In my last talk to you, I told
you about the wonderful awakening in Wales at
the beginning of this century.
Now supposing you heard that in Nova Scotia
the churches were packed, thousands of people being
converted, all days and nights of prayer.
Supposing you found that crime had almost been
wiped out, what would you do here?
You'd pray, oh God, do the same thing
in California.
So that's actually what happened in 1905.
When the news came of the Welsh revival,
people began to pray all over this country.
Now I told you that at the beginning
of the century, most of the big denominations
had their own program of advance.
The Methodists of the 20th century forward movement,
they're going to win two million souls to
Christ, they raised 20 million dollars to do
it.
They said with a better knowledge of how
to work, a great religious awakening might be
secured at the opening of the 20th century.
The Baptists North and South were working in
the same way.
Presbyterians likewise.
The great evangelist of that time was Wilbur
Chapman, a Presbyterian.
And all over the United States, people were
keyed up for blessing in the 20th century.
But nothing much came of these human efforts
until news came of the Welsh revival.
Even the high church Episcopalians were stirred up.
They talked about the Welsh revival brought about
by the strong breath of God's Holy Spirit.
And they asked, how long will it be
till it comes to the United States?
The Baptists said, let's cease talking about revivalism
and let's get on our knees and pray
for revival.
And a Southern Baptist magazine said, will the
revival be repeated in this country?
To answer the question, we are, as usual,
doing the inconsistent thing.
We read that the Welsh revival grew out
of prayer and has no machinery.
And now we set to work to get
all our machinery going.
The Methodists also said there is evidence of
the general religious revival from border to border.
Presbyterians said, all the country seems to be
on the lookout for a great outpouring of
the Holy Spirit.
The revival began in Pennsylvania.
It began in a town called Wiltsbury in
December of 1904, in a Welsh church, a
small church of Welsh immigrants where the people
all spoke Welsh and therefore preferred to worship
God in their own language.
The Reverend J.D. Roberts reported 123 converts
in that tiny little church, most of them
men.
Then the revival spread to Scranton and then
town after town.
Revival broke out in Newcastle, in Pittsburgh.
The leading Baptist periodical in Pennsylvania devoted the
whole issue in March 1905 to describe the
revival in Pennsylvania.
By early spring, the Methodists in Philadelphia alone
were claiming 10,000 converts.
They had 6,101 on probation.
That means new converts who had to wait
six months before they'd be admitted to membership.
In New Jersey, the young people societies of
Christian endeavor increased 10 percent.
Some societies increasing from 10 percent to 300
percent.
On the coast of New Jersey, there was
such a revival in Atlantic City, they said
not more than 50 unconverted people remained in
a population of 60,000.
In November of 1905, a great awakening in
Newark, New Jersey, they said in which Pentecost
was literally repeated during the height of the
revival with its strange spectacle of spacious churches,
crowded overflowing, and great processions marching through the
streets.
In 1904, in Schenectady, New York State, the
local ministerial association heard of the revival in
Wales.
They thought, what can we do?
They said they didn't have any special evangelists
in Wales, so let's just start meetings.
So they took Emmanuel Baptist Church for afternoons,
packed out with women.
The biggest church in town was the State
Street Methodist Church, packed with 1,200 nightly.
Sometimes 800 and 1,100 waited behind in
after meetings.
I've read the Schenectady papers.
You know, in a smaller town they have
an obituary column that tells especially elderly people
to look to see who among their friends
has just passed away.
The Schenectady Gazette ran a column entitled, Yesterday's
Conversions.
If you want to know who was converted,
that's where you looked.
In Troy, New York, it was said no
such unanimous and spontaneous movement had been known
in the city for a generation.
It began in January with a week of
prayer, held in the Second Presbyterian Church, but
it developed into a revival of church members
of six Baptist, ten Methodist, seven Presbyterian, one
Christian, one Congregational, one Episcopal churches.
The revival spread all over.
When the revival reached Calvary Methodist Episcopal Church,
New York City, it produced a site never
before duplicated.
Before 2,200 packing the church, 364 were
received into membership on the 2nd of February.
286 were on probation, that means new converts.
217 of them adults, 134 of them men,
60 were heads of families.
When the cleansing wave reached Brooklyn, Baptist Temple,
500 people waited behind for counsel for salvation.
What about New England?
Here's what the Baptist said, as the news
continues to come from the churches, the conviction
is confirmed that additions to the churches in
New England during the month of April were
larger than during any one month for many,
many years.
Great revival in every part of New England.
What about the South?
The Atlanta newspapers reported that nearly a thousand
businessmen had united in intercession for an outpouring
of the Holy Spirit.
Then, with a unanimity unprecedented, stores, factories and
offices closed in the middle of the day
for prayer.
The Supreme Court of Georgia adjourned.
Even saloons and places of amusement closed their
doors to enable patrons to go to united
prayer meetings.
The awakening began in Louisville.
The great Methodist Henry Clay Morrison of Asbury
College said, the whole city is breathing a
spiritual atmosphere.
Everywhere, in shop and store, in the middle
and on the street, salvation is the one
topic of conversation.
In Danville, Kentucky, 1st of February, 1905, all
employers and employees attended prayer meetings in a
body.
They said, Danville's day of blessing has come.
Paducah, Kentucky, an awakening described by the Southern
Baptist as a great Pentecostal revival within our
own bounds.
The word Pentecostal was a small p in
that particular case.
The movement swept the city from November 1905
until March 1906.
One church, First Baptist, received into membership more
than a thousand new members.
Its pastor, Dr. J.
J.
Cheek, an old man, died of overwork, and
the Southern Baptist said a glorious ending to
a devoted ministry.
I'll be 70 on my next birthday.
But the Lord said, you've only got one
more year left, and you'll lead a thousand
to Christ, I would say.
Amen.
What a way to go.
Now you say, well, what kind of movement
was it?
Who was the evangelist?
No evangelist.
Just everybody was an evangelist.
Here's a typical report from a Southern Baptist
pastor in Tennessee.
Last month, we held revival services.
I failed to get anyone to assist me.
Why?
Because everyone was so busy on their own.
So I had to do the preaching myself.
We had a great meeting.
There were 60 conversions, and the church was
greatly built up in a great outpouring of
the Spirit and a great ingathering of souls.
The revival went over Florida like a tidal
wave.
The leader was an evangelist called Mordecai Ham.
By the way, it was under Mordecai Ham
later that Billy Graham was converted in Charlotte,
North Carolina.
The revival began in the northeast corner of
Texas in the Piney Woods in a town
called Paris.
The pastors were concerned over the fact that
on Sunday night there were more people in
the theater than in church.
So the Baptists and Congregationalists, Methodists and Presbyterians
and others got together and united prayer meetings,
and a great movement began.
The revival reached Houston, not so big then,
but a fair-sized town.
A tidal wave of spirituality rolled through the
city.
Not only crowded the churches, but closed all
the gambling dens.
Revival swept Dallas, Waco.
The chancellor of Waco, of Baylor University in
Waco, told me that was the year that
so many students went from Baylor to the
mission field.
Kansas City, the Southern Baptist Convention met, and
it says, it's manifest to all.
There's come but an awakening in interest in
the subject of evangelistic work.
There's an atmosphere of evangelism.
Now, the revival spread into Ohio, then into
Michigan.
It began with notices, such lessons from the
Welsh revival.
Then the Methodists in Saginaw said, we're in
the midst of a most gracious religious awaiting,
unlike anything seen in these parts for many
a year.
The unction of the spirit outpoured.
There are many gracious revivals in the Albany
district, that's over on the other side of
Michigan.
A thousand conversions in Albany, 1,100 in
Lansing, 500 in Big Rapids, and then the
Edwards said, we can't keep track of them
all.
In Owasso, the whole town awakened to Scola,
the church filled with Pentecostal power for five
weeks.
In Grand Rapids, one church received 118 on
probation.
And the pastor said, the revival certainly has
hit this city.
In Lansing, the Methodists claimed 700 conversions, of
whom 740 joined the churches.
740 out of 700.
Nowadays, it's the other way around, to say
so many went forward, but only 250 joined
the churches.
They said, this is not guesswork.
Actually, the 700 that were converted, collected another
40 on the way to the meeting.
In the spring, the churches are still responding
to the thrill of a vigorous, thoroughgoing revival
triumph.
I won't waive the details.
When the revival reached Indiana, it swept Indianapolis,
was reported as a great day for the
Baptists, but the Methodists said it was a
great day for the Methodists.
What happened in Chicago?
All the pastors got together in Chicago, in
the Loop, to discuss what to do when
the revival came.
The plan in Chicago was to urge pastors
to hold their own meetings in their own
churches and help each other as the needs
suggest.
But they had a central prayer meeting for
ministers, and there they shared news.
A determined effort, they said, has been made
to reach the unsaved, and this is succeeding.
Hundreds have already been baptized in the different
churches.
It has become commonplace in our ministerial gatherings
for a pastor to rise and say, my
church has never known such a blessing of
salvation as we are now having.
The revival in Dixon, Illinois, was described as
a cyclone.
It hit the Baptist, Christian, Congregational, Evangelical, Lutheran,
Methodist, and Presbyterian churches.
The evangelist was an obscure man called Billy
Sunday.
This helped make him well-known.
In Burlington, Iowa, every store and factory closed
its operation between 10 and 11 to permit
all employees to attend services of prayer for
revival of religion.
A great revival swept Louisville and St. Louis.
Redwood Falls, Minnesota, the awakening brought out 600
men, women, and children, although the temperature was
22 degrees below zero.
In Denver, the movement began on the 4th
of January.
On the 20th of January, the mayor of
Denver called for a day of prayer.
At 10 o'clock in the morning, all
cooperating churches were filled.
At 1130, almost every store was closed at
the mayor's request, and four theaters downtown were
crowded for prayer at noon.
12,000 attended these services of intercession.
The Colorado legislature closed.
All schools were closed.
Months later, they said Denver never had a
winter like it.
I knew a man who was in that
movement.
They had a great simultaneous movement in Los
Angeles.
A hundred churches cooperated.
Los Angeles was not a big place in
those days, perhaps 100,000.
The aggregate attendance at the evangelistic meetings downtown
was in excess of 180,000.
4,264 inquires registered.
787 were children.
I was speaking at Temple Baptist Church, Pershing
Square, and the pastor said to me, I
never heard of that movement.
I said, why don't you look up your
records?
He went to the deacon and kept the
church's records.
He came back and said, you know, we
took in 500 in one month.
I said, the pastor's name was Burdett.
He said, that's right, this is Burdett Hall.
This is our smaller hall here.
Great Revival in Redlands and Pomona.
There was a report published called Portland's Pentecost.
For three hours a day, business was practically
suspended.
From the crowds in the great department stores
to the humblest clerk, from bank presidents to
boot blacks, all abandoned money-making for soul
-saving.
More than 200 major stores signed an agreement
to close between 11 and 2.
And the same thing happened in Seattle.
I was associate pastor for some time with
Oswald Smith in the Great People's Church in
Toronto.
I said to him, what did you know
about the Great Revival in 1905 in Canada?
He said, I never heard of it.
I said, come on, it swept Canada from
coast to coast.
I can tell you the Great Revival in
Nova Scotia, I can tell you the Revival
in the Skeena River in British Columbia.
In Winnipeg, First Baptist Church had 2,000
people standing in the snow waiting to get
in.
He said, I never heard of it.
I said, what year were you converted?
He said, 1905.
I didn't know anything about this, but you
can understand how I felt when I read
in the Methodist Christian Advocate, A Great Revival
is sweeping the United States.
Its power is felt in every nook and
corner of our broad land.
The Holy Spirit is convincing the people of
sin, of righteousness, and of judgment to come.
There is manifest a new degree of spiritual
power in the churches.
Pastors are crying out to God for help,
and not a few of them are glad
to find the help right at hand.
In the Baptist magazine, it said, Tidings of
a Revival come from every side.
There is a quickening of spiritual impulse and
life in the churches and in our educational
institutions.
I don't want to wear you with all
the details, but I got a hold of
the Baptist reports and found everywhere blessing.
Like Ohio, the cause never looked better.
In Michigan, the number of baptisms was significant.
In Indiana, hopeful conditions.
In Illinois, more promising than for a dozen
years.
In Iowa, one of the major emphasis was
education, and there wasn't so much revival.
In Wisconsin, the Baptists were growing in influence.
These are just Baptist reports.
The Methodists said there is a stir in
our Methodist camp.
In 1903, that was the end of the
Great Crusade, we made very little gain in
membership.
In 1904, the net gain was 32,000.
In 1905, it was not less than 60
,000.
It had doubled that one year.
Great revival in other parts.
The Congregationalists were stirred.
Among them, people like Washington Gladden, the Disciples
of Christ, the Lutherans.
One Lutheran magazine reported that the revival seems
to have crossed the seas and been breaking
on our shores.
From widely separated points come tidings of great
spiritual awakenings.
I did collect some statistics.
At that time, about a million immigrants were
coming to the United States every year, most
of them Roman Catholic.
And yet the increase in Protestant churches was
far greater than that of the Roman Catholic
Church.
A Methodist editor said, The Spirit of God
has been graciously poured out in many places
in our country, but not more anywhere than
in our colleges.
Kenneth Scott LaTourette said when he was a
student at Yale in 1905, one quarter of
all the students were enrolled in prayer meetings
and Bible study.
I live next door to UCLA, 36,000
students.
Do you think that 9,000 are enrolled
in prayer meetings?
No.
What about the effect of this?
The revival continued in 1905, 1906, and just
after the San Francisco earthquake, which, by the
way, also at the same time was a
devastating earthquake in Valparaiso, Chile.
Just after the earthquake came the remarkable outpouring
in Azusa Street, the beginning of the Pentecostal
movement.
The strange thing is this, until I published
this book of mine about 1973, most Pentecostal
leaders didn't know that Azusa Street was preceded
by a nationwide revival.
They thought Azusa Street was just a little
thing on its own.
Well, sure, it was something that spread.
They began with about 120, but that year
about a million people had been converted in
the United States.
So people don't always know the background.
The social impact was quite strong.
Here's what they said in one great report.
We find evidence of a revival of righteousness
in the popular and pulpit protests against sharp
practice and double-dealing, indignation against swindling, oppressive
corporations, dishonest officials and banks and trust companies,
public wrath against political scandals, and the successful
overflow of many such.
Here's what someone said.
Fancy someone in Wales saying we must have
an ethical revival first.
We must enter upon a crusade against profanity,
obscenity, prize-fighting.
We must close up the saloons, make kindling
wood of the gambling tables and raid the
brothels before we have a revival.
No, he said, all these infamies vanish before
the Spirit's baptism like bats and owls before
the light of day.
Any of you have ever been in the
Middle West and find your car covered with
ice?
You have to take a scraper and scrape
and scrape to get the ice off so
that you can see.
Yet sometimes if you wait just one hour,
the sun melts the whole thing off.
You don't have to work that way.
The revival in Schenectady, which I mentioned, meant
stronger and better citizens, brighter and happier homes,
a cleaner city life, and the strengthening of
all the churches and other agencies for good.
Here's what was reported from Philadelphia.
We're in the excitement and enjoyment of a
great civic righteousness revival.
To a delegation of businessmen at the City
Hall on June 1st, our Mayor John Weaver
said, the hand of the Lord is in
it.
So apparently in different parts, in Cincinnati for
example, civic reform followed the spiritual revival.
It seemed to have prompted from the wave
of reform that swept over the country.
The Methodists in their quarterly journal said, throughout
the Republic there are signs of the revival
of the public conscience, which in many states
and cities has broken party lines, rejected machine
-made candidates, and elected governors, senators, assemblymen, mayors,
and county attorneys have recognized honesty and independence,
the first fruits of a new zeal for
the living Christ, as the Lord of all
human activity, social, industrial, commercial, and political.
I wish that happened today.
I spoke at the Rose Bowl on Saturday,
when I said that George Gallup had declared
that the number of people in the United
States who claimed to be born again had
risen from 46 percent to 53 percent.
Some people started to applaud, and I stopped
them.
I said, I don't believe it.
I don't believe that 53 percent of people
in the United States are born again.
If they were, this would be a different
country.
Whereas the Wall Street Journal said, this must
be the first awakening that has had no
effect upon the morals of the nation.
We ought to be ashamed to say that.
And I think one of the reasons for
it is that they don't preach repentance.
They just try to enlist people.
The only evidence of the new birth is
the new life.
And if a man's not living a new
life, I wonder if he's had a new
birth.
Now, this revival was part of the wave
that swept the world before World War I.
Why was it forgotten?
Well, I think there are reasons.
First of all, the Great Britain lost a
million men in World War I.
The French lost more than the British.
The Germans lost more than the French.
The Russians lost more than the Germans.
It was a blood-letting unprecedented trauma for
the human race.
Perhaps that's why people forgot what went before.
But I suppose there are other reasons.
What we called in those days modernism began,
undercutting the gospel.
On top of that, we found a new
science of psychology based largely on what was
taught by Sigmund Freud, who spoke of God
as an illusion.
I know there are good Christian psychologists today,
but the Freudian movement was anti-Christian, and
that had a dominant say.
But it's interesting that the light that was
set ablaze in 1904-1905 continued.
You might say, what was the relationship between
this new movement of Pentecostalism and the general
revival?
Well, they were both unstructured, there's no doubt
about that.
For instance, anyone coming into this meeting tonight
wouldn't have said it was a very structured
meeting.
That's my warning.
I'm learning to preach to time.
But the meetings were sort of informal, led
by the Spirit.
That was true of the general revival, the
Welsh revival period, and also of Pentecostalism.
The main difference was that the Pentecostal movement
laid stress upon especially two aspects, two gifts
of the Spirit, healing and speaking in tongues.
Whereas the general movement was interdenominational, and the
particular movement grew out of that.
It led to a revival in Brazil, a
revival in Chile, a revival in Mexico.
And this is part of the revival all
around the world.
What's the lesson?
The lesson is prayer.
What we need to do is to pray.
We need to proclaim God's Word.
We can't organize revival, but we can prepare
by prayer for what God is going to
do.
Amen.