After each of the three sermons of the day, the preachers “exhorted” and urged the penitent, sin-convicted soul to kneel at the altar, and to seek the mourner’s bench. These “after meetings,” as they were called, were really the most strikingly characteristic features of the camp. So mighty was the power at work in individual hearts, so great the effect of mental and physical exhaustion, that many fell prostrate in the straw before the mourners’ bench, and lay there as if dead. Others, again, were differently affected, and uttered wild shouts of “hallelujah” and “amen,” which, so far from disturbing the preacher, seemed rather to urge him on to use yet more force in the delivery of his message of salvation for the penitent sinner.
The singing at these camp meetings was in charge of a regular chorister, but he was often unable to guide the great volume of sound that broke out again and again from the hearts of the excited people, who sang with more spirit than knowledge or rhythm. The leaders who guided and supported the meetings were sincere and devout, and many of them were of social and political prominence. Men and women of the first respectability were constant in attendance, and many of them joined in the work as earnestly as the preachers themselves. The peculiar manifestations of the “after-meetings” are thus referred to by John McGee in the letter previously mentioned to his Presiding Elder:
“The nights were truly awful. The people were differently exercised, some exhorting, some shouting, some weeping, some praying, and some crying for mercy, while others lay as if dead on the ground. Some of the spiritually wounded fled to the woods, and their groans could be heard all through the grounds, like the groans of dying men. From thence many came into the camp rejoicing and praising God.”
Such scenes prevailed wherever camp meetings were held, the people, ministers, laity, saints and sinners yielding miraculously, as it seemed, to the sway of some strong spiritual influence. That many wild and eccentric things were done and said, and that the borderland of fanaticism was often overstepped, cannot be denied. But, in spite of these extravagances of speech and action, which were certainly hindrances rather than the opposite, the good effects of the camp meeting were almost universally acknowledged. The moral transformations that followed it in many communities were conspicuous, although, alas! such is human nature, they were not always permanent in all cases of sudden and violent “conversion.” But, in spite of backslidings, many and often, the camp meetings of early days, as well as those of the present, were, and are, productive of good, and serve their purpose of awakening the slumbering conscience. The eccentric manifestations of feeling so characteristic of the earlier meetings have, as a rule, toned down in these modern and more repressive times, but they are not yet wholly subdued.
The Shadow of the Attacoa
By Thornwell Jacobs
SYNOPSIS OF PRECEDING CHAPTERS
Commenced in the April number.