The Great Revival of the Eighteenth Century / With a supplemental chapter on the revival in America

by Edwin Paxton Hood

CHAPTER IX
BLOSSOMS IN THE WILDERNESS.

The preceding chapters have shown that the Great Revival was creating over the wild moral wastes of England a pure and spiritual atmosphere, and its movements and organisations were taking root in every direction. Voltaire, and that pedantic cluster of conceited infidels, the Bolingbrokes, Middletons, and Mandevilles, Chubbs, Woolstons, and Collinses, who prophesied that Christian faith was fast vanishing from the earth, were slightly premature. It is, indeed, interesting to notice the contrast in this period between England and the then most unhappy sister-kingdom of France: there, indeed, Christian faith did seem to be trodden underfoot of men. While a great silent, hallowed revolution was going on in one, all things were preparing for a tremendous revolution in the other. It was just about the time that the Revival was leavening English society that Lord Chesterfield summed up what he had noticed in France, in the following words: “In short, all the symptoms which I have ever met with in history previous to great changes and revolutions in government, now exist and daily increase in France.” The words were spoken several years before that terrible Revolution came, which conducted the King, the Queen, and almost all the aristocracy, respectability, and lingering piety of the nation to the scaffold. It was a wonderful compensation. A few years before, a sovereign had cast away from his nation, and from around his throne, all the social elements which could guard and give dignity to it; how natural, then, that the whole canaille of the kingdom should rush upon the throne of his successor, and cast it and its occupant into the bonfire of the Reign of Terror!

In Britain, from some cause, all was different. This period of the Revival has been truly called the starting-point of the modern religious history of that land; and, somehow, all things were singularly combining to give to the nation a new-born happiness, to create new facilities for mental growth and culture, and to enlarge and to fill their cup of national joy. It will be noticed that these things did not descend to the nation generally from the highest places of the land. With the exception of the sovereign, we cannot see many instances of a lively interest in the moral well-being of the people. Other exceptions there were, but they were very few. From the people themselves, and from the causes we have described, originated and spread those means which, amidst the wild agitations of revolution, as they came foaming over the Channel, and which were rather aided than repressed by the unwisdom of many of the governments and magistrates, calmed and enlightened the public mind, and secured the order of society, and the stability of the throne.

The historians of Wesleyanism—we will say it respectfully, but still very firmly—have been too uniformly disposed to see in their own society the centre and the spring of all those amazing means of social regeneration to which the period of the Revival gave birth. Dr. Abel Stevens specially seems to regard Methodism and Wesleyanism as conterminous. It would seem from him that the work of the printing-office, the book or the tract society, schools and missions, and the various means of social amelioration or redemption, all have their origin in Wesleyanism. We may give the largest honour to the venerable name of Wesley, and accept this history by Dr. Stevens as the best, yet as an American he did not fully know what had been done by others not in the Connexion. There was an immense field of Methodism which did not fall beneath the dominion of Wesley, and had no relation to the Wesleyan Conference. The same spirit touched simultaneously many minds, quite separated by ecclesiastical and social relations, but all wrought up to the same end. These pages have been greatly devoted to reminiscences of the great preachers, and illustrations of the preaching power of the Revival, but our readers know that the Revival did not end in preaching. These voices stirred the slumbering mind of the nation like a thunder-peal, but they roused to work and practical effort. The great characteristic of all that came out of the movement may be summed up in the often-quoted expression, “A single eye to the glory of God.” As one of the clergymen of Yorkshire, earnest and active in those times, was wont to say, “I do love those one-eyed Christians.”

We shall have occasion to mention the name of Robert Raikes, and that name reminds us not only of Gloucester, but of Gloucestershire; many circumstances gave to that most charming county a conspicuous place. Lying in the immediate neighbourhood of Bath, it attracted the attention of the Countess of Huntingdon. “As sure as God is in Gloucestershire,” was an old proverb, first used in monastic days, then applied to the Reformation time, when Tyndale, the first translator of the English New Testament, had his home in the lovely village of North Nibley; but it became yet more true when Whitefield preached to the immense concourses on Stinchcombe Hill; when Rodborough and Ebley, and the valley of the Stroud Water were lit up with Revival beacons, and when Rowland Hill established his vicarage at Wotton-under-Edge; then, in its immediate neighbourhood, arose that beautiful Christian worker, the close friend of George Whitefield, Cornelius Winter; and from his labours came forth his most eminent pupil, and great preacher, William Jay.

And the Revival took effect on distinct circles which certainly seemed outside of the Methodist movement, but which yet, assuredly, belonged to it; the Clapham Sect, for instance. “The Clapham Sect” is a designation originating in the facetious and satiric brain of Sydney Smith, than whom the Revival never had a more unjust, ungenerous, or ungracious critic; but the pages of the Edinburgh Review, in which the flippant sting of speech first appeared, years afterwards consecrated the term and made it historical in the elegant essay of Sir James Stephen. By his pen the sect, with all its leaders, acts, and consequences, are pleasantly described in the Essays on Ecclesiastical Biography; and surely this was as much the result of the Great Revival as the “evangelical succession” which calls forth the exercise in previous pages of the same interesting pen; it was all a natural evangelical succession, that of which we have spoken before, as enthusiasm for humanity growing out of enthusiasm for Divine truth. Men who have become fairly impressed by a sense of their own immortality and its redemption in Christ, become interested in the temporal well-being and the eternal welfare of others. It has always been so, and is so still, that men who have not a sense of man’s immortal welfare have usually cared but little about his temporal interests. Hospitals and churches, orphanages and missionary societies, usually grow out of the same spiritual root.

We scarcely need ask our readers to accompany us to the pleasant little village of Clapham, and its sweet sequestered Common, then so far removed from the great metropolis; surrounded by the homes of wealthy men, merchants, statesmen, eminent preachers, all of them infected with the spirit of the Revival, and all of them noteworthy in the story of those means which were to shiver the chains of the slave, to carry light to dark heathen minds, and to hand out the Bible to English villages and far-off nations. We have been desirous of conveying the impression that those were times of a singular and almost simultaneous spiritual upheaval; it was as if, in different regions of the great lake of humanity, submerged islands suddenly appeared from beneath the waves; and it is not too much to say that all those various means which have so tended to beautify and bless the world, schemes of education, schemes for the improvement of prison discipline, schemes of missionary enterprise for the extension of Christian influence in the East Indies, the destruction of slavery in the West Indies, and the abolition of the slave trade throughout the British Empire; Bible societies and Tract societies, and, in fact, the whole munificent machinery and organisation of our day, sprang forth from that revival of the last century. It seems now like a magnificent burst of enthusiasm; yet, ultimately it was based upon only two or three great elements of faith: the spiritual world was an intense reality; the soul of every man, woman, and child on the face of the earth had an endowment of immortality; they were precious to the Redeemer, they ought, therefore, to be precious to all the followers of the Redeemer. Charged with these truths, their spirits inflamed to a holy enthusiasm by them, from parlours and drawing-rooms, from the lowly homes and cottages of England, all these new professors appeared to be in search of occasions for doing good; the schemes worked themselves through all the varieties of human temperament and imperfection; but, looking back, it must surely be admitted that they achieved glorious results.

John Thornton.

If the reader, impressed by veneration, should make a pilgrimage to Clapham Common, and inquire from some one of the oldest inhabitants which was the house in which John Shore, the great Lord Teignmouth, the first President of the Bible Society, lived, his soul within him might be a little vexed to be informed that yonder large building at the extreme corner of the common, the great Roman Catholic Redemptionist College, is the house. There, were canvassed and brooded over a number of the schemes to which we have referred. Thither from his own house, close to the well-known “Plough”—its site now covered by suburban shops—went the great Zachary Macaulay, sometimes accompanied by his son, a bright, intelligent lad, afterwards known as Thomas Babington Macaulay. John Shore had been Governor of India, at Calcutta. On the common resided also, for some time, William Wilberforce. These were the great statesmen who were desirous of organising great plans, from which the consummating prayer of David in the 72nd Psalm should be realised. Then there was another house on the common, the mansion of John Thornton, which seemed to share with that of Lord Teignmouth the honours of these Divine committees of ways and means. Before the establishment of the Bible Society, Mr. Thornton had been in the habit of spending two thousand pounds a year in the distribution of Bibles and Testaments—a very Bible Society in himself. It is, perhaps, not too much to say, there was scarcely a thought which had for its object the well-being of the human family but it found its representation and discussion in those palatial abodes on Clapham Common. There were Granville Sharp and Thomas Clarkson; thither, how often went cheery old John Newton, to whom, first of all, on arriving in London, went every holy wayfarer from the provinces, wayfarers who soon found their entrance beneath his protecting wing, and cheery introduction to these pleasant circles. Beneath the incentives of his animating words, the fervid earnestness of Claudius Buchanan found its pathway of power, and The Star of the East—his great sermon on “Missions to India,”—was first seen shining over Clapham Common; and it was the same genial tongue which encouraged that fine, but almost forgotten man, John Campbell, in the enterprise of his spirit, to pierce into the deserts of Africa. We may notice how great ideas perpetuate themselves into generations, when we remember that it was John Campbell who first took out Robert Moffat, and settled him down in the field of his wonderful labours.