VI. THE REVIVALS OF 1857-8 AND 1865.

The design in asking but brief attention to these later revivals is that our readers may recall the facts as they passed at the time under their observation.

In the first instance, 1857-8, it will be remembered that there was great depression, something like that of the present, in commercial and financial circles. Trembling and distrust seized upon the people. Irreligion was likewise prevalent. Men of the truest piety were wont to say, "The church itself requires conversion," and “The great want of the age is the regeneration of Christianity." The words of Dr. Skinner are well applied to the period just preceding this revival: “Truly, if ever there was a period when the whole Christian world should lie down upon their faces before the throne of mercy, imploring with all the importunity, and boldness, and perseverance of faith, a race of ministers, each full of the Holy Ghost- that period is passing over us."

Theodore Parker had not been slow to discover the defects of the popular religion, rather the inconsistencies of worldly professors: there followed thereupon his fearful mistake; in wrath he launched his shafts, not against sin and sinners in the church,-in doing which we would not have blamed him, but against the evangelical faith itself, though matchless in its sublimity when understood, and beneficent always to the children of men. He struck humanity's friend; nay, he dealt his fierce blows upon the good Samaritan while leaning over the wounded traveller.

For nearly or quite ten years, in the Melodeon, in

Music Hall, and elsewhere, were heard the thunders of his voice and the might of his eloquence. He was wont to say that he would traverse New England in all directions, that his voice should be heard in city and village; and that, unless there were something more in the popular theology than he dreamed of, he would demolish it even to its foundations.

Good people trembled and prayed. The wind, that bloweth where it listeth, came, and the people breathed a new inspiration. Mr. Parker expired on a foreign shore; the great mass who thronged to listen and applaud gradually fell apart and no longer assembled in any place to listen to words the like of which he had spoken; and religious converts were numbered by thousands.

But demoralizations, for which Christianity was in no way responsible, ripened during the next ten years, with special rapidity during the latter part of it; and at the very time (1865-8) when the revival longed for by naturalism could not have been expected, nor have possibly come, men were blessed. Surely the revival of 1868 did not come "after long continued peace"; that revival was not "the slow swelling of a bud," "the gradual unfolding of a flower," nay, rather, out of the darkness of fearful years of sorrow, war, and blood did that beautiful flower bloom.

The conviction by this time cannot fail to dawn upon the mind that uniformation hypotheses and theories, which claim the gradual evolution of religious sentiment and life by natural processes, have no foundation in the phenomena of history; nay, rather, they are ground to powder by these constantly recurring

facts of the world's religious revivals. Too often has "the vast reserve force of the divine energy been ordered to the front in dire emergencies, and too often have the ranks of adversaries been scattered in confusion by the resistless momentum of divine movements," to allow any longer of naturalistic suppositions.

All these grand religious movements of history have had for a cause that which science and philosophy have utterly failed to discern, a cause above man,

Haggai and Zecha

but working in and upon man. riah, John the Baptist and Peter, Luther and Zwingle, Wesley, Whitefield, and Edwards, likewise the other and later revivalists, were not prime movers; the primal factor was an outward and invisible force, often working first upon the public mind, and, having produced a preparatory effect, sent forth those reformers upon a divine mission. This Force, which is the centre of all forces, in which all others are conserved, and without which men would forever grope and die; this Force, which depends upon no human might, power, nor calculation, but whose coming is like that of the kingdom of heaven, without observation, to which all other forces must yield, or be crushed if they do not yield,—this primal and fundamental Force is the strong and tender, powerful and pitying, almighty and all-merciful Spirit of the Lord God of hosts.

III.

DEDUCTIONS FROM INDIVIDUAL RELIGIOUS

EXPERIENCE.

MR.

66

R. EMERSON has wisely remarked, as to intellectual perceptions, that a certain qualification or cultivation is essential in order to perfect or correct our ordinary apprehensions. "Our eyes," he says, are holden that we cannot see things that stare us in the face, until the time arrives when the mind is ripened; then we behold them, and the time when we saw them not is like a dream." It being thus also with religious experiences, some of our readers need not be surprised if the analysis now attempted should fail in perfect clearness: one must pass through a religious experience if he would fully and rightly apprehend religion.

I. THE AWAKENED.

We presume there is no need of argument while making the assumption that there are times when, without any apparent cause, and without distinction of time or place, a sense of the existence of a future and eternal world takes strong and unwonted possession of the mind of a given person. This feeling

sometimes comes without any apparent connection with what has previously occupied the man's thoughts; it is often entirely foreign, and in some instances is positively unwelcome. The strange impression, however, is so powerful that the person no more doubts the existence of the next world than he doubts the existence of the present, though an hour before he may have thoroughly doubted it, and may again an hour hence; but now, while wrought upon by some unaccountable and seemingly outside influence, he feels that that future and unexplored world is filled with realities, and that it is almost the only reality existing. He no longer doubts that it contains a heaven, a God, a judgment, and a retribution. While thus affected, the man may make an effort to banish these thoughts; he may endeavor to fix his attention upon things about him; he may look upon the arching heavens bent over and smiling upon him with cloud, with star, and sunlight; likely enough, however, they will only reproach him. He may look upon the solid earth under his feet, clad with verdure, white with snow, or brown with frost-blight; he may try the pleasures of the world and the power of song; he is sure, nevertheless, to fail of the object sought. He may then turn his attention to the heavy tramp of business and trade; but for a time he can think of nothing but God and religious obligations. Somehow, he does not at such moments realize the events of life, nor have impressions as was his wont at other times. That orb of another life rolls up in its splendor, or in its terror, into the place of this earth, which grows strangely dim in his sight and strangely distant in its