The 1830 Revival: Global Impact and Key Figures

Some people have already been talking to me about how the facts of what God has done have warmed their hearts. Well, I'm not surprised at this. It may be a surprise to you, but of course, I have seen this sort of thing happen in other parts of the world and elsewhere around this country. The reason is, Scripture tells us, Psalm 78, we must tell our children's children what the Lord has done, that they might set their hope in God and forget not his commandments. It's commanded to do. Yet so few people know anything about what God has done for them in their national life, in their city life, and the like.

Now we're going to continue our studies. There may be some folk here who are here for the first time, who were not here last night. So I ought to explain that last night we considered the great awakening of 1792 onward, that followed the greatest national backsliding and moral decline in the history of the country. It completely turned the tide. Not only so, but it achieved a lot of social reform, and it started the Bible societies, the missionary societies, and the like.

Now at Asbury College the other day, a minister who was studying for a higher degree said to me, well, doesn't the tide have to go out first before it can start coming in? I said, that's only if you assume that revival is just a tide that goes out and in cyclically. No, the fact is that following 1792 there was revival for 30 years or more, and then in 1830 there came another outpouring of the Holy Spirit. If you look at it from the human point of view, you could say there were waves of revival and another great wave came in. But from the point of view of the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, believers were convinced that the Holy Spirit had been outpoured upon the country from one end of the country to the other in the year 1830.

So it teaches us a lesson. We don't have to have the tide out for God to bless us with an outpouring of his Holy Spirit. We can have blessing upon blessing. When the tide is out, our hearts get desperate and we cry for blessing, and then we see a tremendous change. But we can't make it just operate like a tide. We're dealing with a person—God, the Holy Spirit, and he is sovereign.

Let me give you some of the facts of this great movement. It seemed almost too good to be true that another awakening should come so suddenly about the year 1830. It was without extravagance wherever it was reported. The revival began in Boston, New York, and other cities in early summer or late spring of 1830. And it swept the country from coast to frontier. I was going to say from coast to coast. Of course, in 1830, California wasn't settled, other than a few Spanish missions.

Now, this is most important that we understand how it began. First of all, let me, as a good Baptist, tease the Congregationalists for a little while. The Congregationalists and the Presbyterians got together and they said, let's not compete. We're much the same sort of denomination. One has a Presbyterial sort of government, the other a Congregational government. So let's divide the country equally. So they divided the country right down the middle, by the Hudson River. New Englanders still think that the Hudson River is the middle of the country.

I was studying at Harvard University at the Chaplain School during World War II, and what we might call a back-bay dowager said to the wife of one of the chaplains, where do you come from, my dear? She said, I'm from Idaho. Oh dear, should we call that Ohio? You know, when you go back to the eastern states, they're quite surprised to find that Californians talk about going east to Colorado. To a New Englander, going across the Hudson is going west. Ohio is west, and of course, California is very far away indeed.

So the Congregationalists, who were very strong in New England, said to the Presbyterians, you will build no Presbyterian churches in New England, and we'll build no Congregational churches in the other half of the country. And this became what they called the Plan of Union. However, they did share the same missionary societies. Home Missions, for instance. They were both helping the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, and they were both helping in an organization called the American Home Missionary Society. It was a Home Mission for both the Presbyterians and the Congregations. The Congregations in New England, the Presbyterians in the other half of the country.

Now, I found to my great surprise—this was a total surprise to me, I thought I knew a great deal about the history of revival in the United States—when I came across a Presbyterian Congregational report, with feelings of reverential gratitude, it becomes us to make mention of the blessings of the Most High poured out upon the churches of our country. From one end of the land to the other, points of light are appearing amid the darkness. In some districts, these luminous points are becoming so numerous as to blend their brightness so that the pathways of the Spirit may be distinctly traced by the glory which attends His visitation. I looked at the date again, 1830. This was about the month of June this report appeared. I thought, I never heard of the 1830 revival. So I began to study and I got the facts.

By the middle of 1830, the awakening had become general. The Presbyterians and Congregations were receiving reports of revival from every quarter, east, west, north, and south. Thirty Presbyteries west of the Hudson rejoiced in torrents of blessing. The General Associations, congregational, of Connecticut and Massachusetts reported overcrowded churches, while the General Conventions, also congregational, of Vermont and New Hampshire told of great numbers turning to the Lord and extensive revivals of religion. In Boston, the metropolis of New England, it was said, God is raining down righteousness upon the people. The Evangelical churches in Boston, that meant Park Street and Old South Church, the others had become Unitarian, were instructing 600 inquirers who soon became 1,500 converts.

It's an interesting thing, in times of revival, you don't have a falling away or a losing of numbers between people professing and people being added to the church. In evangelistic campaigns, perhaps you may have a wonderful evangelistic campaign, 3,000 so many professed to side for Christ. But about a year later, when you go around the churches, you find maybe only 2,227 actually stayed with it. But in times of revival, it's the very opposite. The number who make professions and the number who join the church is in the opposite relationship. Far more join the churches than actually make profession outwardly at first.

It was noticed that the Methodists and Baptists were united with their congregational and Presbyterian colleagues in the work. And there was utter harmony. In these great outpourings of the Holy Spirit, at first there is utter harmony. It seems as if those who are lukewarm about revival and those who are not evangelical in heart are dumbfounded by what they see. And they don't start to criticize until some short time afterwards. This is also true of great evangelists who rise in times of revival. You'll agree with me, those of you who are old enough to remember, that Billy Graham had a kind of honeymoon period of about a year or two years when nobody said anything against him at all. Everyone was praising Billy Graham for his work. But then they began to find fault from right and from the left.

Now the reports from Boston announced there was a cloud of mercy resting on the city. Several churches were engaged in days of fasting and prayer. In New York, souls were being added daily to almost all the churches—Baptists, Dutch Reformed, Methodists, Presbyterian, and some Episcopal congregations. I mention some Episcopal congregations because, you know, the Episcopal Church was almost wiped out by the Revolution. You see, the Episcopal Church supported the mother country, and their clergy were compelled by ecclesiastical law to pray for the king and to pray for George III in the wake of the American Revolution was not at all popular until they began to change things, and then they began to catch up.

The revival swept Maine, Vermont. I find one of the most thorough awakenings began in Charlestown, Massachusetts, just across the river from Boston. And it began with prayer meetings for ministers. For those of you who know something about this, I would say a la Guesswine, if you know what I mean by that. Pastors getting together to pray for reviving their own congregations and their own hearts. One interesting thing was that this revival spread to Cape Cod and was most effective in a town called Hyannis, which of course we know as the home of the Kennedy family today. It began in Hyannis among the children, and more than 200 adults were converted in this children's revival.

Now for something else that's significant, the first intimation of a growing seriousness in the city of New York was not found in great congregations, nor in the ordinary assemblies of the saints, but in little praying circles that were discovered multiplying. And the movement was spontaneous and entirely interdenominational. Great awakenings swept Long Island, found mentioned Southampton, Westhampton, Oyster Ponds. Up the Hudson River, all the little towns were touched. Along the Mohawk westward, all those little cities, the revival was intense. There was a most extraordinary movement in Rochester.

Now the awakening in New York State was already considered by the summer a glorious work. The reports to summarize them crowded churches, powerful intercession, convicting preaching, immediate conversions, encouraging additions in New York, Albany, Troy, Utica, Rochester, and a score of other towns.

I told you that in New York, the Presbyterians were dominant. The Congregationalists had given way to them in return for a free hand in New England. But in the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th Presbyterian churches in Albany, the capital city of New York, there was a revival sweeping the congregations and many, many conversions. I got the pastors' names—Campbell, Sprague, Lockhead, and Kirk. Sprague became such an enthusiast for revival, he wrote a great volume on revival. You'll find it's a standard work. You may find it in some old bookshops these days.

Now, here's something that's most important. I found from the Rochester newspapers that in the last week of 1830, there was unabated interest in things spiritual, and a large proportion of the recent converts were among the citizens of First Intelligence and Highest Station. Now, you may wonder why I single out Rochester. The evangelist of the Rochester revival was Charles Grandison Finney, and that's a name that's well known in evangelical circles today. Charles Finney was a converted lawyer. He was used to presenting truth in a logical way. He believed in persuading people, but he also believed that the word would convict them.

He developed a quarrel with his own denomination. He was a Presbyterian. The Presbyterians and many of the Congregationalists of that time believed in winning people to Christ. But if after a meeting someone came up and said, "I'm in great distress of soul, I'm a lost sinner, can you help me?" They would say, "Keep on praying, brother, and perhaps God will extend his mercy to you. Maybe you will find your name among the elect. And keep in touch with me. I'll pray for you, and you keep in touch with me." And maybe, for instance, Samuel J. Mills, whom I mentioned last night, took him three years to receive the assurance of salvation. Finney said, this is utterly wrong. God commands men to repent. It's a repentance now. And he preached for immediate decision. And in this matter, of course, I would heartily endorse what he said.

Rochester was the first big town that Finney had a real campaign in. He had preached in, if you read his autobiography, in tiny little towns like Evans Mills, population 250, that sort of thing. Also, he held meetings for individual pastors in Philadelphia, where he stirred up some of the hyper-Calvinistic brethren by his emphasis. But of the 10,000 inhabitants of Rochester, a thousand were converted, one in ten. And 150 of them joined the Presbyterian churches. According to all the reports, this lessened crime so much in Rochester that prosecutions dropped one-third while the population traveled.

Now, in the San Jose prayer conference we had last fall, Armand Gassois and Bill Bright and myself and others, one man mentioned that in Finney's Rochester campaign there were 100,000 people converted. I said to him, as discreetly as I could afterwards, that poses a problem for me. How could you have 100,000 converts in a town of 10,000? "Oh, excuse me," he said, "a quarter of a million." I said, "How could you have a quarter of a million converts in a town of 10,000?" "Well," he said, "that is difficult. I never thought of that." So he went and looked it up and came back and apologized. He said, "I got the wrong figure. There were 100,000 converts." But I said, "Even that poses a problem. In a town of 10,000, before railroads, when you could only reach the town by horse and buggy, or on horseback, or walking, or on a canal, how could there be 100,000 converts in a town of 10,000?" Yet I have seen dozens of times that in Finney's great revival in Rochester there were 100,000 conversions. It's a case of misrepresenting or misreading facts.

Now, Finney says in his autobiography, the very fame of the work at Rochester was an efficient instrument in the hands of the Spirit of God in promoting the greatest revival of religion that this country had till then ever witnessed. In other words, Finney, in a nice way, was saying, he gave God the praise, that thanks to the Rochester revival, it resulted in a nationwide revival of 100,000 converts. Then, in his lectures on revival of religion, he quotes Lyman Beecher, the great congregational divine, saying of this revival, that was the greatest work of God and the greatest revival of religion the world has ever seen in such and such a time. 100,000 were reported as having connected themselves with churches as a result of that great revival. This is unparalleled in the history of the Church and of the progress of religion.

So you see, putting those things together, Finney doesn't say there were 100,000 converted in Rochester. He says there were 100,000 converted as a result of the Rochester campaign. But I discovered this isn't true. Finney's campaign ran from the last week of September right into about March of 1831. And the revival began, and at least six months before that, I was just describing it to you. What can you make of that?

Now, I'm not taking an isolated case. There's a book you'll find in the Fuller Bookshelves. Maybe your pastor's got a copy of it. The German title is Geschichte der Evangelisation. It's by Professor Paulus Scharf of Frankfurt. It's been translated by Helga Henry, wife of Dr. Carl Henry. And it's called The History of Evangelism. I think it was financed by Billy Graham. In the German, he says, "Der kritische Theologe Dr. Lyman Beecher Bertelt Finney's Wirken aus der größten religiösen Erweckung." If you understand all that, he's saying it was the greatest religious revival in so short a space of time. And 100,000 people were converted. So even the Germans have picked this up. Whereas actually, so far as I can tell, there was a general outpouring of the Holy Spirit. In the first year, there were 100,000 conversions. And towards the end of that first year, Finney won 1,000 to the Lord.

Now this is worth keeping in mind, because most people think that Charles Finney was the Billy Graham of his day. I find he was more a John Stott or Raymond Ortlund of his day. He was a pastoral evangelist. In fact, in 1832, Mrs. Finney said she was tired of all that travel, and he settled down and took a pastorate in New York, the Broadway Tabernacle. Did a great work in New York. And Finney never was what Moody was, a campaigner for all these churches together.

You say, well then, how do you account for his great influence? He became president of Oberlin College in Ohio. And when he was there, he wrote lectures on revivals of religion. One of the best textbooks on such movements that I know. The tactics are splendid. I don't know that I agree with one point of his strategy. He says revival is nothing more than the right use of the appropriate means. Revival is something for man to do. Now, Jonathan Edwards, on the other hand, said of the revival at Northampton, Massachusetts, it is the work of God. Both are true. In these great movements of the Spirit, man has something to do. But he doesn't control the power, and he doesn't initiate the movement.

This is worth asking questions about, because the mood of our country today is, give us the plan, give us the blueprint, show us how to do it, and we'll swap up a revival of our own. Whereas these movements all came about through intense prayer and beseeching God to do it. I hope that no one will think I was denigrating in any way the work of Charles Finney. You see, he was such a logical preacher, and he did such a good work in Rochester that he became an authority in this field of evangelism. And what he said of revival, I would say of evangelism. Evangelism is nothing more than the right use of the appropriate means.

I still remember 1949, being in Billy Graham's company, when Dawson Troughton said to Billy, "Now Billy, the Lord is really blessing you. But you've got to treat the convert a lot differently than Billy Sunday did." Billy Sunday used to preach in these tabernacles with a sawdust trail, and to be converted, you just simply went up and shook Billy Sunday by the hand. In some cases, decision cards were used, but there was no real follow-up. And it was Dawson Troughton that sold Billy Graham on the idea of scripture memorization as a means of confirming people in the faith. That's what you call the right use of the appropriate means. That pertains to evangelism. But revival, the reviving of God's people, the awakening of the masses, is the work of the Holy Spirit. And we cannot organize that or even schedule it.

Now there was a whole series of revivals in the colleges at this time. Kenyon College, Ohio Episcopalian Institution, sweeping revival with 50 volunteers for the Episcopal ministry. Union College Schenectady, Western Reserve, Jefferson College, another great awakening in Williams College, Massachusetts. In Yale, a college revival of great power brought about 50 conversions at once, began in the senior class and spread until the college administration reported that 100 only of the 350 students were unaffected. 350, yes, that was the student population of Yale in those days. They were small colleges. At Brown University, that's a Baptist institution in Rhode Island, it was noted that 70 of the student enrollment of 130 had been pious before the revival. 30 had become pious in the revival, and the hope was expressed that the other 30 would experience a change of heart and become pious. The word pious was a word they used, I suppose, for like finding the Lord. We have our expressions. Well, I'll say no more about the college revivals, but here's an interesting thing.

Remember I described last night some of the extravagant behavior on the frontier, where people fainted and trembled, where they jerked, where they sobbed and wept, and when they were delivered, where they danced for joy? I was curious to know what this next revival would do in Kentucky, where all these things had happened. The revival in 1830 began in a town called Glasgow. It's just about 90 miles south of Louisville. For instance, 1,500 new converts joined the Baptist Church there. No extravagances, nor any mentioned anywhere in Kentucky or Tennessee. They said in the Trans-Appalachian country there is a strange stillness in which some sinners wept and some trembled under conviction of sin, but they were quite convinced it was an outpouring of the Holy Spirit. So some of these extravagances are not at all indispensable to the work.

By the way, I'm going to digress to tell you of something interesting. When I took a course in Chicago under William Warren Sweet, who was professor of American Church History at the University of Chicago, he told of the frontier awakenings in Kentucky, and he mentioned, besides what I've described to you, the barking. I wonder if anyone here has ever heard of the barking exercise in revival? Yes, some. But in every theological seminary, you hear about this because it's part of American Church History. William Warren Sweet told the class, of which I was a member, that those people were illiterate. They meant well, but they had strange ideas. They would get down on their hands and knees at a tree, and they'd bark at the tree like dogs keeping an opossum up a tree. They figured they had the devil up the tree, and they wanted to keep him up there while the preacher was preaching. And of course, the students thought this was excruciatingly funny, and they laughed so heartily. Not many of these students were at all evangelical, and they put it down like religion on the frontier type of thing.

Now that intrigued me, because these other symptoms I had seen in secular life—for instance, I have seen a schoolboy threatened with expulsion. Knowing when he went home his father would give him a thrashing, he just trembled. Have you ever seen a person tremble? Well, that's psychologically explained. I have seen a soldier at a court-martial faint. He thought he was going to be shot, and he fainted, passed out. That happens in courtrooms sometimes when the person is convicted, he just goes into a dead faint. The dancing for joy. Have you ever seen some of these women on these giveaway programs when they win a... Well, these things you can explain. But barking. I've never seen anyone bark on one of these giveaway shows. I've never seen a schoolboy bark when the headmaster threatened to expel him. I've never seen a soldier bark at the colonel. Never. Seemed to be out of place.

So I decided to investigate this. I got a book called Primitive Traits in Religious Revivals by a man called Davenport. And he said, mentioning the trembling and the jerking and the weeping and so forth, he said there was also barking on the frontier but it was not too common. I thought, now how did he know? He wrote a hundred years afterwards. I looked for footnotes, no footnotes. Forty years after that, 140 years after the movement, Professor Alice Felt Tyler of the University of Minnesota wrote a book called Freedom's Ferment in which she said there was barking on the frontier and it was altogether too common. Whom did she cite? Davenport. Whom did he cite? Nobody. Then I got a book by a Jesuit scholar, Francis Xavier Curran. And he said there was barking on the frontier, it was altogether disgraceful. Who does he cite? Tyler and Davenport. You must concede they read each other's books.

So I thought, well I've got to go back and find out the whole secret of historical research is to go back to the original sources. I found David Benedict, the great Baptist historian of New England. David Benedict was in touch with all the Baptists. His history of the Baptists is like an encyclopedia. He could tell you how many Baptist members there were in some tiny village in Kentucky and so forth. He wrote to them all, they wrote to him, and he compiled his encyclopedia of the Baptists. But he said the Baptists did not bark, but the Presbyterians did. So I thought, now how did he know what the Presbyterians did? So I got Presbyterian documents and I couldn't find any record of this except for one case. A Richard McNamara, a Presbyterian minister who became fanatical and joined the Shakers. You've heard of the Shakers? They died out. They didn't believe in sex, so you understand why they died out. They believed in universal celibacy. And so they died out. But McNamara said that some Kentucky men fancied themselves as dogs and barked. But now, he didn't say where it happened, he didn't say he heard it, he didn't say he saw it, he didn't mention any place. It was hearsay.

But Barton Stone, one of the founders of the Disciples of Christ, a Presbyterian minister, said there was no barking on the frontier. He lived there. He was in all these great camp meetings. And Cossett, who wrote the history of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church, said there was no barking on the frontier. They said the story was circulated by Unitarians to discredit the Revival. So where did the story come from? According to Barton Stone, an aged Presbyterian minister, in his eighties, was deeply convicted of the Lord for his shortcomings as a minister. He was sobbing and crying. And because he was so old and nearly fell over, I suppose, he held on to a little tree and he sighed and sobbed. And that was the basis of the report of the barking.

Now I brought this up at the Conference on Faith and History at Capital University in Ohio, before three hundred secular and church historians. They fell on me like a ton of bricks. They said, Orr, you're spoiling good classroom fun. In other words, it's hard to teach history to some people, so if you want to lighten the class a little bit, tell them about the barking. It's not true.

Well, the Revival swept Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia. For instance, Virginia is a great Baptist state, as you know. It reached Richmond in July of 1831. On the first Sunday, they baptized thirty in the river, twenty white, ten black. Two weeks later, there were twelve white and ten black. And before many weeks, First Baptist Church received 480 into fellowship, and Second Baptist Church 152. And this movement spread throughout the South. It's a very interesting thing. You find that the blacks were deeply moved, although they were still in slavery. You find that the numbers increased. I can give you a little example of that. In 1797, there were 3,700 white Methodists in South Carolina, only 1,000 black. However, in 1807, there were 14,000 white and 5,000 black. 1818, 21,000 white, 11,000 black. 1828, 35,000 white, 18,000 black. But by 1838, there were 24,016 white, 23,498 black. I wish I could get a black American to research the history of the work of God among his own folk. I've talked to many of them. One of the troubles is that the blacks in those days didn't have much education and not many records. But there's quite a story. By the time a revival swept the country, it affected the blacks as well as the whites.

Now, I better not mention names, but a very godly Methodist church historian wrote an article in preparation for Key 73, in which he said that the churches ought to pull up their socks. The title of the article was, Will the Third Great Awakening Miss the Churches? And the idea he had was, if we don't do something as denominations, it'll break out among the Jesus people or something like that. It was a good article, but I was intrigued over his saying, Will the Third Great Awakening Miss the Churches? The Third Great Awakening was this awakening began in 1830. And in case you think of that as the only one, then there was the Fourth Great Awakening in 1858, and the Fifth Great Awakening in 1905. I wrote to the good professor and asked him about it. He never answered my letter. I got his private address from a phone book in the library. I wrote to him again. Still didn't get an answer. Finally, I wrote an article of criticism of his article. I put on it, Not Yet Published. And then he answered me. He said if it made me any happier, he would not refer to the Third Great Awakening, but the Next Great Awakening.

Now he thought, and maybe some of you think, Well, what's the good of fussing over a number? After all, what does it matter whether it's third or whatever? Let me say this. Supposing President Ford or some Democratic contender for the presidency were to say, The armed forces of the United States have been engaged in war only two times, and since 1820 we've never heard a shot fired. You'd say, Well, what about the Civil War? What about the Spanish-American War? What about World War I? What about World War II? What about the Korean War? Now I heard that this good man was coming to speak in Los Angeles, in St. Paul's Church, so I drove off to St. Paul's Church. When I got there, I found myself the only man among 200 nuns. The Roman Catholic Church, the only other men there were the priest who was chairman and this good Methodist historian. And he made the same statement. He said the tragedy of American life is that since 1800 or thereabouts, we have had no Great Awakening.

I wrote to him again and I told him, did you know that in the Great Awakening of 1830, which lasted about 12 years, in the last two years your own denomination increased from 580,098 to 1,171,356? Could you imagine a denomination doubling in two years? A 100% increase in two years. Yet there's no record of the Third Great Awakening in American church history books. None at all.

Now I must round this out very quickly for you. The revival affected all denominations. Then it broke out in England under an Irish-American called James Caughey. It broke out in Scotland under William Chalmers Burns, one of the most remarkable revivals Scotland ever knew. It broke out in Wales. The same revival broke out in Sweden under George Scott, followed by a great man called Rosenius, who was born Swede. The same revival was felt all around the world, wherever there's an evangelical cause. Perhaps what will interest you most of all was that this revival swept Polynesia, especially Hawaii.

At the beginning of the 1830s, the total membership of the congregational churches in Hawaii was 577. All around the world, people were praying for revival. In 1835, the congregational missionaries were moved to appeal to Christians in the United States to pray for a baptism from on high for the Hawaiian field. And they promised to pray for the rest of the world. Now at Hilo, on the big island of Hawaii, there was a blind man called Pua Aiki. He was called the leader of the praying ones. A congregational minister called Titus Cohen was sent to Hilo. He was a great man of prayer. And within two years, the Great Awakening had begun in Hawaii.

In the First Congregational Church of Hilo, Titus Cohen took in one Sunday, 1,705 members who had been on probation for six months. Before the movement ended, he took into one church at Hilo 7,557. As far as his own ministry was concerned, he won 13,000 to the Lord. Now you might say, was this one of these people movements when people all came along and said, we'd like to become Christians? Oh, no. Let me describe Titus Cohen in the work. He said, the sea of faces, all hushed, except when sighs and sobs broke out here and there, was a scene to melt the heart. The word fell with power, and sometimes as the feeling deepened, the vast audience was moved and swayed like a forest in a mighty wind. The word became the fire and hammer of the Almighty, the spirit quick and powerful.

This movement spread throughout the Hawaiian Islands. After 20 years, 19,679 of the converts were still in good standing. So that King Kamehameha granted the country a Bill of Rights and said, Hawaii is now a Christian country. And the Congregational Mission, the American Board, pulled out and said, Hawaii is now Christian. And the Hawaiians took over the evangelization of Micronesia and other parts of the world.

You say, well, why is Hawaii not Christian today? The Hawaiians were dying of Western diseases like smallpox and German measles and the like. And to work in the plantations, they began importing Japanese, Chinese, Filipinos, and others. Orientals. Consequently, today, Hawaiians are less than 10% of the population of the islands. All Hawaiians are Christianized. The Japanese and Chinese are still largely Buddhist, but with considerable Christian minorities among them.

I can describe these revivals in other places, in the Netherlands, Indies, in Armenia, in Assyria, in South Africa, South India, but I've given you enough. This Great Awakening was another outpouring of the Holy Spirit, and it came about the same way as the second one, through prayer, which brought an intense conviction of sin.

Before we sing another hymn, is there any question you'd like to ask on this historical treatment? Anything I missed or anything I didn't make clear? Just raise your hand and ask your question on the historical part.