7. Personal Revival
7
PERSONAL REVIVAL
While 1848 had been a year for eminent visitors at the Institution, 1849 saw another visitor, a less friendly one. The guest whose visit made the greatest impact on the Institution—and on much of America—was the ghastly pestilence from the Orient.
The Pale Horse—cholera—began galloping through Russia, India, and Persia in 1846. Twenty thousand died in Persia in a few months’ time. By the spring of 1849, seventy thousand were reported dead in Britain. Americans were gripped in fear, awaiting the plague’s approach.
At the Institution, Fanny and others calmed the more terrified residents with assurances that the future was in God’s hands. Fanny impressed upon her pupils, as it had been impressed upon her years before by her grandmother, that “the good Friend above that had been so merciful to us thus far would not desert us now; that He would do all things best for us, both in this world and in the next….And so we prayed—and waited.”
The epidemic was carried by passenger ship in December 1848, to New Orleans, where thirty-five hundred died. The Pale Specter invisibly permeated the sailing ships, flatboats, and steamers that left the southern port. In May, it broke out in the East.
Superintendent Chamberlain thought it best to dismiss students from the Institution for an early vacation, because the disease was much less severe in the country than in heavily populated areas. But since some pupils, for different reasons, were unable to return to their homes Fanny and certain other faculty members remained “convinced that God would take care of us and that we could be of some help.”
On May 17, three people died of cholera in a lower Manhattan tenement. The disease had struck New York.
Fanny volunteered as a nurse to help the Institution’s physician, Dr. Clements. Her time was occupied making “cholera pills”—two-thirds calomel and one-third opium.
By mid-July, five hundred to eight hundred a week were dying in Manhattan. Later that month, a school one block from the Institution was turned into a cholera hospital. Here, Dr. Clements and Fanny labored to relieve the stricken. Ten pupils from the Institution died.
Toiling in the hospital, Fanny became increasingly overwhelmed. “The horrors of the situation grew upon us day by day,” she wrote. A half-century later, she still could hear “the harsh cry of the truckman, ‘Bring out your dead!’” When her patients died, they usually were removed as quickly and quietly as possible, but “I remember my fright at sometimes stumbling over coffins in the halls, on my way from room to room.”
TOILING IN THE HOSPITAL, FANNY BECAME INCREASINGLY OVERWHELMED.
In the midst of the epidemic, Fanny was asked to welcome with a poem the white-haired Irish priest Father Theobald Mathew, who had chosen this dreadful time to observe the Institution for the Blind. Father Mathew had a tremendous reputation on both sides of the Atlantic as an evangelist. He was a great advocate of temperance; during his lifetime he had led nearly seven hundred thousand to sign pledges of total abstinence from alcohol.
He also was said to have worked many miracles of healing. His visit was “like the visit of an angel to a house of death,” Fanny reported. The priest was impressed by Fanny’s great piety, and when he left, he laid his hands on her head to bless her. “His touch seemed to me like that of a saint who had been permitted to leave his abode in heaven for one single moment to cheer the desolate children of earth.” It was perhaps from Father Mathew that Fanny acquired her great love and respect for the Roman Catholic Church.
Fanny was unable to withstand the horrors of that summer. Already, she had been sent to Brooklyn for a three-day rest, and shortly after the visit, she felt certain she herself was coming down with cholera. She liberally dosed herself with the cholera pills she had been making and went to bed. By the next morning all her symptoms were gone, but when Chamberlain learned his most valued teacher had almost contracted the pestilence, he ordered her to take a vacation. So in early August, Fanny left for Bridgeport, to remain until fall.
Preoccupied by thoughts of death and desolation, she fell into a state of deep depression. She tried to distract herself by organizing a new collection, Monterey and Other Poems. Her mental state is evident in the preface, in which she spoke of “health sadly impaired” and an “inability to discharge those duties from which I have hitherto derived a maintenance.”
PREOCCUPIED BY THOUGHTS OF DEATH, SHE FELL INTO A STATE OF DEEP DEPRESSION.
During the abbreviated semester of 1849–1850, she was able to meet few classes. She suffered from no specific disease, but from “sadness and depression.” This was caused in part by her anxiety about her eternal destiny. Had she succumbed to the pestilence, where would she be now? Would she have been ready to meet her Maker?
The last meeting with her grandmother weighed deeply on her mind. Fanny had not experienced the distinct emotional “conversion experience” so important to her ancestor. She began to doubt her faith. She doubted her life was totally consecrated to the service of God, as she felt it should be. Although she had never lost her profound faith in God and His goodness, she grew increasingly convinced that she had not taken seriously enough the lecture Superintendent Jones had given her long before, warning her of letting success go to her head. She had enjoyed being acclaimed as “the Blind Poetess,” but she came to question its worth: What did it mean in the face of death?
Fanny attended a series of revivals that fall at the Methodist Broadway Tabernacle on Thirtieth Street. Fanny, reared in a cold and colorless Calvinistic Presbyterian church, was drawn to the Methodists’ warm and lively services and their fervent and comparatively cheerful hymn singing. As early as 1839, she had attended Methodist “class meetings” at the Eighteenth Street Church, where the pious gathered to sing, pray, “testify,” and read scripture in free-flowing, informal meetings that appealed to many young persons. Often the leader, without warning, would call upon someone to testify, and that person would talk about all God had done for him or her.
In her teens and twenties, Fanny had attended class meetings twice a week, once at Eighteenth Street and once at the Institution, where the Methodist church sent a man every Thursday evening to lead a meeting. Nevertheless, she had “grown somewhat indifferent to the means of grace,” and she attended simply to provide the worshippers with music for their meetings. She played “on the condition that they should not call on me to speak.” A decade later, Fanny was still afraid to “testify” in the meetings.
Fanny had a close friend named Theodore Camp, a teacher of industrial science at the Institution, who suggested she go with him to the revivals at the Broadway Tabernacle. At first, she apparently hesitated. Then one night she had a vivid and disconcerting dream. “It seemed that the sky had been cloudy for a number of days and finally, someone came to me and said that Mr. Camp desired to see me at once. Then I thought I entered the room and found him very ill.”
The “dying” Camp (who was to live for another half-century) asked if she would meet him in heaven after their deaths.
“Yes, I will,” Fanny said, “God helping me.” This, it will be remembered, was the response she had given her dying grandmother.
In the dream, just before he died, Camp admonished, “Remember, you promised a dying man!”
Fanny recorded:
Then the clouds seemed to roll from my spirit, and I awoke from the dream with a start. I could not forget those words, “Will you meet me in heaven?,” and, although my friend was perfectly well, I began to consider whether I could really meet him, or any other acquaintance, in the Better Land, if called to do so.
Fanny was convinced that as things stood, she could not. Although from all indications she had never ceased to be a deeply religious woman, she was certain she had denied the faith in which she had been reared and had allowed it to take second place in her life to literary and social concerns. She felt there was something terribly lacking in her spiritual life.
She began to attend the revivals with Camp every evening in the autumn of 1850. In those days, the service was highlighted by a long, emotional sermon, punctuated by cries of “Amen!” and “Hallelujah!” There were inarticulate cries, convulsive sobbings, and ecstatic outbursts. It was not uncommon for the frenzied worshippers to leap from their seats and run about or fall on the floor.
When the preacher concluded the sermon—usually spiced with abundant references to hellfire and the consequences of failure to heed the Gospel message—those interested in joining the church were invited to come forward and be prayed over. People would go to the front of the tabernacle and kneel on the cold, dirty floor for as long as two hours while deacons and elders placed their palms on the candidates’ foreheads, praying aloud for conversion.
Twice that fall, Fanny went to the altar. Twice she got down on her knees and the frenzied elders all but crushed her skull, laying hands upon her head and roaring prayers for her conversion. Twice the hours went by without her “getting happy.”
Finally, on November 20, Fanny, now torn with frustration and anxiety, was led for a third time to the altar. This time she was frantic. “It seemed to me that the light must come then or never.”
No other candidates presented themselves that night. For hours, the deacons and elders prayed, but nothing happened. The congregation began to sing Isaac Watts’s consecration hymn, “Alas and Did My Saviour Bleed.” At the fifth and last verse—“Here, Lord, I give myself away. ’Tis all that I can do.”—it happened. Suddenly, Fanny felt “my very soul was flooded with celestial light.” She leaped to her feet, shouting, “Hallelujah! Hallelujah!” In her ecstasy, “for the first time I realized that I had been trying to hold the world in one hand and the Lord in the other.”
SUDDENLY, FANNY FELT “MY VERY SOUL WAS FLOODED WITH CELESTIAL LIGHT.”
It is difficult to review Fanny’s life up to this time without having a distinct impression of Christian convictions from earliest childhood. However, something very significant did happen that night. If the experience were not the beginning of her Christian life, it certainly marked a pronounced deepening of it. It was perhaps what would be called by charismatics the “baptism of the Holy Spirit.”
The “November Experience,” as she called it, was a watershed in Fanny Crosby’s life. Although there was no dramatic change in her life and she soon realized it did not solve all her spiritual problems, it marked the beginning of a deepening Christian experience and the beginning of total dedication to her life in God. Like most other young people, Fanny previously had lived in hopes of making a name for herself in the world, of making money, of attaining other earthly goals. Now, increasingly, she came to lay aside those ambitions.
The experience is frequently alluded to in many of her hymns and poems. It is in “At the Cross,” written about 1900, and is described in more detail in the long, unpublished “Valley of Silence,” written about two months before she died at the age of ninety-five:
I walk down the Valley of Silence,
Down the dim, voiceless valley alone,
And I hear not the fall of a footstep
Around me, save God’s and my own;
And the hush of my heart is as holy
As hours when angels have flown.
Long ago I was weary of voices
Whose music my heart could not win,
Long ago I was weary of noises
That fretted my soul with their din;
Long ago I was weary with places,
When I met but the human and sin.
Do you ask what I found in this Valley?
’Tis my trysting place with the Divine,
For I fell at the feet of the Holy,
And above me a voice said, “Be Mine.”
And there rose from the depth of my spirit,
The echo, “My heart shall be Thine.”
She concluded:
Do you ask how I live in this Valley?
I weep and I dream and I pray;
But my tears are so sweet as the dewdrops
That fall from the roses in May,
And my prayer, like a perfume from censers,
Ascendeth to God night and day.
The “Valley of Silence,” more than any of her writings, explains the mystical experience of November 20, 1850.