investments.
Now, Sears Roebuck charges 18 percent per annum
for delinquent accounts—one and a half percent per
month.
But there isn't any bank today that will
give you 18 percent.
So you see what a boom was going
on in the United States at that time.
And when people are making money easily, they
tend to be pleasure-seeking and God-neglecting.
Second, the country was seriously divided over a
political issue—the issue of slavery.
It was also a moral issue.
But it divided the country politically.
And we mustn't think that it divided the
country north against south.
Churches throughout the country were divided.
I remember reading the records of the Second
Methodist Church in Chicago split over slavery.
Third, a godly New England farmer called William
Miller rediscovered the doctrine of the Second Coming.
He preached so fervently and enlisted so many
interested people that he had a following of
about a million.
It was as widespread as the charismatic movement
today.
He made the mistake of fixing the date
for Christ's coming as 1844.
And when the Lord didn't come on that
date, some people were bitterly disillusioned.
Now there are some legends that the people
who were expecting the Second Coming dressed in
white and waited on the rooftops, but this
is legend.
But the fact is that many people sold
their homes and their businesses or their farms
and then when they tried to buy them
back, the price was up.
That always puzzled me.
You know, if I thought the Lord were
coming tomorrow, I wouldn't even bother about my
mortgage with Great Western Loan and Savings.
I always call it Great Western Loan and
Savings because I owe them money.
I don't have any savings there.
But somehow or other, these people would rather
have the cash in hand for the Lord's
coming.
I first came to the United States, I
saw an advertisement in some magazine like The
King's Business or Moody Monthly.
It said, when you make your will, leave
your money to us.
It was a Hebrew Christian association.
It said, we will be the only people
here after the rapture.
That was a mixture of commercial and prophetical
interest, all right.
Now, as I say, the tide went out
in the 1850s.
You read, for instance, that the brother of
the president of Illinois College was expelled for
dancing in the aisles during divine worship.
You read of riots, obscene verses being written
in hymnbooks, students singing parodies.
The tide was going out.
But it came in again in 1857.
It began as a prayer movement.
I can't emphasize this too much.
This great revival was leaderless.
In America, as soon as you mention a
revival, they say, who was the leader?
All these great awakenings were leaderless.
They produced leaders.
That's the mark of a great awakening, a
generality of the outpouring of the Holy Spirit.
Now, the initiatory prayer meetings were begun in
an upper room in Manhattan on the 23rd
of September 1858 by a man called Jeremiah
Lanphier.
He had been appointed visitor for the North
Dutch Reformed Church in downtown Manhattan.
He was a man of prayer, so he
printed a little leaflet, How often shall I
pray?
As often as the language of prayer is
in my heart.
That's another way of saying, every time I
feel the Spirit moving in my heart, I
will pray.
As often as I feel the power of
temptation within, as often as I feel the
aggression of a worldly spirit.
On the other side it said, in prayer
we leave the business of time for the
business of eternity.
And it said, a prayer meeting will be
held weekly in the upper room of the
North Dutch Reformed Church of the consistory building,
Fulton and William Street.
Of the population of greater New York of
one million, the only one to show up
was Jeremiah Lanphier.
But at twenty-five to one, he heard
another step on the stairs, and there were
six men who prayed until one o'clock.
There was no rending of the veil, there
were no tongues of fire, nothing.
Just a little prayer meeting, that was all.
But they felt so close to God in
prayer, they decided to meet the following week.
And the numbers increased, doubled at fourteen now.
They decided to meet every day of the
week, Monday right through to Saturday.
Then they began overflowing.
They filled the auditorium of the church.
Then John Street Methodist Church opened up.
Then Trinity Episcopal Church, the corner of Wall
Street and Broadway.
And then church after church.
Now some who deny the Holy Spirit's prescience,
who try to explain everything by political or
economic or sociological reasoning, dismiss this as a
bank panic revival.
It's true that three weeks after this prayer
movement began, there was a bank failure, and
a lot of people lost their money.
And this undoubtedly was a factor.
But when people talk about a bank panic
revival, it sounds like hysteria.
And I found that, for instance, the bank
panic caused the attendance at the prayer meeting
to increase by about twenty-two out of
a population of a million.
That's not hysteria.
And the great revival itself didn't break through
to become public property until about February of
the following year.
But there are some people who like to
talk that way.
Here's another interesting thing.
During the second week of that revival, there
was an outpouring of the Holy Spirit in
Hamilton, Ontario, in Canada, which was unaffected, of
course, by the American bank panic.
The mayor of the town was converted.
Doctors and lawyers were converted.
Drunkards and prostitutes were converted.
And thousands of pastors who saw their congregations
withering away in the United States read wistfully
of this gust of divine power in Hamilton,
Ontario.
Now, I find in my researches that throughout
the remainder of 1857, prayer meetings multiplied everywhere.
For instance, the Presbyterians met on the first
of December 1857 in Cincinnati.
Two hundred and forty ministers came to discuss
revival.
They spent most of their time praying.
The same sort of meeting in Pittsburgh.
The Baptists had an all-day prayer, Congregationalists
in New England, and so on.
So that you could say, from September until
the end of the year, prayer meetings multiplied
throughout the United States.
It was in February of 1858 that the
New York newspapers reported an extraordinary movement of
men to prayer in New York City.
I take it you've all heard of Horace
Greeley, the editor who said, Go West, young
man.
There's a town in Colorado named for him.
He sent one of his reporters in horse
and buggy racing around the prayer meetings to
see how many men were at prayer.
And in an hour, he visited about a
dozen prayer meetings and found 6,100 businessmen
meeting for prayer.
There were more, but that was as many
as he could visit in an hour.
And this was news, so Horace Greeley put
this in the headline.
The other newspapers felt they had to do
something about it too, so the flood tides
began.
Soon every downtown auditorium, whether public hall or
theater, as well as church, was filled.
You read, for instance, of Burton's Theater in
Brooklyn.
The street packed from wall to wall, crowded
with carriages, and every part of that huge
theater was three galleries, the pit, the platform,
the windows, people clinging to projections.
5,000 people gathered for prayer.
Now you might say, what kind of prayer
meetings were they?
They were the simplest imaginable.
They were run by laymen.
They were not anti-clerical, anti-ministerial in
any way.
The chairman, a layman, would always say, I
see the Reverend Mr. So-and-so, the
Presbyterian minister, or the Baptist minister, whoever is
present, we'll ask him to lead in prayer.
And if he saw another minister, he'd ask
him to read the scripture, and then he'd
say the meeting is open for prayer.
And for fifty minutes they prayed.
Of course, when the meetings got very big,
they couldn't all pray.
I mean, it meant that perhaps thirty people
only could pray out of three thousand in
a meeting.
So they sometimes would write requests down and
pass them up to be read and to
be prayed for.
They had signs around the walls, no controverted
subjects discussed.
In other words, no ardent Baptist was to
get up and pray about believers' baptism, and
no enthusiastic Episcopalian was to talk about the
apostolic succession of the bishops, and so forth.
There was a comedy.
They agreed that they were met there to
pray.
They had signs that said the younger must
give way to the older, the local people
to people from out of town.
And no long prayers.
It was more like chain praying, as we
used to call it in the Christian endeavor
movement.
Now, in one of these prayer meetings in
New York, a minister got up and said,
I was here until three o'clock yesterday
dealing with people who wish to find Christ
as Savior.
There must be many others.
So I would like to announce that from
tonight onwards indefinitely, my church will be open
for the preaching of the gospel.
And soon, every church in New York was
opened and filled every night.
That hasn't hit you yet.
I was at the last Graham crusade in
this city.
Billy Graham was speaking to 40,000 a
night.
What a crowd.
If on Tuesday night Billy Graham had said,
don't come here tomorrow night, go to your
own midweek service.
And you pastors that don't have one, you
better open up because these people are coming.
If some pastor had looked over that crowd
of 40,000 and thought, I better open
up or I'll be disgraced.
What would he have told his custodian?
He would have said, Billy Graham announced a
prayer meeting here tonight, so you better open
up.
But how many people would have come?
If you divided the 40,000 by the
5,000 sponsoring churches alone, it would have
meant eight people in the front row.
Can you imagine that?
Mass evangelism at its best.
I'm one of Billy Graham's enthusiastic supporters.
Mass evangelism has its weaknesses, but he does
a good job compared to other evangelists that
I've read about and that I've known.
But that's mass evangelism at its best.
Can you imagine a movement that would fill
every church every night?
And in the 20th century, when I come
to that tomorrow night, I can tell you
that happening even in this part of the
world, in our own century, in the living
memory of some people.
Most of the people who were alive then
were very young, of course, but there's still
some people alive from that time.
Of course, there were some startling conversions.
The Muhammad Ali of that day was a
boxer called Orville Gardner, nicknamed Awful Gardner.
He was wonderfully converted, and that impressed a
certain class of citizens.
Lots of people were being converted.
They were running about 10,000 conversions a
week.
All the churches crowded.
Now, the revival went up the Hudson and
down the Mohawk.
It burst out in New England.
Finney was conducting modest meetings in Park Street
Chapel, and he says in this autobiography that
the revival in Boston became so general, it
was impossible to keep any account of the
numbers of converts, or even to make an
estimate of the numbers that would approximate the
truth.
It's very interesting that Finney mentions this, because
although he says revival is nothing more than
the right use of the appropriate means, the
three great awakenings in his lifetime, 1792, the
year he was born, 1830, when he had
his great breakthrough, and 1858, in which he
had a small part, in both the United
States and the United Kingdom, these movements were
unstructured, unprogrammed, and unplanned.
They were not set up at all.
I'll spare you the details of the awakening
in New England, but for instance, in Maine,
church bells were ringing at eight in the
morning, and at noon, and at six in
the evening, bringing the people to church.
Along the Mohawk, the Baptists, for example, had
so many candidates for baptism of their converts,
they couldn't baptize them in their chapels and
churches.
They went down to the river and broke
the ice and baptized them in the cold
water, and when Baptists do that, they really
are on fire.
In Newark, New Jersey, of a population of
70,000, 2,785 were converted in the
first two months, and according to the pastors,
mostly mature people.
At Princeton, of 272 collegians, 102 repented, and
50 entered the ministry.
This was very typical of the colleges, because
the movement swept the colleges from Bowdoin College
in Maine to Baylor University in Independence, Texas.
Now, six weeks or so after the bank
panic hit Philadelphia, some young men started a
united prayer meeting, but only a dozen showed
up.
That doesn't suggest hysteria, does it?
But then, on the 3rd of February in
1858, these dozen intercessors, who were still faithfully
praying, decided to move closer downtown and to
a neutral place, so they got the use
of an empty room in Jane's Theatre, the
biggest theatre in Philadelphia.
Then, attendances picked up to about 60.
But in March, the tide of revival came.
The attendances overflowed the main auditorium, then the
platform, then a gallery, then both galleries, and
in that crowd of 6,000 men, George
Duffield wrote the hymn, Stand Up, Stand Up
for Jesus, Ye Soldiers of the Cross.
By the way, if there's anyone interested in
hymnology, you could write a doctor's dissertation on
the hymns produced in times of revival.
Then the churches got together for the summer,
with huge big-top tents, to evangelize all
the inquirers.
This movement of prayer crossed the Allegheny, like
a tidal wave, and right down the Ohio
River.
State after state reported extraordinary things.
For instance, in Ohio, 200 small towns reported
12,000 converts in a couple of months.
In Indiana, further west, 150 towns reported 4
,500 converts.
In state after state, there was extraordinary prayer
and response.
I found it impossible to get the figures.
A Baptist journal decided to publish the number
of people being converted, but there was no
systematic survey.
They simply took letters that reached the editor's
office and said, up in Rockland, Maine, that
had 27 converts and so forth, just wrote
them all down and added up to thousands.
Then the Methodists tried the same, they got
96,000.
But it wasn't exhaustive.
Actually, I found about a million people were
converted the first year, maybe two million in
the two years, out of a population of
30 million.
Two million out of 30 million.
To give you a typical illustration of a
prayer meeting, an Episcopal layman convened the first
United Prayer Meeting in Kalamazoo, Michigan.
He said, I'm unused to extemporaneous prayer like
this, but we'll follow the example we've read
about in the New York papers.
I see our rector is present, we'll ask
him if he will lead in prayer, and
we'll ask the Methodist minister if he will
read the scripture.
But he said, this room is so crowded,
you had better write your prayer request and
hand it up.
The first prayer request was, a praying wife
asks the prayers of this company for the
conversion of her husband, who is far from
God.
Surely you'll agree that's a common prayer request.
Immediately a blacksmith stood up and said, my
wife prays for me, I know I must
be that man and I need to be
converted.
Would you please pray for me?
Up got a lawyer and said, I think
it was my wife that wrote that note
because I know I'm far from God.
And five husbands were converted in five minutes.
You see, in times of revival, it's not
like evangelism.
In evangelism, the evangelist seeks the sinner.
But in times of revival, the sinners come
running to the Lord.
Chicago had a population of a hundred thousand
at that time.
By the way, I was very much surprised
to find that Chicago's main rival for the
title, capital of the West, was Keokuk, Iowa.
Has anyone ever been in Keokuk, Iowa?
My professor of Hebrew was born there, and
I drove down to see what it was
like, and drove right through the place before
I realized that passed.
But that was just below the rapids on
the Mississippi, and the paddle steamers used to
come up and land settlers there.
But Chicago got the railroads and they went
ahead.
Out of a population of 100,000, there
were 2,000 men meeting for prayer in
the Metropolitan Hall every day.
Then it overflowed to the churches.
I picked up a letter written by a
man, apparently a member of First Baptist Church,
in which he said the interest has passed
anything he'd ever seen in his life.
He said that in the First Baptist Church
they had prayer meetings at eight o'clock
in the morning, at twelve o'clock noon,
and at six and a half o'clock,
they called it, in the evening.
And he said yesterday went on all day
of prayer.
Just prayer.
The people were converted largely in prayer meetings.
That doesn't mean there wasn't any preaching.
After the prayer meeting movement began and people
flocked to the prayer meetings, then they began
holding meetings in the churches with a lot
of preaching.
Lots of conversion.
What was the effect?
I'll give you a typical example.
Trinity Episcopal Church in 1857 had 121 members.
In 1860 they built a church for the
1,400 members, from 121 to 1,400.
A young shoe salesman went to the superintendent
of the Plymouth Congregational Church and asked if
he might teach Sunday school.
The superintendent said, I'm sorry, I've got 16
teachers too many, but I'll put you on
the waiting list.
The young man said, but I'd like to
do something now.
Well, said the superintendent, why don't you start
a class?
How do you do that?
He said, get some boys off the street.
Now don't bring them here.
Take them out in the country for about
a month on Sundays, and then when you
have control of them, you bring them here.
They'll be your class.
Now that would work.
For instance, if anyone went along to a
street where the boys are shooting marbles or
playing leapfrog or flying kites and shit, how
many of you boys would like to go
on a hike?
How many of you would like to go
on a hike?
They'd go immediately to get permission from their
parents.
And the parents investigate the young man and
find he's a scoutmaster or something.
They say, okay, be careful now and all
the rest of it.
Give them instructions for what to do.
Away they go.
This young man took these boys to a
beach on Lake Michigan, probably along what's now
called the Gold Coast, and taught them Bible
games and Bible verses, and then took them
to the Plymouth Congregational Church.
The name of the young man was Dwight
Lyman Moody, and that was the beginning of
his ministry.
You don't read about this.
That's how Moody got started.
Now Charles Finney, whom I've mentioned already, reported
that only the South was missed by the
Awakening.
He said in his autobiography that the people
there were so addicted to their peculiar institution
that the Spirit of God was grieved away
from them, and that they found no place
for him in their hearts.
This is not true.
I got the newspapers when I was working
in Chicago.
I did all my research that I could
get to find that from Richmond, Virginia to
Galveston in Texas, the Revival swept the South
in the same way.
Perhaps a little more slowly, because the South
was largely rural.
There weren't the big industrial cities of the
North.
But Bishop Warren Candler said he thought that
the number of converts was even greater according
to the population.
Why did Finney make that statement?
By the way, other historians have made the
same statement.
Frank Grenville Beardsley, in his History of American
Revivals, quotes Finney almost verbatim.
Why did Finney make that statement?
He was such an ardent abolitionist, so much
against slavery, that he had made up his
mind that God couldn't bless them anyway.
It was almost as if I were to
come back and say that there's a great
Revival sweeping South Africa.
A lot of people say that wouldn't be
possible.
I would like to point out to you,
although there's not a great Revival in South
Africa, that church attendance there is much higher
than in Australia or New Zealand, and that
there are more black Christians per head of
population in South Africa than the rest of
Africa in any part, in spite of apartheid,
or maybe because of it, because of the
tension and so forth.
The same was true of the South.
The Awakening of 1858 was received with enthusiasm
by the secular press.
I remember in 1949, I'd flown in from
Chicago and I went straight to the big
tent where Billy Graham was holding forth in
Los Angeles.
Billy saw me, gave me a signal to
meet him at the platform.
We went out, but he was being mobbed
by so many people wanting his autograph and
so forth, wanting to shake hands with him.
He said, look, let's find a place.
I want to talk to you.
We found a car parked.
The doors weren't locked.
I don't know whose car it was, but
we got in, Billy and I.
And he said, Edwin, I've got a real
problem.
And he told me William Randolph Hearst had
sent a telegram to the reporters down here
saying, puff Graham.
Now he said, my committee are alarmed.
They say it will be the kiss of
death.
Don't let them in.
Drive them away.
What do you think?
I had on my lap my Oxford dissertation
dealing with this movement.
And I opened up the thing and I
showed Billy, I still don't know whose car
that was, in the light of their dash,
I said, now read this.
It says the press which speaks in the
ears of millions is taken possession of by
the spirit willingly or unwillingly to proclaim the
works of God.
I said, Billy, if the Department of Agriculture
in the United States wanted to sell an
idea to the farmers of America, they'd have
to set aside $100,000 to do so.
I said, if what's happening here is what
I think it is and God is going
to bless you the way he blessed Moody,
he'll make the newspapers work for you for
nothing.
And in one way, do you realize what
free publicity that man gets to this day?
In fact, he's sick of it at times.
If he were asked tomorrow on the golf
course at Montreat, what do you think of
Mrs. Ford's latest statement?
And he was simply to say, clear his
throat.
It'll be in the newspapers tomorrow.
Billy Graham asked what he thought of Betty
Ford's latest statement.
Cleared his throat.
But this is what happened during the revival
of 1858.
And it went like wildfire because everywhere people
read about it in the newspapers.
Of course, Christians became excited.
With very few exceptions, everyone was for it.
For instance, some of the Unitarians were quite
moved by it.
In Boston, Harvard was Unitarian.
The professor of religion was Frederick Dan Huntington.
He was so moved, he started a midweek
prayer meeting for Harvard students, in which he
himself was converted.
And then he became an Episcopal bishop.
But one critic was Theodore Parker, a rather
radical Unitarian, a man who was shocking his
own Unitarian colleagues.
Unitarianism in those days was not like Unitarianism
today.
It was Christian Unitarianism in the sense that
they believed that Jesus Christ was the Savior
of the world, but they didn't believe in
his deity.
They believed he was the adopted son of
God.
Whereas Unitarianism today has renounced even its Christian
heritage and says there's no difference between Holy
Scripture and the Koran.
Now, Theodore Parker went to one of these
prayer meetings.
I think he was in Park Street Chapel,
and he was moved to pray.
But some ardent brother got up and said,
the man who has just prayed needs converting
himself.
Let's pray for him, and mortally offended Theodore
Parker.
He turned against the revival and preached against
it.
Some of the Anglo-Catholics of the Episcopal
Church, the high church people, were against it
first, but it so filled their churches with
seekers that they changed their minds and became
in favor of it.
The same thing was true of the Lutherans.
I found that all over the country there
was almost unanimous support.
The movement was completely free of sectarian emphasis.
Its primary emphasis was on prayer, yet there
was a lot of preaching of the word.
The meetings were all marked by quietness and
restraint, and the most mature people of the
community were converted.
Now, someone may say to me, was there
speaking in tongues during this revival?
I have to say I came across not
one case of speaking in tongues in the
United States or United Kingdom, or in Australia
or South Africa.
Only one place, in South India, in Tenevelli,
an extraordinary movement began among the Indian people
that alarmed the Anglican clergy, the Episcopal clergy.
Among these people there were trances and visions
and dreams and prophecies and speaking in tongues.
One clergyman wrote to his bishop, who was
very much alarmed, that he must withdraw his
criticism.
They have the ear of the people, and
the heathen are responding by the hundreds.
By the way, at that part of India,
the little tip of India, at the very
end, there were Christians within a hundred miles
for fifty years than all the rest of
India put together.
So you can draw what conclusion you like.
You see, some of my ardently charismatic friends
insist, because of their experience, that there must
have been speaking in tongues in every revival.
I have to say, no, not in this
case.
But then there was the exception in India,
in case somebody wants to make a doctrine
out of it the other way.
So I just mention these aspects.
Now, did the revival stop?
I always assumed, in fact, when I wrote
my Oxford dissertation, I assumed that the revival
stopped with the Civil War.
But in my latest book, which was published
last year, I've had to withdraw that statement.
The revival continued through the Civil War.
To try and get the records of all
the denominations for seven years was too much
for me to do, so I decided to
go halfway between the liturgical Episcopalians and Lutherans,
and the informal Baptists and Methodists.
So I picked on the Presbyterians, and I
find that the revivals continued, Presbytery after Presbytery.
If I'm not mistaken, in the last year
of the war, there were extraordinary revivals in
seventy-two out of ninety-one Presbyteries.
And then in 1866, after the war, they
reported revivals exceeding even those of 1858.
What was most remarkable was the revival continued
in the armies, too, only more evangelistically.
I have the diary of a man who
was working with the YMCA as a voluntary
worker, and he said that they were taking
a load of wounded men down the Tennessee
River after the Battle of Pittsburgh landing.
He said, the cry of a wounded man
is, water.
He said, I told my colleagues, we must
not let one man die without giving the
water of life.
That was D.L. Moody.
That's where he served his apprenticeship.
Moody was making five thousand dollars a year.
Now, for purchasing power, just multiply that by
ten.
He gave it up and lived by faith.
His income the first year was only a
hundred and fifty dollars.
This same great revival broke out in the
United Kingdom in Northern Ireland.
It began in a prayer meeting of laymen,
four laymen.
You see, a man called James McQuilten had
been converted.
His pastor, the Reverend Samuel J.
Moore, gave him a New Testament and also
gave him a little book called God's Deedings
with George Mueller of Bristol, the great man
of prayer and faith.
Now, you know, you can do a lot
with a new convert.
I find that God accomplishes most with new
converts and restored backsliders.
But this young man had the idea, if
God is sending this great revival to our
cousins across the Atlantic, and if God answers
prayer for Mr. Mueller the way he does,
why couldn't we pray for a revival in
Ireland?
Well, plenty would have told him Ireland is
a Roman Catholic country, the Protestants are only
a minority.
But he persisted.
He asked the Lord for three prayer companions,
and the four of them—McQuilten, Manili, Wallace, and
Carlyle—met in a barn.
In that barn, others joined them, some were
converted there.
On one occasion, one of the converts went
back to a village called Ahochal, where his
mother was a hard-drinking widow, his brother
was a ne'er-do-well, and his
sister had a bad reputation in town.
And they bitterly upbraided him for becoming soft.
They went to bed very angry.
But at two o'clock in the morning,
they were wakened by the mother's outcries.
They thought she had inflammation of the bowels,
which was the name for appendicitis in those
days.
They sent for the doctor.
The doctor examined her and said, there's nothing
organically wrong with her, send for the minister.
Can you imagine in a quiet little Irish
town, before the days of automobiles, the clip
-top of a horse and buggy coming along,
people getting up to see what was going
on, and then the minister coming, they felt
sure it was a death.
The Irish people, you know, hold what they
call wakes, that means they all come in
and sympathise with the bereaved, lift their mind
until the funeral is over.
They began coming in.
The mother was converted, the brother was converted,
the sister was converted, and every neighbour that
came in was converted.
It caused such a sensation that the minister
of the Second Presbyterian Church invited the four
laymen to come and preach in his church.
The church was so packed, and the galleries
creaked so ominously, he was alarmed, and he
dismissed the congregation.
It was sleeting outside, but the four men
hadn't walked 14 miles, they were going to
give up preaching, so they started to preach
from outside.
People began falling to their knees in the
mud of the street, and the ministers of
Ahoho were like doctors in an epidemic, working
day and night dealing with souls.
Then it swept Ballymena, then it broke out
in Belfast, swept the whole of the north
of Ireland.
Someone's bound to come up to me afterwards
and say, well why doesn't it affect them
today?
My grandfather, I knew my grandfather, he was
converted in that revival because he died when
I was a little boy about four or
five.
But in 1959, all the churches of Ireland
invited me over to help them celebrate the
1859 revival.
I preached in St. Patrick's Cathedral and all
over Ireland in commemoration of this great movement.
The same revival, after winning about 10 percent
of the population of Northern Ireland, broke out
in Scotland, won about 300,000 people there.
Then the same in Wales, and then it
swept England.
It's very interesting, when the news of the
Irish revival reached London, an English lady, Elizabeth
Codner, was so moved, she wrote a hymn
that we just sang tonight, Lord, I hear
of showers of blessing, thou art scattering, full
and free.
It packed out every theatre in London on
Sundays for gospel meetings.
Spurgeon built this tabernacle during that revival.
The Bishop of London and the Dean of
Westminster, in friendly competition, ran evangelistic meetings in
St. Paul's Cathedral and Westminster Abbey for five
years every Sunday night.
The movement swept the British Isles.
Out of it, by the way, came the
China Inland Mission.
You know the story of Hudson Taylor.
I found that he worked in his spare
time in a little mission hall in the
East End of London while he was studying
medicine during that revival.
Half a mile from him, another young man
was working called William Booth.
He started the Christian Mission, which became the
Salvation Army.
That great foreign mission society and a great
home mission agency both came out of the
revival.
These revivals broke out elsewhere.
For example, in South Africa.
I'll just mention South Africa briefly.
They had a conference of ministers.
374 came to a place called Worcester, 100
miles up country from Cape Town.
Missionaries were coming back from the United States
and the United Kingdom, telling of the revival,
and the South Africans, chiefly Dutch Reformed, were
deeply stirred to pray.
Seven weeks later, at Pentecost, Whitsun Tide, the
young people in the Dutch Reformed church at
Worcester were having their youth meeting when a
black girl, a Fingo girl, got up and
asked if she might give a testimony.
There was such a sweet sense of the
presence of God.
The leader of the meeting was a young
man called Jan Christian de Vries.
Then he said, in the silence, he heard
the approach of a tornado.
As he thought, the whole building trembled, and
all those Dutch Reformed young people were on
their feet, praying simultaneously, audibly.
An elder called Jan Robbie, walking by, heard
this strange noise and peeped in to see
what on earth was happening.
He was so alarmed, he ran to the
parsonage, brought down the minister.
The minister asked, What's going on here?
All that de Vries could say was, It's
God.
The minister stood up and said, In Dutch,
Mensa, Blessed O!
Everybody be quiet.
Nobody took any notice.
He said, I am your minister sent from
God.
Will you please be quiet?
Nobody took any notice.
He was a new minister.
He said, I have been duly appointed by
presbytery.
Nobody took any notice of the presbytery either.
Actually, they didn't see him.
They didn't hear him.
That's why they were all praying audibly, simultaneously.
Each one thought he was the only one
praying.
The minister went back and said to de
Vries, Start a hymn.
The two men started to sing a Dutch
hymn.
Nobody joined them, so the minister stamped out.
He said, God's a God of order.
This is nothing but confusion.
By the way, his name was Andrew Murray.
In the meantime, these prayer meetings multiplied all
over the Wagonmaker's Valley.
Andrew Murray knew he had to do something,
so he announced a united prayer meeting for
Saturday night in the schoolhouse.
A thousand showed up.
He took charge.
He read the scripture, gave a short commentary.
He offered the colleague for the day.
Then he said, The meeting is now open
for prayer.
There was dead silence.
Then he heard the rushing mighty wind too.
Everyone was praying.
A stranger by the door pushed his way
in, forced his way in, spoke to him
in English, and said, Are you the minister
of this congregation?
He said, I'm a missionary.
Just come back from my furlough.
This is the outpouring of the Holy Spirit,
so be careful what you do.
That was the beginning of the greatest awakening
ever known in South Africa.
The Dutch Reformed Church to this day celebrated
every year a role, in some cases rather
formally.
The same revival broke out in South India,
broke out in Jamaica in 1860.
Out of the revival arose in Britain a
phalanx of evangelists, famous aristocrats and working men.
But in the United States, the great evangelist
to emerge from this revival was D.
L.
Moody.
By the way, Professor William McLoughlin said in
his book of the revival that the excitement
of 1858 scarcely deserves to be called an
awakening.
I wrote to him at Brown University, and
I asked him on what criteria he made
this judgment.
He wrote back and said, well, he had
certain standards in his mind and didn't measure
up to those standards.
So I wrote back, I said, as one
scholar to another, as one Christian to another,
would you mind sharing this with me, because
I'd like to know.
I still haven't found out.
It must be classified material.
He won't tell me.
But I told him, I think you're mistaken.
The year that Moody died, 1899, 41 years
later, Moody said, I would like, before I
go hence, to see the whole Church of
Christ quickened as it was in 1858, and
a wave going from Maine to California to
sweep thousands into the kingdom of God.
I think it's fair to deduce from that,
that in Moody's 40 years of glorious evangelism,
he hadn't seen anything to compare with what
he saw in 1858 in Chicago.
Because if 1884 had been a better year,
he would have mentioned 1884.
Now, Moody was the product of that moment,
but there isn't time to go into all
the details of what happened for the next
40 years.
All right, we're going to take a break
and then apply the message for the evening.