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ARTICLE III.-REVIVALS OF RELIGION.

HOW TO MAKE THEM PRODUCTIVE OF PERMANENT GOOD.

THE phrase "A Revival of Religion," or as more briefly used, "A revival," has in this country a somewhat narrow and technical meaning. It has lost its wide, historic sense, in which reference is had to a period of some length, to facts of varied nature, and to the experience of an entire country or of all Christendom: such as the national religious reformations under Luther, Calvin, and Knox. It means in our American newspapers, magazines, and books, a more local and transient excitement, which may be limited to a single congregation, or may pervade a district of country, and which implies an increase of conversions from a worldly to a spiritual life, and a large accession of communicants to the church. The circumstances may vary in nearly all the incidental particulars. The revival may come with or without a resort to special means, such as more numerous meetings, the preaching of an evangelist, or the labors of some minister ot her than the pastor; with or without a previous state of doctrinal or of practical declension; with or without careful and intended preparation; with or without peculiar measures in the way of manifesting feeling, testing earnestness, and directing inquirers. Revivals may differ in the degree of prominence of the ordinary exercises, singing, prayer, the exhortations of laymen, and the sermons of clergymen. They may be unlike in the frequency of their return to the same community, in the rapidity or simultaneousness of their effects, in the duration of the special influence, and in their freedom from mixtures of superstition, animal excitement, and fanaticism. It is simply claimed, by the name in question, that, with whatever peculiarities or imperfections, there has been a truly religious influence, manifested with more than usual power, and so operating through social sympathies and channels as to affect large numbers, in a short space of time, with regenerative results. The name represents a reality. It may not stand for the

highest type of experience, in the individual or in the church; but it represents a Christian force, which deserves study, which has rewarded use, and which such a mind as that of Jonathan Edwards thought worthy of defense and explication.

The word revival is peculiarly precious to our American churches, from its relations to their past history, and to their present attitude before the hosts of unbelief. At critical times, the spiritual interests of the nation have been saved by them, while not a few churches have owed their existence to the local revivals in border settlements, and in older communities; the sudden conversion of great numbers to a religious life having furnished the needed material for new organizations. A large proportion of the churches in the evangelical denominations will testify that, by this instrumentality, they have been greatly if not chiefly enlarged and strengthened. And now that faith in the Bible is losing its hold on many minds, and a supernatural religion is pronounced in high quarters to be an absurdity, there is a moral sublimity in the aspect of earnest souls, who value revivals because in them the presence and agency of the Holy Spirit are manifest, and the modern as well as the ancient gospel is seen to be "in demonstration of the Spirit and of power." If still there are Pentecostal effusions, primitive Christianity survives in one of its chief characteristics, and will yet vindicate its reality and potency by a repetition of early victories.

In learning how to make these seasons of spiritual exaltation and conquest productive of permanent good, we must guard against conceptions and acts which, from a misunderstanding of their nature, limit the use of revivals, or introduce into them. vitiating influences. We need to understand their philosophy to such an extent as to enable us to seek them rationally, and to employ them in a wise harmony with other instrumentalities. That a revival should not be productive of permanent good seems indeed to be a contradiction in terms, and the supposition is warranted only as the word is used to cover a mixed experience, in which human errors and sins appear by the side of phenomena referable only to divine action. We proceed, then, to answer the question proposed, by indicating the leading truths which require to be kept in mind, and by which our specific judgments and decisions should be shaped.

1. We must keep steadily in view all that is implied in the divine authorship of revivals of religion. If every truly converted soul is "born of God," and, through conversion, is introduced into a divine kingdom, whose victories are precisely of this spiritual nature, then a revival is the product of divine forces, and the result of a previous divine plan. It is such an event as a battle in a military campaign; and, whether it occur in a large city upon the scale of the day of Pentecost, or as a limited movement in some obscure village church, it marks the development of the scheme of the great leader. God cannot be indifferent to such phenomena, or separate from them. As conquests of his foes, they are acts of his power. He has put his will into them, as a general puts his will into the plan and conduct of a compaign, with its resultant battles and victories. For the Holy Spirit is a person and not a mere influence. He therefore enters into revivals, not as a material force, such as water, or steam, enters into machinery, being let on or shut off, by infallible and inflexible methods, and producing uniform results under uniform appliances; but He enters into them as sensitive, intelligent, voluntary divine mind acting upon similarily characterized finite minds. There is then scope and demand in revivals for everything which recognizes on our part this divine activity; for desire and love, for prayer and faith, for encouragement and submission, for joy and humility. The good is to be secured in the spiritual and not in the material kingdom of God. The effect is to be wrought by a conscious and purposed divine influence, in a way which introduces us to that which, as above the realm of mere natural causation, is therefore in the free realm of spirit, or the super-natural, though not ranked in the category of miracles. It will save us from many mistakes in connection with revivals to look this fact always in the face, and to study its many relations. Under its light we shall see that there is ample space for a divine choice and sovereignty in the part which revivals shall have in the religious forces of a given country, community, or church, and in the use to which God shall put given individuals. No absolute outward uniformity can be predicted, even when men imagine that they are arranging a similarity of circumstances. The richest blessing of a revival is never to be found in the unwarranted assumption that it has been the product of a fixed spiritual force in the moral world,

parallel to the law of gravity in the natural world, which can always be counted upon, and used at will, by a happy adjustment of the appropriate machinery. Not so must it be interpreted, would we give due honor to God, and cultivate in our own souls the purest joy, the truest humility, and the deepest reverence. That we may be privileged with other such scenes of power, and may have the richest resultant piety, we must cherish the thought that God, as the Head of the Church, has strictly personal relations to these revival occasions, and in wisdom and love exercises his own judgment as to time, place, men, measures, and results. With humble prayer and faith should we seek his appearing; with grateful joy and reverence should we hail his presence and accept his gifts: then may we reasonably hope to see the churches used, through revivals, as instruments of divine power.

2. We must as carefully recognize the fact, that revivals, coming in a line of spiritual causation, involve human agency, and therefore varied methods and attendant imperfections. It is not true that divinely induced results imply an exclusively divine operation, uniform methods, or freedom from imperfections. In his moral kingdom God deals with associated minds, and under the limitations of their ignorance and sin. He influences them not only individually but socially; not only directly but indirectly. He reveals truth gradually and in many ways; he introduces human agency; he institutes organized religion, the Church, the ministry, the sacraments; he uses the providential incidents of national and individual history; he works through all appropriate second causes as they exist at the time. This plan involves a variety of methods in producing revivals of religion. These must be adapted to the peculiarities of particular periods, nations, classes in society, and individuals, according to vary. ing degrees of knowledge and culture, changing moods, shifting tendencies to faith or unbelief, and differing temperaments. Facts confirm the conclusions o' theory. No little astonishment has been caused by the variety of instrumentalities and methods connected with revivals, and the outward diversity of results. Some have been stumbled at the marked contrast of the phenomena, till they have doubted the reality of a divine power therein, and the wisdom of seeking to renew such scenes.

But variety is characteristic of all God's works; in the spiritual as well as in the natural realm. Consider the variety of authorship, style, and contents in the books of Scripture; resorted to, plainly, as a means to reach minds in every age and of every degree of development. Similar is the variety of revival agencies and methods, which are to work upon the German, French, Scotch, Irish, English, or the conglomerate American character; upon the higher, the middle, and the lower classes of society; upon sanguine and sluggish temperaments; upon the children of the Church and the neglected masses of the highways and hedges. It is to be expected that, in this work, men will be used according to their personal availability in relation to those to be influenced. A tasteful, scholarly minister, with methods ordered by culture, will usually have his chief power with the educated and refined; and, in a revival, God will give him a work to do among them. But a coarser-grained man, with less knowledge and ruder speech and action, will ordina-/ rily see his work prepared for him on his own level, and wil find favor with the common people. Very few possess a hmanity as broad as that of Jesus, who could reach the extrerhes of society. Religion does not overlook natural affinities. gain its full revival power, as a permanent force in the Church, we must so far lay aside our personal likes and dislikes as not to make them a rule for others, or to seek to confine the grace of God to the channels which might be prescribed by our ideas of taste, dignity, and propriety. All fish are not caught with the same hook, or with the same bait, and God must be allowed to select his "fishers of men" according to their skill in winning souls from particular classes, or in special circumstances. Permanent good will result from revivals only as ministers and churches learn to be as wisely comprehensive in their measures as God is or as they grow into the spirit of Paul, in their passion for souls, and are ready to be "made all things to all men,' that they may "by all means save some." Otherwise, suspicion will supplant confidence, alienation will take the place of co-operation, favorable opportunities will be lost, valuable instrumentalities will be thrown away, and important results will be disesteemed.

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