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

by Edwin Paxton Hood

All impartial historians of the period place this most remarkable religious impulse in the rank of the very foremost phenomena of the times. The calm and able historian, Earl Stanhope, speaking of it, as “despised at its commencement,” continues, “with less immediate importance than wars or political changes, it endures long after not only the result but the memory of these has passed away, and thousands” (his lordship ought to have said millions) “who never heard of Fontenoy or Walpole, continue to follow the precepts, and venerate the name of John Wesley.” While the latest, a still more able and equally impartial and quiet historian, Mr. Lecky, says, “Our splendid victories by land and sea must yield in real importance to this religious revolution; it exercised a profound and lasting influence upon the spirit of the Established Church of England, upon the amount and distribution of the moral forces of that nation, and even upon the course of its political history.”

Shall we, then, first attempt to obtain some adequate idea of what this Revival effected, by a slight effort to realise what sort of world and state of society it was into which the Revival came? One writer truly remarks, “Never has century risen on christian England so void of soul and faith as that which opened with Queen Anne, and which reached its misty noon beneath the second George, a dewless night succeeded by a dewless dawn. There was no freshness in the past and no promise in the future; the Puritans were buried, the Methodists were not born.” It is unquestionably true that black, bad and corrupt as society was, for the most part, all round, in the eighteenth century, intellectual and spiritual forces broke forth, simultaneously we had almost said, and believing, as we do, in the Providence which governed the rise of both, we may say, consentaneously, which have left far behind all social regenerations which the pen of history has recited before. Of almost all the fruits we enjoy, it may be said the seeds were planted then; even those which, like the printing-press or the gospel, had been planted ages before, were so transplanted as to flourish with a new vigour.

Our eye has been taught to rest on an interesting incident. It was in 1757 John Wesley, travelling and preaching, then about fifty years of age, but still with nearly forty years of work before him, arrived in Glasgow. He saw in the University its library and its pictures; but, had he possessed the vision of a Hebrew seer he might have glanced up from the quadrangle of the college to the humble rooms, up a spiral staircase, of a young workman, over whose lodging was the sign and information that they were tenanted by a “mathematical instrument maker to the University.” This young man, living there upon a poor fare, and eking out a poor subsistence, with many thoughts burdening his mind, was destined to be the founder of the greatest commercial and material revolution the world has known: through him seems to have been fulfilled the wonderfully significant prophecy of Nahum: “The chariots shall rage in the streets, they shall jostle one against another in the broad ways: they shall seem like torches, they shall run like the lightnings.” This young man was James Watt, who gave to the world the steam engine. A few years after he gave his mighty invention to Birmingham; and the world has never been the same world since. “By that invention,” says Emerson, “one man can do the work of two hundred and fifty men;” and in Manchester alone and in its vicinity there are probably sixty thousand boilers, and the aggregate power of a million horses.

Let not the allusion seem out of place. That age was the seed-time of the present harvest fields; in that time those great religious ideas which have wrought such an astonishing revolution, acquired body and form; and we ought to notice how, when God sets free some new idea, He also calls into existence the new vehicle for its diffusion. He did not trust the early christian faith to the old Latin races, to the selfish and æsthetic Greek, or to the merely conservative Hebrew; He “hissed,” in the graphic language of the old Bible, for a new race, and gave the New Testament to the Teutonic people, who have ever been its chief guardians and expositors; and thus, in all reviews of the development and unfolding of the religious life in the times of which we speak, we have to notice how the material and the spiritual changes have re-acted on each other, while both have brought a change which has indeed “made all things new.”

Contrasting the state of society after the rise of the Great Revival with what it was before, the present with the past, it is quite obvious that something has brought about a general decency and decorum of manners, a tenderness and benevolence of sentiment, a religious interest in, and observance of, pious usages, not to speak of a depth of religious life and conviction, and a general purity and nobility of literary taste, which did not exist before. All these must be credited to this great movement. It is not in the nature of steam engines, whether stationary or locomotive, nor in printing presses, or Staffordshire potteries, undirected by spiritual forces, to raise the morals or to improve the manners of mankind.

If sometimes in the presence of the spectacles of ignorance, crime, irreligion, and corruption in our own day, we are filled with a sense of despair for the prospects of society, it may be well to take a retrospect of what society was in England at the commencement of the last century. When George III. ascended the throne the population of England was not much over five millions; at the commencement of the present century it was nearly eleven millions; but with the intensely crowded population of the present day, the cancerous elements of society, the dangerous, pauperised, and criminal classes are in far less proportion, not merely relatively, but really. It was a small country, and possessed few inhabitants. There are few circumstances which can give us much pleasure in the review. National distress was constantly making itself bitterly felt; it was the age of mobs and riots. The state of the criminal law was cruel in the extreme. Blackstone calculates that for no fewer than one hundred and sixty offences, some of them of the most frivolous description, the judge was bound to pronounce sentence of death. Crime, of course, flourished. During the year 1738 no fewer than fifty-two criminals were hanged at Tyburn. During that and the preceding years, twelve thousand persons had been convicted, within the Bills of Mortality, for smuggling gin and selling it without licence. The amusements of all classes of people were exactly of that order calculated to create a cruel disposition, and thus to encourage crime; bear-baiting, bull-baiting, prize-fighting, cock-fighting: on a Shrove Tuesday it was dangerous to pass down any public street. This was the day selected for the barbarity of tying a harmless cock to a stake, there to be battered to death by throwing a stick at it from a certain distance. The grim humour of the people took this form of expressing the national hatred to the French, from the Latin name for the cock, Gallus. It was in truth a barbarous pun.

With abundant wealth and means of happiness, the people fell far short of what we should consider comfort now. Life and liberty were cheap, and a prevalent Deism or Atheism was united to a wild licentiousness of manners, brutalising all classes of society. For the most part, the Church of England had so shamefully forgotten or neglected her duty—this is admitted now by all her most ardent ministers—while the Noncomformists had sunk generally into so cold an indifferentism in devotion, and so hard and sceptical a frame in theology, that every interest in the land was surrendered to profligacy and recklessness, and, in thoughtful minds, to despair. Society in general was spiritually dead. The literature of England, with two or three famous exceptions, suffered a temporary eclipse. Such as it was, it was perverted from all high purposes, and was utterly alien to all purity and moral dignity. A good idea of the moral tone of the times might be obtained by running the eye over a few volumes of the old plays of this period, many of them even written by ladies; it is amazing to us now to think not only that they could be tolerated, but even applauded. The gaols were filled with culprits; but this did not prevent the heaths, moors, and forests from swarming with highwaymen, and the cities with burglars. In the remote regions of England, such as Cornwall in the west, Yorkshire and Northumberland in the north, and especially in the midland Staffordshire, the manners were wild and savage, passing all conception and description. We have to conceive of a state of society divested of all the educational, philanthropic, and benevolent activities of modern times. There were no Sunday-schools, and few day-schools; here and there, some fortunate neighbourhood possessed a grammar-school from some old foundation. Or, perhaps some solitary chapel, retreating into a bye-lane in the metropolitan city, or the country town, or, more probably, far away from any town, stood at some confluence of roads, a monument of old intolerance; but, as we said, religious life was in fact dead, or lying in a trance.

As to the religious teachers of those times, we know of no period in our history concerning which it might so appropriately be said, in the words of the prophet, “The pastors” are “become brutish, and have not sought the Lord.” In the life of a singular man, but not a good one, Thomas Lord Lyttleton, in a letter dated 1775, we have a most graphic portrait of a country clergyman, a friend of Lyttleton, who went by the designation of “Parson Adams.” We suppose him to be no bad representative of the average parson of that day—coarse, profane, jocular, irreligious. On a Saturday evening he told Lyttleton, his host, that he should send his flocks to grass on the approaching Sabbath. “The next morning,” says Lyttleton, “we hinted to him that the company did not wish to restrain him from attending the Divine service of the parish; but he declared that it would be adding contempt to neglect if, when he had absented himself from his own church he should go to any other. This curious etiquette he strictly observed; and we passed a Sabbath contrary, I fear, both to law and to gospel.”

If we desire to obtain some knowledge of what the Church of England was, as represented by her clergy when George III. was king, we should go to her own records; and for the later years of his reign, notably to the life of that learned, active, and amiable man, Dr. Blomfield, Bishop of London, whose memory was a wonderful repository of anecdotes, not tending to elevate the clergy of those times in popular estimation. Intoxication was a vice very characteristic of the cloth: on one occasion the bishop reproved one of his Chester clergy for drunkenness: he replied, “But, my lord, I never was drunk on duty.” “On duty!” exclaimed the bishop; “and pray, sir, when is a clergyman not on duty?” “True,” said the other; “my lord, I never thought of that.” The bishop went into a poor man’s cottage in one of the valleys in the Lake district, and asked whether his clergyman ever visited him. The poor man replied that he did very frequently. The bishop was delighted, and expressed his gratification at this pastoral oversight; and this led to the discovery that there were a good many foxes on the hills behind the house, which gave the occasion for the frequency of calls which could scarcely be considered pastoral. The chaplain and son-in-law of Bishop North examined candidates for orders in a tent on a cricket-field, he being engaged as one of the players; the chaplain of Bishop Douglas examined whilst shaving; Bishop Watson never resided in his diocese during an episcopate of thirty-four years.

And those who preached seem rarely to have been of a very edifying order of preachers; Bishop Blomfield used to relate how, in his boyhood, when at Bury St. Edmund’s, the Marquis of Bristol had given a number of scarlet cloaks to some poor old women; they all appeared at church on the following Sunday, resplendent in their new and bright array, and the clergyman made the donation of the marquis the subject of his discourse, announcing his text with a graceful wave of his hand towards the poor old bodies who were sitting there all together: “Even Solomon, in all his glory, was not arrayed like one of these!” This worthy seems to have been very capable of such things: on another occasion a dole of potatoes was distributed by the local authorities in Bury, and this also was improved in a sermon. “He had himself,” the bishop says, “a very corpulent frame, and pompous manner, and a habit of rolling from side to side while he delivered himself of his breathing thoughts and burning words; on the occasion of the potato dole, he chose for his singularly appropriate text (Exodus xvi. 15): ‘And when the children of Israel saw it, they said one to another, It is manna;’ and thence he proceeded to discourse to the recipients of the potatoes on the warning furnished by the Israelites against the sin of gluttony, and the wickedness of taking more than their share.”