The Unpredictable Outpouring and Revival of the Holy Spirit

You will remember the outline that I gave to you. The outpouring of the Holy Spirit is exclusively the work of God. No man, no organization can say that on the 15th of January there will be an outpouring of the Holy Spirit. The wind blows where it lists; you cannot hear where it is coming from or where it is going to, so it is with the Spirit. You cannot see the wind, but you can see what the wind does, and the first effect of an outpouring of the Holy Spirit is to revive the whole body of Christ, to quicken its spiritual life. The word revive means to bring to life again. In the Old Testament, the word revive comes from two Hebrew words, and both mean to revive or to restore or to bring to life again.

However, we need to pray not only for an outpouring of the Holy Spirit upon the body of believers but also upon the people. Peter preached at Pentecost; 120 believers became 3,120. What was the secret? He was filled with the Spirit, and he preached the word. But Stephen was filled with the Spirit, and Stephen preached the word equally strongly, and he did not add 3,000 to the Church. We need the Holy Spirit to convict the world of sin and of righteousness and of judgment, and that happens in times of revival. Then the revived Church engages in evangelizing, so to present Jesus Christ and the power of the Spirit, that men may come to put their trust in him as Savior and to serve him as Lord in the fellowship of his Church and in the vocations of the common life.

The revived Church also engages in teaching the commandments whatsoever he has told us to do, to evangelize and to teach. That's the great commission. And by many or by few, God raises up his servants to help in the reforming of society, taking care of injustices, giving people better opportunity. It always happens. That's the commended ministry of the Church, where the preaching and the teaching is the commanded mission of the Church.

We want to illustrate from another great revival period. First of all, I might say that several years ago, the director of one of the nation's largest evangelistic enterprises came to me with a tape recorder and said, I want to tape what you say. I want to ask you questions. I said, go ahead. Well, he said, according to one of your books, a man called Jeremiah Lanphier started a prayer meeting of six men in New York. And it doubled and quadrupled, it spread all over the city, spread all over the country, and about a million people were converted to God in the great 1858 revival. I said, that's right.

Now he said, I have just come from New York where we had a great campaign. We didn't start with one prayer meeting; we had one thousand prayer meetings organized. He said, we didn't have one bumper sticker; we had a plane riding in the sky. He said, we spent one million dollars. He said, it was a good campaign as far as campaigns went. But he said, a couple of months later when I was in Florida, my heart got sick when I read that three hundred thousand New Yorkers tried to loot the town during the great blackout. He said, why can't we do something that will last? It seems as if all our efforts are just simply stirring a bucket of water. I said, what do you say to that?

What could I say? My mind went back to 1949-1950. We saw an outpouring of the Holy Spirit at Forest Home, out of which came Billy Graham's ministry and Bill Bright and Campus Crusade and Dick Halverson and so forth. So I said to him, in 1950 I went with Billy Graham to Portland in Oregon. A godly man, Frank Phillips, a veterinarian, organized the Billy Graham Crusade. He told the pastors in Portland, we stand on the verge of a revival. They had one thousand prayer meetings organized. Billy Graham came and preached in his inimitable style for two weeks and left quite a number of inquirers for the churches to take in and teach. Some of the pastors went back to their churches, thinking now it's a new day dawning in Portland, but they just went back to the usual routine, except they had the encouragement and the problem of the converts.

My friend said, that's exactly what I'm saying. Jeremiah Lanphier started one prayer meeting and it swept the country. In New York, he said, we had a thousand and you're saying the same thing about Portland. I said, I'll tell you the secret. The day Billy Graham left town, the thousand prayer meetings in Portland were disbanded. You see, I said, the prayer meetings were to pray for the success of the Graham Crusade. I'm a Baptist minister by ordination. It's a good idea sometimes to have a Baptist youth rally, get the young people of all the churches together. So we choose a good auditorium and we choose a good program. We have a good speaker and good music and good transportation and everything we can arrange. And then someone throws in a little prayer, Lord please send us a revival. Now is it a good thing for the Baptist to have a youth rally? Of course it is. But you can't tie revival onto that like the tail of a kite. The revival of the whole body of Christ is far more important than any youth rally or any evangelistic campaign.

My friend said, thank you. He resigned his job. He's out in the ministry urging churches to set aside time to pray. Now let me tell you what God can do in answer to prayer. In the middle of the nineteenth century, the tide was out. Why? First of all, the country was seriously divided over the slavery issue. Not nearly north against south, that's too simplistic. Second, the Methodist Church in Chicago was split over the issue, can a church member hold slaves? It was the same in many parts of the North. Second, people were making money hand over fist. When young D. L. Moody moved from Boston to Chicago, he worked very hard. He had a salesmanship second to none, so he invested his savings and he got 18 percent interest, which shows you how much money was in demand. There was a boom at that time, railroads being built everywhere. And affluence takes people away from God.

Third thing was, a godly farmer called William Miller rediscovered the doctrine of the Second Coming. He had as many followers in all the denominations as, say, the present-day charismatic movement. Episcopalians and Baptists and Methodists and Presbyterians all talking about the imminence of the return of the Lord. But Miller made the mistake of settling on 1844 for the return. Some people sold their property, their farms, their homes, their businesses, and waited for the coming. And when they were disappointed, they tried to buy it back and the price was up. That sort of embittered them. I don't know why they sold their property. If I thought the Lord was coming tomorrow, I wouldn't even call Great Western Savings and Loan to try and get my mortgage money. I wouldn't bother about it at all, but some people felt they could meet the Lord better with the money in their pocket.

Whatever the reasons were, in the 1850s the tide was out. But in 1857, a godly man called Jeremiah Lanphier started a prayer meeting in the Dutch Reformed Church downtown in Manhattan. He put out a little leaflet, How Often Shall I Pray, as often as the language of prayer is in my heart, as often as I am aware of a worldly spirit, as often as I feel the power of temptation. On the other side of the leaflet, it said a day prayer meeting will be held each Wednesday between twelve and one o'clock in the upper room of the consistory building of the Dutch Reformed Church, corner of Fulton and William Street, close to Wall Street and Broadway. Out of a population of a million, Jeremiah Lanphier was the only one that showed up. But at half past twelve, you heard his step on the stairs, and at twenty-five to one, there were six men who prayed turnabout, and then some prayed again, and at one o'clock they went back to work. That was all. No fireworks, nothing spectacular, just a simple service of intercession.

The following Wednesday, the numbers doubled, the following Wednesday trebled, then they began meeting every day of the week. It seems as if in October, November, December, prayer meetings began to multiply throughout the whole country. The Presbyterians met in Cincinnati, and instead of having business sessions, they set aside the whole time to discuss revival and God's requirements for revival and so forth. They did the same thing in Pittsburgh. You'll find the Baptists in their associational meetings, in their conventions, met for the same purpose. And the Methodists likewise. There was a spirit of prayer abroad in the land.

William McLaughlin, a well-known liberal scholar, calls this great revival the Bank Panic Revival, because in October of 1857 there was a bank failure. It's interesting, the revival began in Canada where there wasn't a bank failure, so it rather destroys his argument. Also, when he talks about the Bank Panic Revival, it sounded as if people were in a panic and rushed to pray, whereas, as I told you, the numbers at Fulton Street increased from maybe 26 to about 44 in the month of the panic. That's hardly a panic in a city of a million. But things began to spread. Fulton Street was so crowded that the John Street Methodist Church opened and was filled. In Fulton Street, they filled the opera room and the lower basement and the main auditorium every day, and the same thing happened on John Street.

Then they opened up Trinity Episcopal Church, the corner of Broad Street and Broadway and Wall Street. Then they began taking over all the YMCA halls for prayer meetings. And then they began taking over the theaters. Horace Greeley, the famous editor, sent a reporter in horse and buggy racing around the prayer meetings to count the number of men at prayer. He could only visit 12 in the course of an hour, just racing from one to the other and counting the number, and he reported 6,100. This became headline news.

Then a landslide started. They filled every big theater, theaters of 5,000 people, now mostly men. In those days women were not in business. In a typical service, for instance in Brooklyn, in a big theater there, there were 5,000 packing the place out, of whom about 200 were ladies and about 50 were clergymen. The rest, businessmen. The busiest hour of the day. A minister got up in one of the prayer meetings in Fulton Street and said, I was here until three o'clock yesterday, dealing with people who wish to find Christ as Savior. There must be many more, but many of you are anxious about keeping your jobs, so I would like to announce that my church will be open from tonight onwards indefinitely for the preaching of the gospel. And soon every church in New York was opened and filled.

You haven't taken in what I said. I attended the last Graham crusade. Billy Graham is one of my dear friends. There is mass evangelism at its most wholesome. Billy Graham is speaking to 40,000 a night in Los Angeles. If he had said on Tuesday night, don't come here tomorrow night, go to your own midweek service. New pastors who don't have one, open up because these people are coming. Supposing a pastor spoke to his custodian and said, we're going to have a meeting tonight. The custodian would say, well, how many do you expect, sir? What would the pastor say? If they had divided the 40,000 by the 5,000 sponsoring churches, it would have meant eight people per church, and they would all have sat in the front row. How could you compare mass evangelism at its best with a movement of the Spirit of God that filled every church? That's what happened in New York.

Soon they were having 10,000 converts a week. Newspapers were full of it. The Christian periodicals tried to keep tally, but gave up. They couldn't keep track of the converts. The revival swept into New England. As far north as Portland, Maine, the bells were ringing at seven in the morning to fill the churches, at 12 noon and at 6:30 in the evening. The revival swept Boston. It's interesting it even had an effect on the Unitarians. Professor Frederick Dan Huntington was professor of religion at Harvard, a Unitarian. He was moved to start a prayer meeting for students, the result of which he himself was converted and became an Episcopal bishop.

The revival went up the Hudson and down the Mohawk. In the little Mohawk towns, the Baptists, for example, had so many candidates for Believer's Baptism, they couldn't get them into their chapels. They went down to the river and cut a square hole in the ice and baptized them in the cold water. When Baptists do that, they really are on fire.

The revival reached Philadelphia. William McLaughlin says it was a bank panic, but actually this little prayer meeting that started in Philadelphia in the fall of 1857 struggled with about ten or twelve people until March of 1858. Then they took, for the sake of a neutral place, a committee room in James Hall, the biggest theater in Philadelphia. Then the flood came. By the way, one of the leaders of the prayer meeting was a young man called John Wanamaker. Of course, Wanamaker's is the great department store of Philadelphia. But that little prayer meeting increased until they packed James Hall, they separated the partition from the platform and filled it as well. They filled the first gallery and the second gallery.

One of the leaders was a young Episcopal elector called W.T.Y.N.G. During the revival, in the country, he was working with some farm machinery when his sleeve was caught and dragged his arm into the machine and was chopped up and had to be amputated. W.T.Y.N.G. died. It caused quite a sorrow in the city. He had been such a leader in the revival movement. But when he was dying, he said to his friends, told the men, it was a men's meeting, of course, 6,000 every day praying, tell the men to stand up for Jesus. George Duffy, the young Presbyterian minister, wrote a hymn called Stand Up, Stand Up for Jesus, Ye Soldiers of the Cross. I would have liked to have been there to hear that crowd sing that for the first time.

When summer came, the YMCA took the lead and the huge tents in Philadelphia packed out. There was a little account written, Pentecost or the Work of Grace in Philadelphia. The revival swept Maryland as well as Pennsylvania. It reached Washington, D.C. They were having five businessmen's prayer meetings in Washington, the biggest one being in the Academy of Music Hall with 5,000.

The revival went over the Alleghenies and down the line of settlement of the Ohio. This sort of thing was happening in Ohio and Indiana and Michigan, Illinois, right to the frontiers, which in those days were through Missouri to Omaha and Nebraska. Everywhere a sweeping movement. When the revival reached Kalamazoo and Michigan, a young Episcopal layman convened the first meeting in the town hall. It was so crowded, he began by saying, I am better used to liturgical prayer than extemporaneous prayer, but we will follow the procedures that we find in the New York papers. I see our rector is here, we will ask him if he will open with prayer. I see the Baptist pastor is here, maybe he will read the scriptures. Then the meeting will be open for prayer. But he said there are so many here who will want to pray, let's save a little time, write your prayer request on a slip of paper, pass it up to me, and someone will pray for you, and that will save time.

The first request was from a woman. It said, A praying woman asks the prayers of this congregation for the conversion of her husband who is far from God. She wasn't the only woman with such a problem. Nor would she be today. It's a common problem. As soon as the request was read out, a big burly blacksmith got up and said, My wife prays for me, I'm far from God, would you please help me? A lawyer got up and said, I think it was my wife that wrote that note because I'm far from God and I need help. And five husbands were converted immediately. In evangelism, the evangelist seeks the sinner. In these times of the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, the sinners come running to the Lord.

When the revival reached Chicago, it was a town of 100,000. There were 2,000 men meeting for prayer down on Michigan Avenue, on the edge of what is now called the Loop. A young shoe salesman went to the superintendent of the Plymouth Congregational Church and said, I'd like to teach Sunday school. The superintendent said, I'm sorry young fellow, I've got 16 teachers too many, but I'll put you on a waiting list. He said, I'd like to do something now, how long do I have to wait? He said, why don't you start your own class? Well, how could I do that? He said, go and get some boys off the street. Now, don't bring them here. Take them out into the country for a few Sundays until you have control of them. Then bring them here, they'll be your class. So the young shoe salesman went to a street and found boys playing marbles and so forth. So he said, many of you boys would like to go for a hike? Of course, they all wanted to go. They ran off to get permission from their parents and came back. He took them to a beach in Lake Michigan. There he taught them Bible stories and Bible games, and he took them to Plymouth Congregational Church. The name of the young man was Dwight Lyman Moody. That's how his ministry got started.

I once heard a famous professor report to me several times as having said, every great revival was the work of some great evangelist under God. I said, I thought it was the other way around. Every great evangelist has arisen from some time of revival.

Now, the revival swept the South. If you read Charles Finney's autobiography, he said in connection with the 1858 revival, only one part of the country was not touched by the revival, and that was the South. The people there were so addicted to the peculiar institution that the Spirit of God was glued away from them, and no place was found for him in the hearts of Southern people at that time. Absolute nonsense. In my research I found a revival from Richmond, Virginia, around to Galveston, Texas. It started a little more slowly up North, because the South was rural and up North was industrial. But as every bit of sorrow in the South had touched black and white, in spite of the slavery problem, maybe even because of it, some people were so conditioned that if a revival broke out in South Africa today, they would cry foul. They would say, God has no business sending a revival to South Africa. But perhaps South Africa needs it more. I've seen crowded churches in the Soviet Union and packed-out churches in China. It doesn't mean that God Almighty approves of the social system in either country. Not only so, but the revival continued in the South.

What's even more amazing is that there was an astounding awakening in the Confederate army. Those young men fighting on the wrong side, as we would say. Yet there was such a movement in the Army of Northern Virginia, more than 150,000 young soldiers were converted. In fact, in 1863, Abraham Lincoln said, "I fear that our Southern brethren are praying more than we do. We are counting on our superior numbers to win this war." He called for a day of humiliation and prayer. It was only after that the tide turned and the Battle of Gettysburg was fought. After that, the abolition, the emancipation of the slaves was a foregone conclusion.

Why did Finney say that it didn't touch the South? He was such a convinced abolitionist he refused to believe that God could work there. Yet he was a trained lawyer. How he ignored the evidence, I don't know. But you could say that revival swept the whole country. It was such a revival that ships crossing the Atlantic, coming within the three-mile limit, revival would break out on board. On the Ohio and Mississippi, they had paddle steamers. Young people today don't have much experience of traveling on ships, but anyone who has ever traveled on a ship knows that as soon as a ship sails, the bar is crowded, the dance hall is crowded, the dance floor and the gambling tables are crowded. But during the revival, they had prayer meetings on board the ships, the paddle steamers out of Louisville and down to Mississippi, revival on board every ship. It was an astounding time. More than a million converted and added to the churches, not counting maybe a million more converted who were church members. Because when a man who is a member of a church is converted, he doesn't resign and join again, so statistics will not show his conversion.

That revival swept the West Indies, began in Jamaica in 1859. That revival sent the first pioneer missionaries to Brazil. I happen to know because the churches in Brazil invited me to come down and help them prepare for the centenary for 1959. The same revival broke across the Atlantic and broke out in all places, of all places, Northern Ireland. You may wonder why. Because Northern Ireland had supplied the second great wave of immigration to the United States. Every American has heard of the Scotch-Irish. Perhaps there are 25 million people who are Scotch-Irish in the United States. That doesn't mean your grandfather was Scotch and your grandmother Irish. It means that you were descended from people from the North of Ireland. They were largely Presbyterian. To distinguish them from the Catholic Irish, they were called Scotch-Irish. So that every family in the North of Ireland had some relatives in the United States.

By the way, if you ask the average American who was the first Irish President of the United States, they immediately say John F. Kennedy. He was the 14th. The other 13 were Protestant, including Woodrow Wilson and Andrew Jackson, or I could mention so many others, McKinley, 13 of them. So when the North of Ireland people heard that there was a revival in the United States, they quickened their prayers. It came through a simple little prayer meeting again. A young man called James McQuilken was converted in 1856. His pastor, Samuel Moore of Ballymena, gave him a New Testament to read, and also a little book called The Narrative of God's Dealings with George Muller of Bristol, the great man of faith and prayer. McQuilken said, if God is sending revival to our cousins in America, and if God answers prayer the way Mr. Muller says he does, why can't we pray for revival in Ireland?

Of course, there were many who said, well, this is not a Protestant country. But they met in a barn outside Ballymena, a little place called Kells. Four young men, McQuilken, McKinley, Wallace, and Carlyle. Another young man joined them and was converted. He went back to the village of Ahochal to testify to his family. His mother was a hard-drinking widow. His brother was a ne'er-do-well, what we would call a no-good. His sister had a bad reputation in town, and they bitterly upbraided him for being soft. They went to bed angry. But at two in the morning, the family was wakened by the screams of the mother. They thought she had inflammation of the bowels, which is what they called appendicitis in those days. In the middle of the night, people hear the medical doctor and his horse and buggy come along. People are wakened up and look out of the curtains to see what's going on. It must be somebody dying. The doctor examined the woman and said there's nothing physically wrong with her. It's religion. So they sent for the Presbyterian minister.

The neighbors were convinced not it was a death. Irish people are very sympathetic. You've heard of Irish wakes when people all come in and help the family. But the mother was converted, the son was converted, the daughter was converted, every neighbor coming in was converted. It caused such a sensation that the minister of the Second Presbyterian Church asked the four laymen to come over and preach in his church. In those days, they didn't allow laymen to speak from the pulpit, so they spoke from under the pulpit. But the church was so packed, the galleries began creaking ominously. So the minister, who was nervous about the whole thing anyway, brought the meeting to a close. It was sleeting outside, but the four young men said we haven't walked 14 miles just to walk back again. So they started preaching from the front of the church and people began falling in the mud, crying what must I do to be saved. The ministers of Ballymena were like doctors in an epidemic working night and day, dealing with souls.

But here's the interesting thing. In the American revival of 1858, there were no prostrations, no extravagances whatsoever, no jerking, no screaming, nothing. But in the Irish revival of 1859, which spread from the American revival, under such conviction of sin, they collapsed in a heap. In fact, it was so prevalent, maybe one convert in a hundred, that the Roman Catholic priests had notices outside the Catholic churches urging the faithful not to go to these meetings and accusing the Presbyterian ministers of having chloroform in their hankies to put the inquirers over. But a hundred thousand were converted in that revival, including my grandparents. That's what gave me an interest in revival.

It jumped the North Channel, broke out in Scotland, 300,000 out of a population of three million converted in Scotland, including some very great people such as James Chalmers, the Martyr of the South Seas, John McNeill, the great Scottish evangelist, Mary Slessor, I could mention so many. It spread throughout Wales. In Wales, there was a peculiar phenomenon of the revival called mulianu, or praising. One meeting, a girl got up and said, an elder had said something about the Lord Jesus Christ, God's great gift to men, and a young girl got up and shouted in Welsh, Blessed be his holy name forever. The whole company was taken up in praise. There was no prostration in Wales, but there was this fervor, and again multitudes converted.

Revival spread more slowly in England. Do you know that during the revival, the Bishop of London and the Dean of Westminster in friendly competition ran evangelistic meetings in St. Paul's Cathedral and Westminster Abbey every Sunday night for five years. Not all Anglicans were like that. In Bradford, in Yorkshire, the Anglicans of the free churches, that means the Methodists and Baptists and others, got together and said, let's have united meetings on Sunday night. The Anglicans said, we'll have to get the Bishop's permission. The Bishop was a very high churchman. He said, I do not deny that these men are servants of Jesus Christ according to their light, but they are not priests of the true church. I cannot give permission. It seemed as if they were stymied. Then somebody came up with a bright idea. Let's have an Anglican service the first Sunday night of the month, free church the second, Anglican the third, free church the fourth. The people won't know the difference. It's the same format. It's evangelistic. We don't need the Bishop's permission. The place was packed out every night. Very interesting result. On certain Sunday nights, they had the blessing of God and the benediction of the Bishop. But on other Sunday nights, only the blessing of God.

That revival swept every part of Britain. About a million people converted there also, but there was no civil war following. So a lot of things developed in Britain came to the United States later, such as the Salvation Army, which came out of the revival, and the China Inland Mission came out of the revival. The great Barnardo's Homes, the greatest orphanage in the world. The revival broke out in Australia, 1859. It broke out in South Africa. When the South Africans in Cape Town heard of the revival in the United States, they were not impressed. The attitude of many people outside the States is anything can happen in America. They mean that, too. But when news came that the revival had swept the Church of Scotland, then they were impressed, because the Church of Scotland is a very dignified body.

I direct a conference of scholars at Oxford University every summer, and one day we had a very ardent American fundamentalist visiting Oxford, and he told us he had been up in Scotland. He wondered, how do these people worship here? So he went to St. Giles Cathedral, the great Presbyterian Cathedral in Edinburgh. He said it was a very formal service, very formal, but to his great surprise, the minister preached a real message from the word. So much so that the American couldn't help it, he shouts, Praise the Lord!

An elder appeared at his shoulder, tapped him on the shoulder, and said, we don't praise the Lord in this church. Now, when the South Africans heard that revival had swept Scotland, they began to pray. They arranged a conference at a place called Worcester, a hundred miles upcountry from Cape Town. Three hundred and seventy-four came to it, nearly all ministers, some missionaries, more Dutch-speaking than English-speaking. There they discussed revival.

Two weeks later, that was Easter time, at Whitsuntide, Pentecost, the young people in the Dutch Reformed Church were having a youth meeting in a youth hall, led by a young man called Jan Christian de Vries, eighteen years of age. A Fingal girl, a black girl, belonging to the closer-speaking people, asked if she might speak. She gave a testimony so sweetly there was a sense of the presence of God. So far as I know, she was the only black person in that meeting. De Vries said there was a silence, and then he heard the sound of an approaching tornado. He thought the whole building shook. All these young Dutch Reformed people on their feet praying aloud, some loudly, some murmuring, simultaneously. De Vries was so frightened he fell to his knees.

An elder named Jan Rabbe was walking by, and he was rather shocked at the noise coming from this little chapel. He rushed up to the minister as a parsonage, and the minister came down in his Sunday clothes, his frock coat, and top hat. Now, the Dutch Reformed have a high regard for their dominees. He went in, he said to De Vries, what's happening? De Vries murmured something about the presence of God. The minister said, I hold you responsible. Then the minister raised his voice and shouted in Dutch, Mensa blestou, everyone be quiet. Nobody took the slightest notice. They never even saw him. He said, I am your minister sent from God, I have been duly appointed by Presbytery. Nobody took any notice of Presbytery or anything else. They went on praying and crying.

He went back to De Vries and said, start a hymn. The two men started to sing a hymn in Dutch. Nobody joined them. The minister stomped out and said, God is a God of order, this is nothing but confusion. He went back to the parsonage and said to his wife, we have been praying for a revival, but is this a revival? By the way, the name of that minister was Andrew Murray. I didn't know Andrew Murray personally, I knew his grandsons. I knew his biographer, and old Pa Douglas told me that when Andrew Murray was a mellow old saint, three times moderator of the Dutch Reformed Church, famous throughout the United States and the United Kingdom as a deeper life speaker, his friends used to tease him and say, Dr. Murray, tell us how you tried to stop the revival.

Well, he didn't know what to do. The prayer meetings were multiplying through the Wagon Makers Valley, but he sent out runners on Saturday to say that on Saturday night there would be a united prayer meeting in the schoolhouse. More than a thousand packed out the schoolhouse and hundreds standing outside. Andrew Murray took charge, he was determined to get control. He read the scripture, gave a short commentary, offered prayer, and then he looked around the audience and he said, the meeting is now open for prayer. Then he heard a sound of an approaching tornado himself and the whole company engaged in prayer. He was bewildered. The meeting was no longer in his charge.

A stranger outside began pushing his way in and finally touched him on the shoulder and said in English, not in Dutch, are you the minister of this congregation? He said, I am. He said, be careful what you do, this is the outpouring of the Spirit. It was a missionary coming back unfurled from the States. You know that 50 young men from that one parish went into the ministry? Greatest revival. Here's the interesting thing, when I did my doctorate in the University of South Africa, I discovered that a revival broke out among the Zulus a year earlier, among the blacks, a year earlier than among the South African whites. It's too long a story to tell you. That revival was worldwide. The greatest figure it produced was D. L. Moody, who extended it for 40 years.

When William McLoughlin said that this bank panic revival didn't deserve the title of an awakening, I wrote to him and said, the year that Moody died, 1899, he said, I would like, before I go hence, to see the whole Church of Christ quickened and a way of going from Maine to California to sweep thousands into the kingdom of God. I said, I think it's fair to deduce that in Moody's lifetime he had seen nothing to surpass 1858. If 1884 had been a better year, he would have said, I would like, before I go hence, to see 1884 repeated. But 1858 was the great awakening, the most wholesome awakening this country ever knew.

Now there's something to add to this, to round it out. Moody was not an educated man. It may encourage some of you to know that he couldn't spell. He spelt orthodox, O-T-H-E-D-E-X, orthodox. He spelt Philadelphia with an F. You say, well, we never heard that. Before they published his writings, they always edited them because he couldn't spell, he couldn't use correct grammar. But he was full of the Holy Spirit. So he kept away from the students. The students wanted to come and speak in the universities, and he said, not on your life. But somebody persuaded him to go to Cambridge University in England, an aristocratic university full of the sons of the noble and the wealthy. And when these young Englishmen heard that, quote, an illiterate American was coming, they decided to show him his place. And there's no one quite like an Englishman for doing that.

Moody and Sankey started. Moody called upon the vicar of St. Mary's to lead him in prayer, and the students shouted, hear, hear, in the middle of the prayer. When Sankey sang, they sang a parody along with him. Moody preached on Daniel in the den of lions. I think that's the way he felt. But every time, you know the English word, the Hebrew word Daniel has three syllables, Dan-e-l. English word at least two, Daniel. But the American, only one. Have you ever heard of Danel Boone and Danel Webster? It's always spelled D-A-N apostrophe L. That's the way Americans pronounced it until very recently, Danel, not Daniel. And the Englishmen thought this was screamingly funny. Every time Moody mentioned Danel, then Danel said to the Lord, brought the house down. They tramped their feet, clapped their hands, and shouted.

When Moody got home to his lodgings that night, he was in a perspiration, he said, Sankey, I've got no hankering for that crowd. But he was no coward either. The attendance dropped from a thousand to one hundred the next night. But on Wednesday, a tall young man came to the lodging and said he wanted to see Mr. Moody. He said, bring him in. When he saw one of the ringleaders of the rioters, he said, what can I do for you? He said, Mr. Moody, I was one of those who thought that you were singularly unequipped to speak to gentlemen. But sir, he said, as I observed you, you were the only gentleman in the meeting. We who prided ourselves on our English breeding acted like cads, he said. Sir, I wish to apologize. Moody shook hands with him and said, I'll forgive you if you come to all the meetings.

So Gerald Lander sat in the front seat. Moody waited wisely for a week before giving an invitation. First invitation, the first forward was Gerald Lander, who became Bishop of Hong Kong. Then others. He turned the university upside down. They formed a group called the Cambridge Seven out of the converts, including Sir Montagu Beecham, nephew of Lord Radstock, two brothers called Paul Hill Turner, a man called Stanley Smith, the chief oarsman of the Cambridge rowing crew, and a fellow called Cassill, son of a wealthy importer. He became Bishop of Sichuan. By the way, they all became missionaries. The best known was C.T. Studd, the Babe Ruth of English cricket. Those young men turned the universities upside down. Great wave of revival among students. They helped Moody in his meetings.

Moody was preaching in North London to a packed-out tabernacle while they were building one in South London. Then he moved for the next month to South London. Then they wanted him to preach simultaneously, which he couldn't do, so he alternated with other people. One night, Moody was leading in South London when a Presbyterian minister was leading in prayer. The man had never prayed before 25,000 before, so he prayed and prayed and prayed. Now you know, of course, when a man prays for three minutes, you pray with him. If he prays for another three minutes, you pray for him. If he prays for another three minutes, you pray against him. This man was going on at a great rate. Moody got up and said, while our brother is finishing his prayer, let's sing hymn number 11.

There was a young atheist there, and he said, there's an honest man, I'm coming back tomorrow night. He came back the next night, but Moody wasn't there. The Cambridge Seven were there. This young man was converted. He became Sir Wilfred Grenfell, a great pioneer to Labrador. When Moody got back to the States, the American students said, now what about us? We have no excuse anymore. But Moody was still nervous, a conference at Mount Hermon, Massachusetts. Two hundred and fifty students came. One young man asked permission to speak. Moody said, I'm sorry, we have a full program. He finally gave him permission to speak over the dinner table.

This young fellow said, my father was one of the students that sat under the haystack in New England and went out to India to be a missionary. He's come back to die. But he says, it's ripe to harvest. He's praying for a thousand students to go to the mission field. Of the two hundred and fifty, one hundred volunteered, and thus was born the student volunteer movement. Do you know that in a long generation, thirty thousand went to the mission field? Greatest student movement of all time. That was a kind of renewal of revival.

Oh, I could take a whole week to tell you what God has done among students in all these great revivals. But perhaps I have told you enough for today. Now let me ask you what my friend asked me. Why was it that Jeremiah Lanphier started a prayer meeting which resulted in a nationwide revival and more than a million people converted out of thirty million, whereas in our big organized crusades today, sometimes we have a thousand prayer meetings and nothing happens except a good crusade? The answer is, when you pray for revival, you don't quit after two weeks. And as Armand Gueswine says, revival, the outpouring of the Holy Spirit is the greatest thing that can happen, and it must have priority.

Let us stand for prayer. Wilt thou not revive us again that thy people may rejoice in thee? Lord, in these wicked days when crime is at an all-time high, and immorality so gross, profanity so prevalent, pornography shocking, revive thy work, O Lord, in the midst of these years, in wrath, for mercy. Lord, send a revival, and start in me. Amen.