The 1857 Revival: A Leaderless Prayer Movement Transforming America

As we come together now, we'll turn the time over to Dr. Orr and ask God's blessing upon him as he comes again. The question has been asked me, do we have the right as a people to take a promise made by God to the nation of Israel and apply it to the United States? That's a good question. And my answer is a very simple one, that the history of our country shows that when we do this, God honors the promise. Now don't misunderstand, I do not believe that the United States of America stands in the same relationship to God as the nation of Israel did under the old covenant. The nation of Israel was God's peculiar people. We call this God's own country, but the Canadians call Canada God's own country, the Australians call Australia God's own country, the Norwegian feels the same about Norway, and the New Zealander feels the same about New Zealand. But when the people of God in this country have taken a promise such as the one I referred to and pled it before God, God honors their prayer.

The promise is very simple: if my people, called by my name, shall humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and will heal their land. I propose to illustrate this from the story of the most wholesome awakening this country ever experienced. Now by the 1850s, the tide was out again in the United States. You may say, why? There were several reasons. First of all, people were making money hand over fist. The Middle West was being developed, railroads were being built. When D.L. Moody, as a young man, moved from Boston to Chicago to make his fortune, he was able to get 18% return on his investments. Now Sears Roebuck charges 18% per annum for delinquent accounts, 1.5% per month. But there isn't any bank today that will give you 18%. So you see what a boom was going on in the United States at that time. And when people are making money easily, they tend to be pleasure-seeking and God-neglecting.

Second, the country was seriously divided over a political issue—the issue of slavery. It was also a moral issue. But it divided the country politically. And we mustn't think that it divided the country north against south. Churches throughout the country were divided. I remember reading the records of the Second Methodist Church in Chicago split over slavery. Third, a godly New England farmer called William Miller rediscovered the doctrine of the Second Coming. He preached so fervently and enlisted so many interested people that he had a following of about a million. It was as widespread as the charismatic movement today. He made the mistake of fixing the date for Christ's coming as 1844. And when the Lord didn't come on that date, some people were bitterly disillusioned. Now there are some legends that the people who were expecting the Second Coming dressed in white and waited on the rooftops, but this is legend. But the fact is that many people sold their homes and their businesses, or their farms, and then when they tried to buy them back, the price was up. That always puzzled me. You know, if I thought the Lord were coming tomorrow, I wouldn't even bother about my mortgage with Great Western Loan and Savings—savings and loan. I always call it Great Western Loan and Savings because I owe them money. I don't have any savings there. But somehow or other, these people would rather have the cash in hand for the Lord's coming. I don't know why, but this is a wonderful country. When I first came to the United States, I saw an advertisement in some magazine like The King's Business or Moody Monthly. It said, when you make your will, leave your money to us. It was a Hebrew-Christian association. It said, we will be the only people here after the rapture. That was a mixture of commercial and prophetical interest, all right.

Now as I say, the tide went out in the 1850s. You read, for instance, that the brother of the president of Illinois College was expelled for dancing in the aisles during divine worship. You read of riots, obscene verses being written in hymnbooks, students singing parodies. The tide was going out. But it came in again in 1857. Now it began as a prayer movement. I can't emphasize this too much. This great revival was leaderless. In America, as soon as you mention a revival, they say, who was the leader? All these great awakenings were leaderless. They produced leaders. That's the mark of a great awakening, a generality of the outpouring of the Holy Spirit.

Now the initiatory prayer meetings were begun in an upper room in Manhattan on the 23rd of September, 1858, by a man called Jeremiah Lanphier. He had been appointed visitor for the North Dutch Reformed Church in downtown Manhattan. He was a man of prayer, so he printed a little leaflet, How often shall I pray? As often as the language of prayer is in my heart. That's another way of saying, every time I feel the Spirit moving in my heart, I will pray. As often as I feel the power of temptation within, as often as I feel the aggression of a worldly spirit. On the other side it said, in prayer we leave the business of time for the business of eternity. And it said, a prayer meeting will be held weekly in the upper room of the North Dutch Reformed Church of the consistory building, Fulton and William Street. Of the population of greater New York of one million, the only one to show up was Jeremiah Lanphier. But at twenty-five to one, he heard another step on the stairs, and there were six men who prayed until one o'clock. There was no rending of the veil, there were no tongues of fire, nothing. Just a little prayer meeting, that was all. But they felt so close to God in prayer, they decided to meet the following week. And the numbers increased, doubled at fourteen now. They decided to meet every day of the week, Monday right through to Saturday. Then they began overflowing. They filled the upper room, filled the basement, they filled the auditorium of the church. Then John Street Methodist Church opened up. Then Trinity Episcopal Church at the corner of Wall Street and Broadway. And then church after church.

Some who deny the Holy Spirit's prescience, who try to explain everything by political or economic or sociological reasoning, dismiss this as the bank panic revival. It's true that three weeks after this prayer movement began, there was a bank failure. A lot of people lost their money, and this undoubtedly was a factor. But when people talk about a bank panic revival, it sounds like hysteria. And I found that, for instance, the bank panic caused the attendance at the prayer meeting to increase by about twenty-two out of a population of a million. That's not hysteria. And the great revival itself didn't break through to become public property until about February of the following year. But there are some people who like to talk that way.

Here's another interesting thing. During the second week of that revival, there was an outpouring of the Holy Spirit in Hamilton, Ontario, in Canada, which was unaffected, of course, by the American bank panic. The mayor of the town was converted, doctors and lawyers were converted, drunkards and prostitutes were converted, and thousands of pastors who saw their congregations withering away in the United States read wistfully of this gust of divine power in Hamilton, Ontario. I find in my research that throughout the remainder of 1857, prayer meetings multiplied everywhere. For instance, the Presbyterians met on the first of December 1857 in Cincinnati. Two hundred and forty ministers came to discuss revival. They spent most of their time praying. The same sort of meeting in Pittsburgh. The Baptists had an all-day of prayer, Congregationalists in New England, and so on. So that you could say, from September until the end of the year, prayer meetings multiplied throughout the United States.

It was in February of 1858 that the New York newspapers reported an extraordinary movement of men to prayer in New York City. I take it you've all heard of Horace Greeley, the editor who said, Go West, young man? There's a town in Colorado named for him. He sent one of his reporters in horse and buggy racing around the prayer meetings to see how many men were at prayer. In an hour he visited about a dozen prayer meetings and found 6,100 businessmen meeting for prayer. There were more, but that was as many as he could visit in an hour. This was news, so Horace Greeley put this in the headline. The other newspapers felt they had to do something about it too, so the flood tide began. Soon every downtown auditorium, whether public hall or theater, as well as church, was filled. You read, for instance, of Burton's Theater in Brooklyn, the street packed from wall to wall, crowded with carriages. With every part of that huge theater, with its three galleries, the pit, the platform, the windows, people clinging to projections, 5,000 people gathered for prayer.

You might say, what kind of prayer meetings were they? They were the simplest imaginable. They were run by laymen. They were not anti-clerical, anti-ministerial in any way. The chairman, a layman, would always say, I see the Reverend Mr. So-and-so, the Presbyterian minister or the Baptist minister, whoever, is present, we'll ask him to lead in prayer. If he saw another minister, he'd ask him to read the scripture, and then he'd say the meeting is open for prayer, and for 50 minutes they prayed. Of course, when the meetings got very big, they couldn't all pray. It meant that perhaps 30 people only could pray out of 3,000 in a meeting.

So they sometimes would write requests down and pass them up to be read and to be prayed for. They had signs around the walls: no controverted subjects discussed. In other words, no ardent Baptist was to get up and pray about believers' baptism, and no enthusiastic Episcopalian was to talk about the apostolic succession of the bishops, and so forth. There was a comity. They agreed that they were met there to pray. They had signs that said that the younger must give way to the older, the local people to people from out of town. And no long prayers. It was more like chain praying, as we used to call it in the Christian Endeavor movement.

In one of these prayer meetings in New York, a minister got up and said, I was here until three o'clock yesterday dealing with people who wish to find Christ as Savior. There must be many others. So I would like to announce that from tonight onwards indefinitely, my church will be open for the preaching of the gospel. And soon, every church in New York was opened and filled every night. That hasn't hit you yet. I was at the last Graham crusade in this city. Billy Graham was speaking to 40,000 a night. What a crowd. If on Tuesday night Billy Graham had said, don't come here tomorrow night, go to your own midweek service. And you pastors that don't have one, you better open up because these people are coming. If some pastor had looked over that crowd of 40,000 and thought, I better open up or I'll be disgraced, what would he have told his custodian? He would have said, Billy Graham announced a prayer meeting here tonight, so you better open up. But how many people would have come? If you had divided the 40,000 by the 5,000 sponsoring churches alone, it would have meant eight people in the front row. Can you imagine that? Can you imagine that?

Mass evangelism at its best. I'm one of Billy Graham's enthusiastic supporters. Mass evangelism has its weaknesses, but he does a good job compared to other evangelists that I've read about and that I've known. But that's mass evangelism at its best. Can you imagine a movement that would fill every church, every night? And in the 20th century, when I come to that tomorrow night, I can tell you of that happening even in this part of the world, in our own century, in the living memory of some people. Most of the people who were alive then were very young, of course, but there are still some people alive from that time.

Of course, there were some startling conversions. The Muhammad Ali of that day was a boxer called Orville Gardner, nicknamed Awful Gardner. He was wonderfully converted, and that impressed a certain class of citizen. Lots of people were being converted, running about 10,000 conversions a week. All the churches crowded. Now the revival went up the Hudson and down the Mohawk. In New England, Finney was conducting modest meetings in Park Street Chapel, and he says in his autobiography that the revival in Boston became so general, it was impossible to keep any account of the numbers of converts, or even to make an estimate of the numbers that would approximate the truth.

It's very interesting that Finney mentions this, because although he says revival is nothing more than the right use of the appropriate means. The three great awakenings in his lifetime—1792, the year he was born, 1830, when he had his great breakthrough, and 1858, in which he had a small part in both the United States and the United Kingdom—these movements were unstructured, unprogrammed, and unplanned. They were not set up at all. I'll spare you the details of the awakening in New England, but for instance in Maine, church bells were ringing at eight in the morning, and at noon, and at six in the evening, bringing the people to church.

Along the Mohawk, the Baptists, for example, had so many candidates for baptism of their converts, they couldn't baptize them in their chapels and churches. They went down to the river and broke the ice and baptized them in the cold water. And when Baptists do that, they really are on fire. In Newark, New Jersey, of a population of 70,000, 2,785 were converted in the first two months. And according to the pastors, mostly mature people. At Princeton, of 272 collegians, 102 repented, and 50 entered the ministry. This was very typical of the colleges, because the movement swept the colleges from Bowdoin College in Maine to Baylor University in Independence, Texas.

Six weeks or so after the bank panic hit Philadelphia, some young men started a United Prayer meeting, but only a dozen showed up. That doesn't suggest hysteria, does it? But then, on the 3rd of February in 1858, these dozen intercessors, who were still faithfully praying, decided to move closer downtown and to a neutral place, so they got the use of an ante-room in Jane's Theater, the biggest theater in Philadelphia. Then attendances picked up to about 60. But in March, the tide of revival came. The attendances overflowed the main auditorium, then the platform, then a gallery, then both galleries. And in that crowd of 6,000 men, George Duffield wrote the hymn, Stand Up, Stand Up for Jesus, Ye Soldiers of the Cross. By the way, if there's anyone interested in hymnology, you could write a doctor's dissertation on the hymns produced in times of revival.

Then the churches got together for the summer with huge, big-top tents to evangelize all the inquirers. Now, this movement of prayer crossed the Allegheny, just like a tidal wave, and right down the Ohio River. State after state reported extraordinary things. For instance, in Ohio, 200 small towns reported 12,000 converts in a couple of months. Indiana further west, 150 towns reported 4,500 converts. In state after state, there was extraordinary prayer and response. I found it impossible to get the figures. A Baptist journal decided to publish the number of people being converted. But there was no systematic survey. They simply took letters that reached the editor's office and said, up in Rockland, Maine, they've had 27 converts and so forth. They just wrote them all down and added up to thousands. Then the Methodists tried the same, and they got 96,000. But it wasn't exhaustive. Actually, I found about a million people were converted the first year, maybe two million in the two years, out of a population of 30 million. Two million out of 30 million.

To give you a typical illustration of a prayer meeting, an Episcopal layman convened the first United Prayer Meeting in Kalamazoo in Michigan. He said, I'm unused to extemporaneous prayer like this, but we'll follow the example we've read about in the New York papers. I see our rector is present. We'll ask him if he will lead in prayer, and we'll ask the Methodist minister if he will read the scripture. But he said, this room is so crowded, you'd better write your prayer request and hand it up. The first prayer request was, a praying wife asks the prayers of this company for the conversion of her husband, who is far from God. Surely you'll agree that's a common prayer request. Suddenly a blacksmith stood up and said, my wife prays for me. I know I must be that man and I need to be converted. Would you please pray for me? Up got a lawyer and said, I think it was my wife that wrote that note because I know I'm far from God. And five husbands were converted in five minutes.

You see, in times of revival, it's not like evangelism. In evangelism, the evangelist seeks the sinner. But in times of revival, the sinners come running to the Lord. Chicago had a population of 100,000 at that time. By the way, I was very much surprised to find that Chicago's main rival for the title capital of the West was Keokuk, Iowa. Has anyone ever been in Keokuk, Iowa? My professor of Hebrew was born there, and I drove down to see what it was like and drove right through the place before I realized it passed. But that was just below the rapids on the Mississippi, and the paddle steamers used to come up and land settlers there. But Chicago got the railroads and they went ahead. Out of a population of 100,000, there were 2,000 men meeting for prayer in the Metropolitan Hall every day. Then it overflowed to the churches.

I picked up a letter written by a man, apparently a member of First Baptist Church, in which he said the entrances passed anything he'd ever seen in his life. He said that in the First Baptist Church they had prayer meetings at 8 o'clock in the morning, at 12 o'clock noon, and at 6 and a half o'clock, they called it, in the evening. And he said yesterday went on all day of prayer. Just prayer. The people were converted largely in prayer meetings. Now it doesn't mean there wasn't any preaching. After the prayer meeting movement began and people flocked to the prayer meetings, then they began holding meetings in the churches with a lot of preaching, lots of conversion.

What was the effect? I'll give you a typical example. Trinity Episcopal Church in 1857 had 121 members. In 1860 they built a church for their 1,400 members, from 121 to 1,400. A young shoe salesman went to the superintendent of the Plymouth Congregational Church and asked if he might teach Sunday school. The superintendent said, I'm sorry young fellow, I've got 16 teachers too many, but I'll put you on the waiting list. The young man said, but I'd like to do something now. Well, said the superintendent, why don't you start a class? He said, how do you do that? He said, get some boys off the street. Now don't bring them here.

Take them out in the country for about a month of Sundays, and then when you have control of them, you bring them here. They'll be your class. Now that would work. For instance, if anyone went along to a street where the boys are shooting marbles or playing leapfrog or flying kites and such, how many of you boys would like to go on a hike? How many of you would like to go on a hike? They'd go immediately to get permission from their parents, and the parents investigate the young man and find he's a scoutmaster or something. They say, okay, be careful now and all the rest of it. Give them instructions for what to do, away they go.

This young man took these boys to a beach on Lake Michigan, probably along what's now called the Gold Coast, and taught them Bible games and Bible verses, then took them to the Plymouth Congregational Church. The name of the young man was Dwight Lyman Moody, and that was the beginning of his ministry. You don't read about this, but that's how Moody got started.

Now Charles Finney, whom I've mentioned already, reported that only the South was missed by the Awakening. He said in his autobiography that the people there were so addicted to their peculiar institution that the Spirit of God was grieved away from them, and that they found no place for him in their hearts. This is not true. I got the newspapers when I was working in Chicago, did all my research that I could get to find that from Richmond, Virginia to Galveston in Texas, the Revival swept the South in the same way. Perhaps a little more slowly, because the South was largely rural, there weren't the big industrial cities of the North. But Bishop Warren Candler said he thought that the number of converts was even greater according to the population.

Why did Finney make that statement? By the way, other historians have made the same statement. Frank Grenville Beardsley, in his History of American Revivals, quotes Finney almost verbatim. Why did Finney make that statement? He was such an ardent abolitionist, so much against slavery, that he had made up his mind that God couldn't bless them anyway. It was almost as if I were to come back and say that there was a great Revival sweeping South Africa. A lot of people say that wouldn't be possible. I would like to point out to you, although there's not a great Revival in South Africa, that church attendance there is much higher than in Australia or New Zealand, and that there are more black Christians per head of population in South Africa than in the rest of Africa, in any part. In spite of apartheid, or maybe because of it, because of the tension, and so forth.

The same was true of this house. The Awakening of 1858 was received with enthusiasm by the secular press. I remember in 1949, I had flown in from Chicago and I went straight to the big tent where Billy Graham was holding forth in Los Angeles. Billy saw me, gave me a signal to meet him at the platform. We went out, but he was being mobbed by so many people wanting his autograph and so forth, wanting to shake hands with him. He said, look, let's find a place, I want to talk to you. We found a car parked, the doors weren't locked, I don't know whose car it was, but we got in, Billy and I, and he said, Edwin, I've got a real problem, and he told me that William Randolph Hearst had sent a telegram to the reporters down here saying, Puff Graham. Now, he said, my committee are alarmed, they say it'll be the kiss of death. Don't let them in, drive them away. What do you think?

I had on my lap my Oxford dissertation dealing with this movement, and I opened up the thing and I showed Billy, I still don't know whose car that was, in the light of their dash, I said, now read this, it says, the press which speaks in the ears of millions is taken possession of by the spirit willingly or unwillingly to proclaim the works of God. I said, Billy, if the Department of Agriculture in the United States wanted to sell an idea to the farmers of America, they'd have to set aside $100,000 to do so. I said, if what's happening here is what I think it is, and God is going to bless you the way he blessed Moody, he'll make the newspapers work for you for nothing. And in one way, do you realize what free publicity that man gets to this day? In fact, he's sick of it at times. If he were asked tomorrow on the golf course at Montreat, what do you think of Mrs. Ford's latest statement, and he were simply to say, clear his throat, it would be in the newspapers tomorrow. Billy Graham asked what he thought of Betty Ford's latest statement, cleared his throat.

But this is what happened during the revival of 1858, and it went like wildfire because everywhere people read about it in the newspapers. Of course, Christians became excited. With very few exceptions, everyone was for it. For instance, some of the Unitarians were quite moved by it. In Boston, Harvard was Unitarian. The professor of religion was Frederick Dan Huntington. He was so moved he started a midweek prayer meeting for Harvard students, in which he himself was converted, and then he became an Episcopal bishop.

One critic was Theodore Parker, a rather radical Unitarian, a man who was shocking his own Unitarian colleagues. Unitarianism in those days was not like Unitarianism today. It was Christian Unitarianism, in the sense that they believed that Jesus Christ was the Savior of the world, but they didn't believe in his deity. They believed he was the adopted Son of God, whereas Unitarianism today has renounced even its Christian heritage and says there's no difference between Holy Scripture and the Koran. Theodore Parker went to one of these prayer meetings, I think he was in Park Street Chapel, and he was moved to pray. But some ardent brother got up and said, the man who has just prayed needs converting himself, let's pray for him, and mortally offended Theodore Parker. He turned against the revival and preached against it.

Some of the Anglo-Catholics of the Episcopal Church, the high church people, were against it at first, but it so filled their churches with seekers that they changed their minds and became in favor of it. Same thing was true of the Lutherans. I found that all over the country there was almost unanimous support. The movement was completely free of sectarian emphasis. Its primary emphasis was on prayer, yet there was a lot of preaching of the word. The meetings were all marked by quietness and restraint, and the most mature people of the community were converted.

Someone may say to me, was there speaking in tongues during this revival? I have to say I came across not one case of speaking in tongues in the United States or the United Kingdom, or in Australia or South Africa. Only one place, in South India, in Tenevelli, an extraordinary movement began among the Indian people that alarmed the Anglican clergy, the Episcopal clergy. Among these people there were trances and visions and dreams and prophecies and speaking in tongues. One clergyman wrote to his bishop—he was very much alarmed—to say, I must withdraw my criticism. They have the ear of the people, and the heathen are responding by the hundreds. By the way, at that part of India, the little tip of India, the very south of Cape Comorin, there were more Christians within a hundred miles for fifty years than all the rest of India put together. So you can draw what conclusion you like.

Some of my ardently charismatic friends insist, because of their experience, that there must have been speaking in tongues in every revival. I have to say, no, not in this case. But then there was the exception in India, in case somebody wants to make a doctrine out of it the other way. So I just mention these as facts.

Now did the revival stop? I always assumed, in fact, when I wrote my Oxford dissertation, I assumed that the revival stopped with the Civil War. But in my latest book, which was published last year, I've had to withdraw that statement. The revival continued through the Civil War. To try and get the records of all the denominations for seven years was too much for me to do, so I decided to go halfway between the liturgical Episcopalians and Lutherans and the informal Baptists and Methodists. So I picked on the Presbyterians, and I find that the revivals continued, Presbytery after Presbytery. If I'm not mistaken, in the last year of the war, there were extraordinary revivals in seventy-two out of ninety-one Presbyteries. And then in 1866, after the war, they reported revivals exceeding even those of 1858.

What was most remarkable was the revival continued in the armies, too, only more evangelistically. I have the diary of a man who was working with the YMCA as a voluntary worker, and he said that they were taking a load of wounded men down the Tennessee River after the Battle of Pittsburgh Landing. He said, the cry of a wounded man is, water. He said, I told my colleagues, we must not let one man die without giving the water of life. That was D.L. Moody. That's where he served his apprenticeship. Moody was making five thousand dollars a year. Now for purchasing power, just multiply that by ten. He gave it up and lived by faith. His income the first year was only a hundred and fifty dollars.

This same great revival broke out in the United Kingdom in Northern Ireland. It began in a prayer meeting of laymen, four laymen.

You see, a man called James McQuilten had been converted. His pastor, the Reverend Samuel J. Moore, gave him a New Testament and also gave him a little book called God's Dealings with George Mueller of Bristol, the great man of prayer and faith. Now, you know, you can do a lot with a new convert. I find that God accomplishes most with new converts and restored backsliders. But this young man had the idea: if God is sending this great revival to our cousins across the Atlantic, and if God answers prayer for Mr. Mueller the way he does, why couldn't we pray for a revival in Ireland?

Well, plenty would have told him Ireland is a Roman Catholic country, the Protestants are only a minority. But he persisted. He asked the Lord for three prayer companions, and the four of them—McQuilten, Manili, Wallace, and Carlyle—met in a barn. In that barn, others joined them, some unconverted were converted there. On one occasion, one of the converts went back to a village called Ahochill, where his mother was a hard-drinking widow, his brother was a ne'er-do-well, and his sister had a bad reputation in town. They bitterly upbraided him for becoming soft. They went to bed very angry, but at two o'clock in the morning, they were awakened by the mother's outcries. They thought she had inflammation of the bowels, which was the name for appendicitis in those days. They sent for the doctor. The doctor examined her and said, there's nothing organically wrong with her, send for the minister.

Can you imagine in a quiet little Irish town, before the days of automobiles, the clip-clop of a horse and buggy coming along, people getting up to see what was going on, and then the minister coming? They felt sure it was a death. The Irish people, you know, hold what they call wakes, that means they all come in and sympathize with the bereaved, lift their mind until the funeral's over. They began coming in. The mother was converted, the brother was converted, the sister was converted, and every neighbor that came in was converted. It caused such a sensation that the minister of the Second Presbyterian Church invited the four laymen to come and preach in his church. The church was so packed and the galleries creaked so ominously, he was alarmed and he dismissed the congregation. It was sleeting outside, but the four men hadn't walked fourteen miles and were going to give up preaching, so they started to preach from outside. People began falling to their knees in the mud of the street, and the ministers of Ahocho were like doctors in an epidemic, working day and night dealing with souls.

Then it swept Ballymena, then it broke out in Belfast, swept the whole of the north of Ireland. Someone's bound to come up to me after and say, well, why doesn't it affect them today? My grandfather, I knew my grandfather, he was converted in that revival, but of course he died when I was a little boy about four or five. But in 1959, all the churches of Ireland invited me over to help them celebrate the 1859 revival. I preached in St. Patrick's Cathedral and all over Ireland in commemoration of this great movement. The same revival, after winning about ten percent of the population in Northern Ireland, broke out in Scotland, won about 300,000 people there. Then the same in Wales, and then it swept England.

It's very interesting, when the news of the Irish revival reached London, an English lady, Elizabeth Codner, was so moved, she wrote a hymn that we just sang tonight, "Lord, I hear of showers of blessing, Thy heart scattering full and free." It packed out every theatre in London on Sundays for gospel meetings. Spurgeon built his tabernacle during that revival. The Bishop of London and the Dean of Westminster, in friendly competition, ran evangelistic meetings in St. Paul's Cathedral and Westminster Abbey for five years every Sunday night. The movement swept the British Isles. Out of it, by the way, came the China Inland Mission. You know the story of Hudson Taylor. I found that he worked in his spare time in a little mission hall in the east end of London while he was studying medicine during that revival. Half a mile from him another young man was working called William Booth. He started the Christian Mission, which became the Salvation Army. That great foreign mission society and a great home mission agency both came out of the revival.

These revivals broke out elsewhere. For example, in South Africa, I'll just mention South Africa briefly, they had a conference of ministers, 374 came to a place called Worcester, a hundred miles up country from Cape Town. Ministers were coming back from the United States and the United Kingdom, telling of the revival, and the South Africans, chiefly Dutch Reformed, were deeply stirred to pray. Seven weeks later, at Pentecost, Whitsuntide, the young people in the Dutch Reformed church at Worcester were having their youth meeting, when a black girl, a Fingo girl, got up and asked if she might give a testimony. There was such a sweet sense of the presence of God. The leader of the meeting was a young man called Jan Christian de Vries. Then he said, in the silence, he heard the approach of a tornado. As he thought, the whole building trembled, and all those Dutch Reformed young people were on their feet, praying simultaneously, audibly.

An elder called Jan Raby, walking by, heard this strange noise and peeped in to see what on earth was happening. He was so alarmed, he ran to the parsonage, brought down the minister. The minister walked in and said to the young man who was on his knees by the table, What's going on here? All de Vries could say was, It's God. The minister stood up and said, In Dutch, mensen blijst u, everybody be quiet. Nobody took any notice. He said, I am your minister sent from God. Will you please be quiet? Nobody took any notice. He was a new minister. He said, I have been duly appointed by presbytery. Nobody took any notice of the presbytery either. Actually, they didn't see him. They didn't hear him. That's why they were all praying audibly, simultaneously. Each one thought he was the only one praying. The minister went back and said to de Vries, Start a hymn. The two men started to sing a Dutch hymn. Nobody joined them. So the minister stamped out. He said, God's a God of order. This is nothing but confusion. By the way, his name was Andrew Murray.

In the meantime, these prayer meetings multiplied all over the Wagonmaker's Valley. Andrew Murray knew he had to do something, so he announced a united prayer meeting for Saturday night in the schoolhouse. A thousand showed up. He took charge. He read the scripture, gave a short commentary. He offered the colleague for the day. Then he said, The meeting is now open for prayer. There was dead silence. And he heard the rushing mighty wind too. And everyone was praying. A stranger by the door pushed his way in, spoke to him in English, and said, Are you the minister of this congregation? He said, I'm a missionary. Just come back for my furlough. This is the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, so be careful what you do. That was the beginning of the greatest awakening ever known in South Africa. The Dutch Reformed Churches to this day celebrate it every year, although in some cases rather formally. The same revival broke out in South India, broke out in Jamaica in 1860.

Out of the revival there arose in Britain a phalanx of evangelists, famous aristocrats and working men. But in the United States, the great evangelist to emerge from this revival was D.L. Moody. By the way, Professor William McLoughlin said in his book of the revival that the excitement of 1858 scarcely deserves to be called an awakening. I wrote to him at Brown University and I asked him on what criteria he made this judgment. He wrote back and said, well, he had certain standards in his mind and didn't measure up to those standards. So I wrote back, I said, as one scholar to another, as one Christian to another, would you mind sharing this with me because I'd like to know. I still haven't found out, it must be classified material, he won't tell me. But I told him, I think you're mistaken. The year that Moody died, 1899, 41 years later, Moody said, I would like, before I go hence, to see the whole Church of Christ quickened as it was in 1858, and a wave going from Maine to California to sweep thousands into the kingdom of God. I think it's fair to deduce from that, that in Moody's 40 years of glorious evangelism, he hadn't seen anything to compare with what he saw in 1858 in Chicago. Because if 1884 had been a better year, he would have mentioned 1884. Now Moody was the product of that moment, but there isn't time to go into all the details of what happened for the next 40 years.

All right, we're going to take a break and then apply the message for the evening.