At the present time, the national debt of
United States exceeds one trillion dollars.
That's the amount that the government owes the
people.
One million times a million.
But when President James Buchanan delivered his inaugural
address in 1857, he declared that our present
financial condition is without parallel in history.
No nation has ever before been embarrassed from
too large a surplus in its treasury.
He proposed paying off the national debt entirely.
Times were good.
Profits were predicting a prolific harvest and editorials
were captioning a good time coming.
And yet 32 weeks later, every bank in
United States went broke.
Now, about that time, the Protestant churches boasted
a membership of about four million.
Between 1857 and 1859, there occurred a revival
and an awakening in United States which added
fully a million members out of a population
of 30 million.
It was the most wholesome awakening of all
time.
The Episcopal Bishop McElveen of Ohio stated, it
is a work so extensive, so remarkable in
its rise, progress and influence, I have no
doubt whence it cometh, it is the Lord's
doing.
And so said all contemporaries except those whose
philosophy rejected evangelism.
That was not only the opinion of the
moment.
D.L. Moody died in 1899.
After a lifetime of service, he declared, I
would like before I go hence to see
the whole Church of God quickened as it
was in 57, and a wave going from
Maine to California that will sweep thousands into
the kingdom of God.
It seems fair to deduce that in 40
years of winning men to Christ, Moody had
seen nothing to compare with the outpouring of
the Holy Spirit in 1858 when he served
his apprenticeship.
Moody did not say, I would like to
see the whole Church of God quickened as
it was in 1893.
That was his best year in evangelism.
But the year 1858 was the greatest of
his experience.
Professor Perry Miller of Harvard made no profession
of faith.
In a book published after his death, he
called the 1858 revival the event of the
century.
However, Professor William McLaughlin of Brown University named
it a religious excitement organized by panic-stricken
businessmen that scarcely deserved to rank as an
awakening.
However, he used as a definition of an
awakening, a deliberate organized conscious effort by members
of a society to construct a more satisfying
culture.
Could you imagine applying such a definition to
the meeting of the apostles in the upper
room at Pentecost?
Evangelicals also called it a businessman's revival, but
they attribute it to a prayer meeting started
at the time of the bank panic by
a lame man called Jeremiah Lanphier.
It was attended only by half a dozen
men out of a population of a million,
and then it overflowed into thousands of prayer
meetings followed by a great revival.
I've had to challenge both interpretations, the secular
one and the evangelical one.
Now, for a dozen years, religious life in
the United States was in decline.
Almost every denomination was losing members or not
keeping up with the birth rate.
What were the reasons given?
Some people had lost faith in spiritual things
because of unhappy disillusionment that vexed the followers
of William Miller, who had predicted Christ's return
and reign in 1844.
Other people were making money very easily and
very easily forgetting God, but most seriously, the
slavery contention divided some denominations and many congregations.
Sometime before the revival, the Reverend William Arthur,
a British Methodist, preached a series of powerful
messages in Ohio and soon afterwards published them
as the Tongue of Fire.
Arthur carried his readers back to Pentecost, seeking
a revival of its power and appealing for
prevailing prayer.
His book concludes with a most remarkable prayer
to God the Holy Spirit.
Descend upon all the churches.
Renew Pentecost in this our age.
Baptize thy people generally again with tongues of
fire.
Crown this century with a revival of pure
religion greater than that of the last century,
greater than that of the first, and greater
than any demonstration of the Spirit ever yet
by faith to man.
Evangelicals of all denominations read this book, and
many there were, after a couple of years,
who asserted that this extraordinary prayer had been
answered.
Now until today, there's been general agreement that
the 1857-58 revival began in the United
States in early 1858, although it was preceded
by a movement of prayer of the humblest
origins.
What is not commonly known is that long
before that bank panic, there was a concert
of prayer.
The Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, Lutherans, Episcopalians, and others
participating.
Fulton Street was only one of thousands of
gatherings praying for an outpouring of the Holy
Spirit upon the churches of the United States
and Canada.
Denominations were officially committed to prayer for revival
and already engaged in it.
Take an example.
The Presbyterian General Assembly quoted one Presbytery after
another.
We would upon our bended knees offer the
prayer for Bacchus, O Lord, revive thy work.
And then they summed it up by saying,
next to a state of actual revival is
the sense of its need and the struggle
to obtain it at any sacrifice of treasure,
toil, or time.
We trust that it's not distant when this
state of general revival shall be ours.
We mentioned the theory that we owe this
revival to the bank panic, but Canada was
utterly untouched by the bank panic.
The people there were praying for revival.
Revivals began in the Atlantic provinces and in
Ontario.
About a week before that bank panic, an
extraordinary revival broke out in Hamilton, Ontario.
Walter and Phoebe Palmer, well-known Methodists who
had been up speaking in summer camp meetings,
lost their baggage and stayed over in Hamilton
unexpectedly.
The ministers arranged special meetings for them on
very short notice.
Very few attended the first meeting, but there
arose such an awakening that the mayor of
the town, business leaders, and common people repented.
And this revival in Canada continued through 1858,
59, and 60.
Now, the South of the United States, producing
cotton, was very little affected by the bank
panic.
If we were to ask the question, what
community in the South was least affected, we'd
have to answer the black slaves.
They didn't have a dime in the bank.
Revival began breaking out in the fall of
1857 in Virginia and the Carolinas among the
slaves.
At that time, blacks met in the same
churches with the whites.
Sometimes they occupied a gallery or some separate
section, but the churches proved to be too
small.
So in Virginia, the great warehouses were filled
with black inquirers.
One of the most remarkable revivals of modern
times occurred during the fall of 57 in
Beaufort, South Carolina, where in 15 weeks a
pastor baptized 428 believers of whom 422 were
black, making it the world's largest Baptist church.
A truly remarkable revival occurred in Anson Street
Presbyterian Church in Charleston, South Carolina, where 48
black members outnumbered the dozen white.
The minister was Dr. John Girardo, an outstanding
theologian who could have had any church he
wanted in South Carolina.
He started a prayer meeting entreating God to
send revival.
It constantly increased until the sanctuary was filled.
He was urged by his officers to commence
preaching, but he declined, waiting, he said, for
the outpouring of the Spirit.
Then one evening, while leading the petitioners in
prayer, he received a sensation as if a
surge of electric power had struck his head
and diffused itself throughout his whole body.
For a little while, he stood speechless under
the strange physical feeling.
He stood up, then he sat down again.
He was confused.
There was nothing in the Presbyterian order of
service to account for this.
Then he said, the Holy Spirit has come.
We will begin preaching tomorrow evening.
So he closed the service with a hymn,
dismissed the congregation, came down from the pulpit,
but no one left the house.
Then he realized the situation.
The Holy Spirit had come not only to
him, but had taken possession of the hearts
of the people.
He immediately began exhorting them to accept the
gospel.
They began to sob softly like the falling
of rain, then with deeper emotion to weep
bitterly, or to rejoice loudly according to circumstance.
It was midnight before he could dismiss the
meeting.
In the greatest event of his ministry, I'm
quoting him, he preached to crowds of 1
,500 to 2,000 night and day for
eight weeks, and converts in great numbers, white
and black, joined the churches of Charleston.
Now throughout the fall of 1857, intercessors multiplied
throughout the country.
Some conventions were far reaching.
The ministers and elders of four Presbyterian synods
met in Pittsburgh December 1st to pray for
revival.
Baptist Churches New York launched united prayer meetings,
so did other denominations.
Not only so, but Baptist Methodist congregations, Presbyterian,
Lutherans, and Episcopalians reported local revivals in state
after state, some as far away as Texas
and Iowa.
Now in February of 1858, Fulton Street and
other businessmen's prayer meetings overflowed.
Horace Greeley, the editor who said go west
young men, sent one of his reporters around
the prayer meetings to count how many men
were actually praying at noon.
In an hour, the man with horse and
buggy could reach only 12 meetings, but he
announced 6,100 men at prayer.
In the evenings, the churches were crowded every
night to hear the word, and soon converts
were coming in at the rate of 10
,000 a week.
Newspapers gave headlines to the reports of revival.
Along the Hudson and the Mohawk, revival stirred
the population in town after town.
In several places, the Baptists had so many
candidates for believers baptism that they broke the
ice on the river and immersed the candidates
in icy water, and when Baptists do that,
they really are on fire.
Revival was underway in New England.
It started in concerts of prayer.
It spread all over Boston.
Finney was preaching at Park Street Church and
said it was too general to keep any
account of the number of converts.
New England's church bells rang three times a
day to call people to prayer.
In Newark, New Jersey, 2,785 of the
city's 70,000 people were converted in a
couple of months, according to reports the most
mature of the people.
In Pennsylvania, there were great revivals in 1857,
but six weeks or so after the financial
crash, a businessmen's prayer meeting was started in
Philadelphia.
Only a dozen men came out of a
population of half a million, but on the
3rd of February of 1858, the intercessors repaired
to an ante room in Janes Hall, a
great theater downtown, where the attendance has picked
up to 3,000 a day.
Then the attendance was so great, it overflowed.
The hymn written by George Duffield, Stand Up,
Stand Up for Jesus, was written there and
sung for the first time by those men.
In Washington, the nation's capital, there were five
daily prayer meetings.
5,000 people attended the one in the
Academy of Music.
However, Charles Finney, strange to say, reported that
the only part of the country not affected
by the revival was the South, because they
were addicted to their peculiar institution of slavery.
But this is not true.
I can document the revival from Richmond, Virginia,
around to Wacoon, Texas.
The mayor of Chattanooga called for Thanksgiving in
February, not November, to celebrate the coming of
the millennium.
He thought the millennium had come.
The revival swept Ohio and all the states.
The movement crossed the Alleghenies again in March,
1858, crowded all the halls and churches all
the way to Omaha.
In Ohio, 200 towns reported 12,000 converts
in a couple of months.
Was it lasting?
Between 1853 and 1857, Methodist churches in Ohio
were losing membership annually, but in 1858 they
gained 12%.
Michigan Baptist won 168 in four years, but
in 1858, 2,539.
Chicago had a population of 100,000, and
yet they had 2,000 men meeting each
noon for prayer, and the churches were conducting
two and three and four meetings a day.
Trinity Episcopal Church had 121 members in 1857.
They built a new church for 1,400
in 1860.
A concerned shoe salesman offered to teach Sunday
school class, but he was told that they
had 12 teachers and only 16 pupils.
So he went out to the streets and
rounded up 17 urchins and started classes and
founded a huge Sunday school.
That was the beginning of the life ministry
of Dwight Lyman Moody.
The news of the awakening back east reached
California in hundreds of thousands of affectionate letters,
and this caused a flocking of Christians to
prayer meetings in the churches and other gathering
places.
The California towns reported extraordinary interest in religion,
and two months later, daily prayer meetings in
San Francisco were continuing with unabated zeal.
The results were rather disappointing in the southern
part of California, where there was very little
Anglo population.
Before the close of 1857, there was a
remarkable awakening among seamen in New York and
all the other ports.
The Seaman's Friend recorded an outpouring of the
Spirit in almost every seaman's battle around the
coasts.
There was an extraordinary revival of religion in
the United States Navy, and dozens of army
volunteer regiments marched to church services.
Firemen in the bigger cities were somewhat of
a problem because they often would battle each
other and fight the police and civilians as
well as dousing flames.
They made a great effort to reach firemen
in all the great cities, and many, many
were converted.
In American colleges in New England, the Middle
Atlantic States, and the South and the West,
it was scarcely an exception there was a
great student awakening.
The work at Yale found no parallel in
the whole history of that institution.
In the most places, the majority of students
professed conversion, and there was a vast increase
of candidates for the ministry reported by the
seminaries.
Now this 1858 revival was received by great
enthusiasm by the secular press.
They testified of great changes for good in
every place.
With few exceptions, the 1857-58 awakening was
supported by every Protestant denomination, including the Lutherans
and the Episcopalians, although a minority in each
objected.
These meetings were commended for their quietness and
restraint, and they gained goodwill of citizens in
every place.
Looking back, none of the objections raised about
extravagances in previous movements were even mentioned in
connection with the 1857-58 revival.
Looking forward, there were manifested no signs and
wonders except extraordinary conversions, no gifts of tongues
or healing, but many, many calls to service.
Besides a million church members reinvigorated in the
movement, a million converts were added to the
membership of major Protestant denominations.
The total number of church members was four
million, and in the two years it became
five million.
Until now, only estimates of the total in
gathering have been published.
I've examined the statistics of 80% of
the Protestant churches and have reached the incomplete
figure of 1,001,379 added to the
churches in two years.
Beyond all else, it was a layman's movement
in which laymen of every sort of church
affiliation gladly undertook both normal and exceptional responsibility.
Now, despite the outbreak of the bloodiest, most
homicidal war in the world between Napoleon's time
and World War I, the American Civil War,
the awakening continued effective in the armies of
North and South.
In the civilian population of the North, after
a national repentance in 1863, it revived the
churches in distressing days and solaced many anguished
people.
In the South, civilian fervor, strong at first,
waned by 1864, but in the wartime 60s,
fervent and united prayer continued, with significant seasons
of refreshing reported, especially in the theaters of
war.
150,000 Confederate soldiers were converted in the
Army of Northern Virginia, but I can document
revivals also in the Union Army.
In a little town called Ringgold in Georgia,
they marched 150 converts down to the river
to be baptized according to preference, some by
immersion, some by pouring, and some by sprinkling.
And then 400 took communion, and that evening
Major General Howard preached the gospel, 86 more
soldiers were converted.
Major Howard was killed at the Battle of
Kennesaw Mountain a month later, but that revival
was in Ringgold, Georgia, in the Army of
General Sherman, invading Georgia.
The evangelists were four young laymen from Illinois,
Reynolds, Nichols, Bliss, and D.L. Moody, 1863,
10 years before he became famous.
Not only was there a great effect upon
the Negro population both North and South, churches
gaining so much strength in numbers, but there
were gracious outpourings of the spirit in West
Indian communities before the end of 1858.
In 1860, a remarkable awakening began in Moravian
church and spread all over Jamaica.
Chapels were once again packed and widespread conversions
followed.
The small beginnings of missionary churches were reported
in Brazil in 1859, and at this time
was also an enterprise pioneered in Mexico.
And following 1858, American Missionary Society expanded ministries
in Asia and Africa.
Among the products of the revival were John
Clough, a Baptist converted in Iowa, who maintained
the ministry of prayer and became a key
figure in a movement in India, baptizing 9
,606 in three days, 2,222 in one
day.
Now this revival became worldwide, but its effect
in the United States was very significant.
Let me give an example.
In Kalamazoo, all the denominations united in a
public prayer meeting.
At the very first meeting, a request was
read out.
A praying wife asked the prayers of this
meeting for her unconverted husband.
All at once, a muscular man stood up
and said, I'm that man.
I have a praying wife.
This request must be for me.
I want you to pray for me.
He was a blacksmith.
He was converted then and there.
Just as soon as he took a seat,
another man arose, ignoring his predecessor, and he
said with tears, I'm that man.
I have a praying wife.
She prays for me, and now she's asking
you to pray for me.
I'm sure I'm that man.
I want you to pray for me.
He was a lawyer, and he was converted.
Half a dozen convicted husbands were converted in
the first five minutes.
In times of evangelism, the evangelist seeks a
sinner.
In times of revival, the sinners come chasing
after the Lord.
There's that difference.
One of the significant things was the number
of conversions among the black slaves in the
South.
I didn't know that there was an army
of liberation in training in the South, planning
an insurrection in 1857.
They were going to march on Atlanta.
A hundred thousand drilled men.
But so great was the revival that the
leader of that underground movement apparently was converted
and decided that a higher power was going
to intervene in the struggle for liberty.
So he called off the insurrection.
Supposing it had not been called off, what
would have happened?
The South was well prepared.
They would have slaughtered the blacks.
There'd been a lot of innocent blood shed.
There'd been reprisals taken.
And so the insurrection was called off.
It was almost as if the Almighty told
the black slaves, slavery is a sin and
it demands a blood atonement.
Actually there were 600,000 white soldiers lost
their lives in the Civil War.
But the blacks weren't to blame for this
and they were told to remain quiet, which
they did.
Had there been a slaughter of the blacks
in the South, perhaps they would have turned
their back on Christianity.
And you'd have seen a situation somewhat like
Haiti where they have voodoo or Brazil where
they have Candomblé and Macumba and the other
African cults.
Now this revival continued for 40 years.
It didn't continue as an exciting revival for
40 years.
But D.L. Moody, for example, extended the
revival by his ministry for 40 years.
Not only that, but the denominations took up
evangelism and made it the usual practice of
their meetings.
Most churches planned evangelistic campaigns and most churches
united in evangelistic efforts to reach a whole
city for Christ.
It not only recruited candidates for the ministry,
for instance Union Theological Seminary had the largest
class in its history.
The same was true of other theological seminaries,
but it recruited quite a number of missionaries
for the foreign field.
And following this revival, following the Civil War,
there was a great expansion of missionary endeavor
throughout the whole world.
The revival continued in Canada also for a
matter of three or four years and continued
on in the following decades.
You could say that the Moody years, Moody
began ministering in 1858 and continued till 1899.
41 years represent the extent of that revival.
But that's another subject we can talk about
somewhat later.
It has been complained that there was not
much social effect due to that great awakening.
Actually, there was a great social ministry, chiefly
for soldiers and prisoners of war and those
dislocated by the war.
But in the meantime, a revival broke out
in Britain and there the new social developments
occurred.
Home missions in the Salvation Army were extended
in the evangelistic social outreach of the awakening
worldwide.
And then after the war was over, these
new developments were brought across the Atlantic to
take root in United States.
Every great awakening has its social impact.
Sometimes it takes some years before it's truly
felt.
But books have been written on the social
impact of the 1859 revival in Britain and
nearly all of those social developments were paralleled
by similar developments in the United States.
It's interesting also that out of that British
revival came the rise of the China Inland
Mission through Hudson Taylor, who was busy working
in the revival in London.
That was the first of the interdenominational faith
missions.
Now, how are we to account for this
great awakening of 1858?
I think it can be summed up in
one way, and that is it was preceded
by prayer.
The bank panic had some influence on people,
but it was not because of the revival.
The revival movement, especially in its prayer concerts,
had started before the bank panic and continued
all the way through until it ran its
course, and then produced one of the greatest
awakenings of all time.
The denominations were one in brotherly love.
Everyone committed upon the extraordinary fraternal good feeling
at that time.
It was one of the most cooperative periods
of Christian history when the denominations worked together
as one man.
What lessons can we learn from it?
Although things have changed and many other features
of Christian work have arisen, I think we
could say this was the most wholesome revival
in American history, and we ought to pray
that the same sort of thing may happen
again.
God grant it.