20. An Age of Societies: Nineteenth-Century Revival and Social Outreach

When my son was an adolescent in the 1980s, we traveled to the Finger Lakes region of New York for a family reunion. On our way we stopped at various historical sites, among them Seneca Falls, the setting for the first Women’s Rights convention and the hometown of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a nineteenth-century feminist leader.

Further west we toured the childhood home of Joseph Smith. We walked into the woods where Smith reportedly received his first vision and went to Hill Cumorah where he later claimed to have dug up a gold bible that he subsequently “translated” into the Book of Mormon. It was in this region that Smith, at the same age as my son, roamed the hillsides digging for buried treasure and employing various kinds of magic, an activity almost any kid would relish.

Spiritualism was part of the popular magic and superstition of this region. Of particular interest were the famous Fox sisters, who conducted séances and entertained devotees from near and far. Besides feminism, magic, and spiritualism, the region was noted for revivals. In fact, it became known as the “Burned Over” district—burned over repeatedly with the fires of revival.

But revival fires burned far beyond the borders of New York. Indeed, for anyone following the revival road of history, Cane Ridge, Kentucky, beckons. Here campfires shot sparks into the night sky as revivalists planted terrors of hellfire into the hearts of weeping, sometimes barking, converts. We studied the map, watched for signs, and asked for directions, wondering how thousands of people could have found their way to this remote site two centuries ago.

The destination proved to be a disappointment. There was a tidy building, marking with photos and newsprint the site of this famous revival, but not a caretaker or tourist was in sight. We were relieved, however, to have missed the summertime Cane Ridge Day celebration, a specious effort to recreate an event forever lost in time. How easily we visualize such happenings with amusement and nostalgia, with little thought of how controversial and bizarre they were at the time and would be today.

Any good history begins in strangeness. The past should not be comfortable. The past should not be a familiar echo of the present, for if it is familiar why revisit it? The past should be so strange that you wonder how you and people you know and love could come from such a time.

RICHARD WHITE, REMEMBERING AHANAGRAN

Good history truly does make the past uncomfortable. Good history makes us wonder how such past strangeness produced what seems to be the completely normal generation we live in. Past generations are not like us, and that is why we revisit them. In the cosmic scheme of things, the nineteenth century is recent history. Many families easily trace their genealogies back to this era. On the surface we have much in common with those who seem almost to resemble us in old photographs. Those with European ancestry know and understand the nineteenth-century Western mind—a mind brimming with curiosity and invention—and nineteenth-century books can be found in any of our bookshelves.

Like our nineteenth-century forebears, we live on this side of the Enlightenment, where religious belief is no longer taken for granted. And like them, we look to charismatic leaders to show us the way to God. These people are not distant ancestors, and yet there is a strangeness when we try to cross the divide and listen to their preachers and participate in their religious activities. In their temptations and travesties they look like us, but there is a chasm that separates us, as is evident in the lives and ministries of Richard Allen, Charles Finney, Phoebe Palmer, C. H. Spurgeon, and D. L. Moody.

Nineteenth-century religion is difficult to quantify or summarize—or even grasp. With every generation that passes since the Reformation (or since the time of Christ, for that matter), Christianity becomes more complicated and more variegated. In England and on the Continent the established churches wield power. They baptize and marry and bury, but they fail to stir passion among people in the pews.

Many circumstances and events factor into this dismal religious equation. The French Revolution had a profound influence on spiritual values, not only in France and in the Catholic Church, but in the entire western European psyche. So also with the American Revolution more than a decade earlier, though the effects were more provincial and less profound. It was a time when religious revivals and church membership were declining.

PARADE OF HISTORY

The nineteenth-century procession of the faith assumes a multicultural and gender-inclusive hue. Indeed, in many instances people of color and women are leading the parade. A poignant example of this occurs when Richard Allen and his poor “colored” followers march right out the door of the Methodist church where they have been rudely treated. Though it was not intended at the time, this was the first step in the formation of the African Methodist Episcopal Church—a parade of believers that has grown to some two million strong.

Along with political revolution came revolutions in thinking, and not for philosophers only. Thomas Paine was no ivory-tower philosopher. His books and pamphlets, including Common Sense, The Rights of Man, and The Age of Reason, were written for ordinary thinkers. They challenged not only political perspectives but also religious faith.

Indeed, if one were to time-travel back to nineteenth-century established churches and denominations, one might conclude that religious passions were lying dormant. Matthew Arnold captures the spirit of the times in his poem “Dover Beach” (1851): “The Sea of Faith was once, too, at the full…. But now I only hear its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar.” There were new ideas in the old churches, to be sure. Modern philosophy paved the way not only for atheism but for deism and Unitarianism as well. In fact, Unitarianism became downright respectable in England and later among New England Congregationalists such as Theodore Parker, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and others.

Nor was there a dearth of theologians or biblical scholars in the nineteenth century. Much of the writing, however, was academic and thus not easily accessible to laity. German theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834), referred to as the “father of modern theology,” was a Reformed minister and professor who blended the Romantic spirit of the age with religious concepts. “God consciousness,” he maintained, “is the feeling of absolute dependence upon God,” and “true religion is sense and taste for the infinite.” German “higher criticism” of the Bible was also aimed at other academics or educated ministers rather than people in the pews.

Outside the halls of academia, religion often drew its ardor from spirited revivalists and social activists who stirred emotions and drew crowds. These religious “enthusiasts” filled the vacuum created by “cold formalism” with apocalyptic visions. In Scandinavia, Hans Nielsen Hauge (1771–1824), amid Lutheran church “deadness,” stirred up revival, traveling some seven thousand miles—often on skis. In America, the evangelical revivalism of the Second Great Awakening spurred evangelistic and humanitarian ministries at home and abroad. But many of the older denominations lost members.

Indeed, as church attendance dwindled, new sects and denominations and parachurch movements flourished. A spirit of democracy spurred ordinary individuals to imagine they could establish their own religion—a religion true to the spirit of the apostles of old. In America, with no state churches to support and with Puritanism on the wane, anyone could become a prophet and purveyor of new religions teachings. Joseph Smith (1805–1844) is an example. His visits by God the Father, Jesus, and angels grabbed the attention of both seekers and scoffers. When he translated his gold bible, he became even more popular. All that was needed to solidify the movement was his martyrdom in 1844.

The year of Smith’s death was also the year of the Great Disappointment. Baptist lay preacher William Miller had been traveling and holding revivals during which he predicted the Lord’s return. When October 22, 1844, came and went, he admitted his mistake, while others, including Ellen G. White, reinterpreted his prophecy. As the founder and prophetess of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, White insisted that Miller’s date had been correct. The miscalculation related to the place: on that very date, Christ had not returned to earth as had been expected; rather, Christ moved from one apartment in heaven to another to begin his work of “investigative judgment.”

Because Smith had a new bible and White offered new truths through her “spirit of prophecy,” these sectarian movements were quickly deemed “cults. “But the spirit of prophecy was also alive and well in many less-than-cultic movements. In England Edward Irving offered an apocalyptic gospel that included tongues-speaking, and Henry Drummond turned it into a denomination—the Catholic Apostolic Church. Included in his circle was John Nelson Darby, who formulated a complex system of dispensationalism (a belief that biblical history is divided into periods of God’s unique activity) and founded the Plymouth Brethren movement.

Dispensational premillennial speculation spurred the Bible conference movement and its most heralded offshoot, the Niagara Conference. The interest in Christ’s imminent return was not confined to sectarian movements, however. Premillennialist writings attracted widespread interest in more mainline circles.

Prophetic preaching and writing was largely a male domain. Indeed, men dominated society in virtually every arena. But Victor Hugo was not far off when he proclaimed, “The nineteenth century is the woman’s century.” Although women continued to be barred from most political and church offices, they were at the forefront of social activism, including the beginning of the women’s rights movement. Some early feminists, like Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902), dismissed biblical orthodoxy as merely one aspect of male chauvinism. Others, like anti-slavery activist Sojourner Truth (1797–1883), found evangelical faith and feminism perfectly compatible.

Nineteenth-century democratic ideals had paved the way for a vast increase in the number of societies and reform movements, so that one historian has identified this period as the “age of societies.” Reaching out to those marginalized by the Industrial Revolution was on the top of their agenda, and there were societies for every need that could be identified. Florence Nightingale took Victorian England by storm with her sacrificial service as a nurse in the Crimean War (1853–1856), inspiring others to follow in her footsteps. Antislavery movements, typically headed by men, captured the support of women, white and black alike. Quakers Sarah and Angelina Grimke, through education and publishing, were key figures in the abolitionist movement, as was runaway slave Harriet Tubman, a famous Underground Railroad conductor.

Temperance, more than any other issue apart from overseas missions, captured women’s attention. The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) was in the forefront of fighting poverty caused by high alcohol consumption. Frances Willard (1839–1898), a proper Victorian lady, devoted her life to preaching temperance, giving the WCTU a respectable reputation. On the other side of the ledger was the six-foot-tall Carry Nation, wielding her hatchet as she conducted her ministry of smashing saloons. Women were also in the forefront of social agencies like the Salvation Army and the Sunday school movement—an outreach focused on literacy for poor children with no access to public education. In London, Elizabeth Fry brought attention to the deplorable condition of incarcerated women and children through her celebrated prison ministry. In fact, when John Randolph, a Virginia planter and legislator went to London and visited Westminster Abbey, Parliament, and the Tower of London, he remarked that they “sink into utter insignificance in comparison to Elizabeth Fry.” In Germany the deaconess movement enlisted an army of women to go into the slums to serve those living on the margins of society.

AMERICA’S MOST HONORED REFORMER

In the Capitol in Washington, D.C., each state is represented by a statue of its most honored citizen. Of all the fifty states only Illinois, the Land of Lincoln, is represented by a woman…. At the time of her death in 1898, Frances Willard was the most famous woman in America. Flags flew at half-mast in New York, Chicago, and Washington, D.C. She died in New York, and her body was transported by rail to Chicago, pausing for services along the way like a presidential funeral train. In Chicago, 30,000 persons filed by her casket in one day. Ruth Bordin writes, “The nation mourned her with a grief, admiration, and respect it would have bestowed on a great national hero or martyred president. No woman before or since was so clearly on the day of her death this country’s most honored woman.”

Faith Martin, “Frances Willard: America’s Forgotten Feminist.”

Often forgotten in histories of this era are people of color and the poor. They are not portrayed as movers and shakers. If they are visible at all, they are often objects of pity. But this vast underclass had a narrative in its own right—a narrative that included leading players in the drama of history.

Richard Allen: Founder of the African Methodist Episcopal Church

One of the denominations that sprouted up in the decades following the American Revolution was the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME). Had blacks been welcomed to worship alongside their white counterparts, the history of American religion might have been very different. The pervasive racism of slavery and segregation led to inevitable denominational splits both before and after the Civil War. The trend began when a former slave, Richard Allen (1760–1831) separated from the Methodist Church and founded the AME in 1816.

While recognizing the cruelty of slavery, Allen paid tribute to a particular slaveholder, Mr. Stokley of Delaware: “He was a very tender, humane man. My mother and father lived with him for many years.” But such tenderness only went so far: “He was brought into difficulty, not being able to pay for us; and mother having several children after he had bought us, he sold my mother and three children.” Such was the emotional torture of a slave family.

Converted at a Methodist revival meeting when he was seventeen, Allen taught himself to read and write and later earned his freedom. But freedom did not mean free time. He frequently worked two shifts a day, cutting wood, laying bricks, and driving wagons. Determined that long work days would not prevent him from following his call to preach, he found time to conduct revivals in the evenings—sponsored by both Methodists and Quakers. “In the year 1784 I left East Jersey, and laboured in Pennsylvania,” he recalled. “Many souls were awakened, and cried aloud to the Lord to have mercy upon them…. Seldom did I ever experience such a time of mourning and lamentation among a people. There were but few coloured people in the neighbourhood—the most of my congregation was white.”

Settling down in Philadelphia in 1786, he establishes a Methodist society of more than forty members and contemplates a building to house his growing congregation. But he soon faces strong opposition from white Methodist leaders, including one who “was much opposed to an African church, and used very degrading and insulting language to us, to try and prevent us from going on.” Allen is informed that he and his congregation can attend St. George’s Methodist Church. However, as a result of Allen’s evangelism, attendance soon grows, and blacks spill over into sections reserved for whites. Amid prayer one Sunday morning, the “coloured people” are told to move. Insisting that they do not want to create a commotion, they remain on their knees — until one of the church trustees begins pushing and shoving and beckons to another trustee for help.

EVERYDAY LIFE

The Christian Household

TThe nineteenth century was a time of budding feminism and of women’s active role in society, but it was also an era of the “Cult of True Womanhood,” both concepts supported by biblical texts. On the one hand, there was a rash of best-selling advice books telling ladies how to behave and how to rear their children. Paintings show delicate females fanning themselves to prevent fainting or taking to bed as lifelong invalids. Their bodies were constricted with tight corsets hidden under layers of petticoats. Manners and mores were likewise restrictive in this era named for Queen Victoria, who reigned in England for nearly sixty-four years (1837 – 1901).

On the other hand, there were women who were far less concerned with corsets than with causes. Their mission field was all around them. In the streets and back alleys they found haggard mothers who sometimes resorted prostitution to feed their little ones while their drunken factory- working husbands spent their off-hours in the gin mills and saloons. Little children ventured into crime-ridden streets peddle trinkets and reclaimed trash for pennies. This too was Victo- rian life, though a world away from the myth of “True Womanhood.”

“A Christian House” illustration from Catherine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s The American Woman’s Home, or Principles of Domestic Science

Men were as involved in the cult of true womanhood as were women themselves, and preachers spread the new religion from their pulpits. The nuclear family was becoming more isolated and independent from the surrounding community than it had been in earlier pre-industrial society. Middle-class homes (particularly in America) were compartmentalized with separate pantries and parlors and porches to accommodate sophisticated tastes. Designed for indoor living, the home extended into the surrounding gardens. The oncecommunal “women’s work” of washing clothes, gardening, and tending the chickens was becoming the responsibility of a single household, jobs suitable for a servant and gardener. Gender roles were becoming fixed, with men in the workplace and women in the home. A woman found her place within a domestic system defined by advice books, sermons, songs, painting, crafts, architecture, and contemporary culture.

That the Victorian era was marked by sexual repression and prudishness is a claim often challenged by historians. There is more myth than reality in the common belief that proper ladies covered the legs of furniture because legs stir sexual passion. But as homes featuring a master bedroom became commonplace, intimacies carried on behind closed doors took on secretive, illicit implications not associated with a common family sleeping room of past eras. Proper behavior was defined by the niceties of True Womanhood. The Puritan father who was God’s minister in the home was a relic of the past. The middle-class nineteent century father was away at work, and the housewife was in charge of family religious training, prayers, and devotion. As such, Victorian religion is characterized by its softer, more feminine touch. Children are no longer relegated to eternal damnation in hell when they become boisterous on the Sabbath. They are rather “little buds from heaven.”

There were strict Sabbatarian households still around, to be sure. Indeed, John Ruskin told how his mother, on the Lord’s Day, turned all the decorative paintings and wall hangings to face backward so as to preclude enjoyment and keep minds from worldly pleasures.

Richard Allen

“By this time prayer was over, and we all went out of the church in a body,” Allen recalled, “and they were no more plagued with us in the church. This raised a great excitement and inquiry among the citizens, in so much that I believe they were ashamed of their conduct.” The “coloured” contingent, poor as they were, had been paying their pledges for remodeling St. George’s Church, “and just as the house was made comfortable, we were turned out from enjoying the comforts of worshiping therein.” They initially rented a storeroom for their own worship but were threatened by trustees who wanted them back paying their pledges.

Throughout his personal narrative, Allen shows deference to Methodist leaders despite ill-treatment. Many local blacks want nothing to do with the Methodists, opting rather to associate with Anglicans. But Allen is opposed. “I was confident that there was no religious sect or denomination that would suit the capacity of the coloured people as well as the Methodist… All other denominations preached so high-flown that we were not able to comprehend their doctrine.” Others organize a church, however, and in 1793 they solicit him to be their minister, “for there was no colored preacher in Philadelphia but myself. I told them I could not accept of their offer, as I was a Methodist.”

HALLOWED GROUND IN PHILADELPHIA

If you go to Philadelphia today and stop at the corner of Sixth and Lombard streets, you stand on hallowed ground. Here one of early America’s leading reformers built an internationally famous church, wrote pamphlets of protest that served as models for generations to come, and championed liberty and justice for all. “He was one of the most talented people of his generation,” a distinguished scholar of the American Revolution has written; he was a true “Apostle of Freedom,” an early biographer declared. His name was Richard Allen.

Richard Newman, Freedom’s Prophet

Then, in 1794, Allen purchases an old blacksmith shop, has it moved to another lot, and hires a carpenter to remodel it. With his own money and that of his followers and sympathetic whites, he raises enough funds for his new Bethel Church. “I hope the name of Dr. Benjamin Rush and Mr. Robert Ralston [both Presbyterians] will never be forgotten among us,” Allen gratefully wrote. “They were the two first gentlemen who espoused the cause of the oppressed and … the first African church in America.”

But problems with the Methodists are not over. Local leaders demand that the new property be turned over to the Conference. Allen balks. He is now free from their demeaning oversight, and he wants independence. One of the leaders agrees, offering to draw up incorporation papers. “We cheerfully submitted to his proposed plan,” Allan recalled. But once again he had been double-crossed: “He drew the incorporation, but incorporated our church under the Conference, our property was then all consigned to the Conference for the present Bishops, Elders, and Ministers, &c., that belonged to the white Conference, and our property was gone.”

Initially, Allen, “being ignorant of incorporations,” does not even realize what has occurred, but some years later this dishonest man (identified by his initials as J.S.) is placed in charge of the Philadelphia Methodist churches. He demands the keys and books of the church and forbids holding any meetings except by orders from him. After protracted deliberations, the incorporation papers are finally changed, giving the Bethel congregation ownership of its property, but the mean-spirited conduct of the local Methodists continues. The new church, in order to be properly Methodist, has to be served periodically by licensed Methodist preachers—white lay preachers who are less qualified than Allen himself. For this service they demand six hundred dollars a year, far beyond what the tiny poverty-stricken congregation is able to pay. The amount is decreased to four hundred and finally two hundred. But when a lay minister is sent only five times for the year, Allen and his followers discontinue his services.

That African American Christians are demanding control of their own religious affairs is galling to some Methodist leaders. Finally, writes Allen, “an edict was passed … that if any local preacher should serve us, he should be expelled,” and “a circular letter [was published] in which we were disowned by the Methodists.” But it is not enough to merely throw them out of the denomination. Preachers were also sent to force their way into their place of worship. “But having taken previous advice we had our preacher in the pulpit when he came, and the house was so fixed that he could not get but more than half way to the pulpit.” Finally, the little congregation is faced with a lawsuit, which ultimately fails. “We bore much persecution from many of the Methodist connexion,” Allen concluded, “but we have reason to be thankful to Almighty God, who was our deliverer.”

The blacks in Philadelphia, however, were by no means alone. “About this time our colored friends in Baltimore were treated in a similar manner by the white preachers and Trustees, and many of them driven away,” Allen wrote. “Many of the colored people in other places were in a situation nearly like those of Philadelphia and Baltimore, which induced us in April 1816 to call a general meeting, by way of Conference.” Delegates come to Philadelphia from surrounding areas and determined to form a new denomination.

Resolved: That the people of Philadelphia, Baltimore, &c., should become one body, under the name of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. We deemed it expedient to have a form of discipline, whereby we may guide our people in the fear of God, in the unity of the Spirit, and in the bonds of peace, and preserve us from that spiritual despotism which we have so recently experienced—remembering that we are not to lord it over God’s heritage, as greedy dogs that can never have enough. But with long-suffering, and bowels of compassion to bear each other’s burthens, and so fulfil the Law of Christ, praying that our mutual striving together for the promulgation of the Gospel may be crowned with abundant success.

Not surprisingly, Allen is elected bishop of the new organization. In the following years he founds the Free African Society, a benevolent organization that helps newly freed slaves get on their feet. And for those still in the bonds of slavery, he oversees a station on the Underground Railroad for more than three decades. Amid his other activities he and his wife Sarah rear six children. The tiny church that he founded in a shed would grow to more than seven thousand by the end of the 1920s.

Despite his own ill treatment, Allen resists opening the door for full ministry to women. When Jerena Lee, one of his converts, tells him God is calling her to preach the gospel, he tells her that the AME has no place for women preachers. She nevertheless goes out on her own as an evangelist, as does Amanda Smith and other African American women.

DELIVERED FROM THE SNARE OF THE DEVIL

My aunt was very religiously inclined naturally. She was much like my mother in spirit. So as we walked along, crossing the long bridge … and were looking off in the water. Aunt said, “How wonderfully God has created everything, the sky, and the great waters.” … Then I let out with my biggest gun; I said, “How do you know there is a God?” and went on with just such an air as a poor, blind, ignorant infidel is capable of putting on. My aunt turned and looked at me with a look that went through me like an arrow; then stamping her foot, she said: “Don’t you ever speak to me again. Anybody that had as good a Christian mother as you had, and was raised as you have been, to speak so to me. I don’t want to talk to you.” And God broke the snare. I felt it. I felt deliverance from that hour. How many times I have thanked God for my aunt’s help. If she had argued with me I don’t believe I should ever have got out of that snare of the devil.

Amanda Smith, Autobiography

THE SECOND GREAT AWAKENING AND BEYOND

When one looks for evidence of religious awakenings in this period, one finds it everywhere: not only in the astonishing variety of religious sects, both imported and native, but also in literature, politics, educational institutions, popular culture, social reforms, dietary reforms, Utopian experiments, child-rearing practices, and relationships between the sexes. In terms of duration, numbers of people involved, or any other measure, the Second Great Awakening dwarfed the First…. By the middle of the nineteenth century, an estimated one-third of the population affiliated with organized religion, twice the percentage of 1776, even though church membership was often deliberately demanding and difficult to achieve…. But the Second Great Awakening put religious practice in the United States on an upward trajectory that would continue through the twentieth century. The contrast with Europe, where religious faith declined in the same era, is striking.

Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought

Charles G. Finney: Evangelist of the Second Great Awakening

The best-known revivalist of the Second Great Awakening that swept America in the early decades of the nineteenth century was Charles G. Finney (1792–1875). In many respects, however, he was an unlikely candidate for this role. During his earliest years of ministry, he was insecure and ambivalent about his ability to preach. “Having had no regular training for the ministry,” he confessed, “I did not expect or desire to labor in large towns or cities or minister to cultivated congregations. I intended to go into the new settlements and preach in schoolhouses and barns and groves as best I could.”

Charles G. Finney

Licensed and commissioned by the Western New York Female Missionary Society, Finney’s initial term was for three months. In the village of Evans Mills, New York, he finds people hardened to the gospel. They attend his meetings, but there is no visible response except for their “ruinous rejection of the gospel of God’s dear Son.” Then one Sunday evening he throws out a challenge, asking all those who want to become Christians to stand and the rest to remain seated. The audience is stunned. “They looked at one another and at me, and all sat still, just as I expected.” Then they begin walking out. He assumes his revival ministry is over, but amazingly, the building is packed at the next meeting and conversions follow.

His own conversion had been a highly charged emotional experience. As a young lawyer, he was alone in his office one evening when he suddenly met “the Lord Jesus Christ face to face.” He fell down, confessing his sins and weeping “like a child.” He arose to be about his business. “But as I turned and was about to take my seat by the fire, I received a mighty baptism of the Holy Spirit…. The Holy Spirit descended upon me in a manner that seemed to go through me, body and soul … like a wave of electricity…. Indeed it seemed to come in waves of liquid love.”

Like his own conversion, Finney’s revival ministry is accompanied by high emotion. At one meeting people suddenly begin falling from their chairs and crying out to God: “If I had had a sword in my hand, I could not have cut them off as fast as they fell.” His methods differ from those used in the First Great Awakening. The frontier spirit of individualism goes hand in hand with the Arminian concept of free will. While earlier preachers looked at revivals as miraculous acts of God, Finney emphasizes the human element, condemning the “notion that sinners should continue under conviction of sin until God should grant them repentance.” In discussing the nature of revivals, he pointed to the necessity of “appropriate means,” including familiarity with God in prayer, entering towns uninvited, expanded roles for women, and the use of the “anxious bench”—a place set aside (often in front of the auditorium) where those contemplating conversion could pray. “A revival is not a miracle,” he insisted; “a revival is the work of man, nothing else!.”

Like Edwards he is a postmillennialist, believing that revival will hasten the millennial age preceding the return of Christ. Indeed, he argues that if Christians had been evangelizing ten years earlier, “the millennium would have fully come in the U.S. before this day.” But all is not lost. “If the church will do all her duty, the millennium may come in this country in three years.”

After many years on the revival circuit, Finney settles down in New York City as the minister of Chatham Street Church. He is at home in this socially conscious “free” church (that welcomes poor people by not charging for pews). Nor is he alone among evangelicals in his concern for the poor. Orange Scott, a New England abolitionist preacher, severed ties with the Methodists over slavery, forming the Wesleyan Church. Then, in the mid-1830s, Lewis Tappan, with the support of Asa Mahan, established Oberlin College—soon to become a hotbed of abolitionist ferment. Tappan invites Finney to devote six months each year to Oberlin as a professor of theology. Here antislavery activism is mixed with Puritan covenant theology and Wesleyan perfectionism. Theodore Weld, another prominent abolitionist, joins the faculty, training students to become agents of the antislavery cause. Meanwhile, back in New York, Finney’s congregation is expanding to become the new Broadway Tabernacle, a center for revival and reform.

“By the law of the [Methodist] church through all these years, a single man’s salary was $100 per year, and a married man’s was $200. If, in the interim between sessions of the annual conference, a married man should lose his wife by death, immediately he was placed at the salary of a single man.”

Rev. James B. Finley (b. 1781)

As a postmillennialist, Professor Finney teaches that the means of bringing in the millennium is through holiness—by a baptism of the Holy Spirit, manifested in many outward forms. A godly Christian society, he insists, offers women opportunities to pray and speak publicly. And not just white women; black women are also enrolled at Oberlin. All the while, he rails against slavery: “How perfectly obvious is it, that slavery is from hell,” he writes. “Such a barefaced, shameless, and palpable violation of the law of God…. And even religious teachers, gravely contending that the Bible sanctions this hell-begotten system? ‘Oh shame where is thy blush?’.”

In this Jacksonian era of land speculation, bank failures, and capitalist schemes, Finney berates merchants who charge exorbitant fees and conduct their affairs on “principles of commercial justice rather than by Christ’s commands.” As to the land speculators, they must “give back their ill-gotten gains” or be condemned to the flames of hell. At his death, he leaves behind no denomination, but his legacy has profound social implications for American culture.

JOHN JASPER

Like Finney, John Jasper (1812–1901) lived into his eighties and conducted a wide and varied ministry that lasted more than five decades. Like Finney he was initially recognized only as a regional revivalist but later became nationally known. But unlike Finney, Jasper was black. Born a slave of slave parents, his father was a preacher and his mother, Nina, was a kindly overseer and medical assistant as well as a deeply pious Christian. On his twenty-seventh birthday in 1839, Jasper was soundly converted and began preaching the same day. His most famous sermon, “The Sun Do Move!”—preached some 250 times, to thousands of people—was taken from the story of Joshua. Challenging the biblical critics of the day, he insisted that the sun moves, assuming its rotation around the earth. People—black and white alike—sometimes traveled a day’s journey just to hear the sermon:

As a fact, Joshua was so drunk with the battle, so thirsty for the blood of the enemies of the Lord, and so wild with the victory that he told the sun to stand still til he could finish his job. What did the sun do? Did he glare down in fiery wrath and say, “What are you talking about my stopping for, Joshua. I ain’t never started yet. Been here all the time, and it would smash up everything if I was to start?” Naw, he didn’t say that. But what does the Bible say? That’s what I ask to know. It says that it was at the voice of Joshua that it stopped. I don’t say it stopped; it ain’t for Jasper to say that, but the Bible, the book of God, says so. But I say this; nothing can stop tilit has first started. So I know what I’m talking about. The sun was traveling along there through the sky when the order came….

Phoebe Palmer: Revivalist and Social Activist

Remembered as the mother of the Holiness Movement, Phoebe Palmer (1807–1874) was a teacher, evangelist, and writer who strongly promoted Wesley’s doctrine of Christian perfection. She was also a leading social activist and an early feminist who maintained that women could minister equally alongside men. Born in New York City to devoted Methodists, she was immersed in the faith from infancy. Her father, a prosperous engineer, often recalled how he had sneaked away as a child from his Anglican home in Yorkshire, England, to hear the aged John Wesley preach. “Ye must be born again” was the message that marked his conversion.

At nineteen, Phoebe married Walter Palmer, a homeopathic physician who shared her commitment to Methodism. In the following years she mourned the deaths of her little ones, convinced that God was taking them to teach her a lesson. “God takes our treasure to heaven, that our hearts may be there also,” she penned in her diary. “The Lord has declared himself a jealous God…. After my loved ones were snatched away, I saw that I had concentrated my time and attentions far too exclusively, to the neglect of the religious activities demanded.”

Religious activities become Phoebe’s priority in the following decades, activities marked by her experience of entire sanctification. Such perfectionism was still an important theme in Methodism, though many ministers, finding it impossible to live out, had abandoned the doctrine. But several years into their marriage both Phoebe and Walter claim the experience of “perfect love.” At the same time, Phoebe’s sister, Sarah Lankford, is hosting Tuesday Meetings for the Promotion of Holiness. In attendance are both women and men, including prominent Methodist leaders. Phoebe joins Sarah, and so popular is her teaching that she receives invitations to speak at camp meetings and other venues. She leaves her surviving children behind with Walter and a maid, though he later joins her part time. “Never have we witnessed such triumphs of the cross as during the past summer and fall,” she reports in 1857. “Not less than two thousand have been gathered into the fold…. Hundreds of believers have been sanctified wholly, and hundreds have received baptism of the Holy Ghost, beyond any former experienced.”

Her ministry corresponds with the Prayer Revival of 1857–58 that begins inauspiciously when Jeremiah C. Lamphier, a lay minister serving at a declining Dutch Reformed church, posts fliers for a weekly noonday prayer meeting near New York City’s financial district. With six in attendance at the first meeting, it spreads across the city and across the county, spurred in part by the events of October 14, 1857, when Wall Street was suddenly in the throes of a crushing financial panic.

In addition to her revival ministry, Palmer establishes the Five Points Mission in New York that offers housing, health care, and education to needy families. Often the brunt of criticism for pushing the boundaries of women’s roles, she responds with Promise of the Father (1859), defending women in ministry. Earlier she had written:

Last night I wrote, as the caption of an article I intend to write … “has the spirit of prophecy fallen on woman? … The promise of the Father has either been fulfilled, or has not … ‘And it shall come to pass, after those days, that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy.’“ And did one of that waiting company wait in vain? … Male and female were now one in Jesus Christ. The Spirit now descended alike on all. And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak as the Spirit gave utterance….

Palmer left behind no organized movement but her teachings paved the way for the later Holiness and Pentecostal movements. Her daughter, Phoebe Knapp, wrote many hymn tunes, including the familiar tune for Fanny Crosby’s popular hymn, “Blessed Assurance.”

METHODIST CIRCUIT RIDERS

A Methodist preacher in those days, when he felt that God had called him to preach, instead of hunting up a college or Biblical institute, hunted up a hardy pony of a horse and some traveling apparatus and … cried “Behold the Lamb of God, that taketh away the sin of the world.” In this way he went through storms of wind, hail, snow, and rain; climbed hills and mountains, traversed valleys, plunged through swamps, swam swollen streams, lay out all night, wet, weary, and hungry, held his horse by the bridle all night, or tied him to a limb, slept with his saddle blanket for a bed, his saddle or saddle bags for his pillow, and his old big coat or blanket, if he had any, for a covering. Often he slept in dirty cabins, on earthen floors, before the fire…. His text was always ready, “Behold the Lamb of God.”

Peter Cartwright, Autobiography

GEORGE MÜLLER

Born in Germany the son of a government bureaucrat, George Müller (1805–1898) was a troubled teen, drunk the night his mother died, and imprisoned before he was sixteen. Prodded by his father, he enrolled at the University of Halle for religious studies aimed at a lucrative clerical career. At the invitation of a friend, he attended a prayer meeting and was soon after converted. In his twenties he moved to England and became the pastor of a small chapel. During that time he was struck by the words of Psalm 68, portraying God as the “father of the fatherless.” With that challenge, he and his young wife rented a house in Bristol and soon had more than twenty orphans in their care. Within months they opened a second orphan home with thirty more children, and soon a third home was opened. In the following years, larger and bigger homes were acquired, some of them housing as many as three hundred children.

At seventy, Müller turned the work over to his son-in-law while he traveled around the world raising support and conducting missionary work. He became a celebrity as his miracle stories circulated. He told how one morning the children arose to the bell only to find their breakfast bowls empty. He had no more than said amen after his prayer of blessing, when there was a knock at the door. The local baker, with fresh bread, told how he had been awakened in the night thinking of hungry children. As the baker was leaving, another knock at the door brought the milkman. With a broken-down wagon, he was offering the milk to the orphans before it spoiled. Miracles multiplied as stories were repeated and funds came in.

Charles Haddon Spurgeon: London’s Boy Preacher

Known as the “Prince of Preachers,” Charles Haddon Spurgeon (1834–1892) was London’s most celebrated megachurch minister of his day. The son and grandson of independent Nonconformist ministers, his training began early with Pilgrims Progress and Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. When his grandmother offered him a penny for each of Isaac Watts’s hymns that he memorized, she soon reduced the pay “to a half-penny, then to a farthing, to keep from being quite ruined in the deal.” When his grandfather offered him a shilling for every dozen rats he could kill around the house, he was torn: “I found rat-catching paid me better than learning hymns.” Growing up in a Nonconformist household, he had a mediocre childhood education and studied Greek for only a short time; the first-rate classical education enjoyed by Anglicans was not available to him.

He was converted as a teenager in a tiny Primitive Methodist chapel. It was a cold winter night, and only eight people were present. On his way to a church social, he had stopped at the chapel, seeking shelter from a snowstorm. A “swarthy faced and grimy handed blacksmith” rose to speak. He read from Isaiah 45, “Look unto me, and be ye saved.” His pointed and personalized commentary was simple: “Well, a man needn’t go to college to learn to look. Anyone can look. You may be a fool and yet you can look. You will never find comfort in yourself. Look to Christ. Young man, you look very miserable. You always will be miserable if you don’t obey the text; but if you obey now, this moment you may be saved.”

“Free will carried many a soul to hell, but never a soul to heaven.”

C. H. Spurgeon

Spurgeon’s life was transformed. “I could dance all the way home,” he remembered. “I understand what Bunyan meant when he declared that he wanted to tell the crows on the plowed land all about his conversion.” Spurgeon preached to more than crows, and his reputation as a mesmerizing speaker quickly spread. At eighteen he was invited to be a pastoral candidate at the New Park Street Chapel, a large prestigious church whose parishioners were frustrated by the dry sermons of the other candidates. “The effect was amazing,” wrote an observer. “After the service people too excited to leave the building gathered in groups talking about securing him for pastor.” He was called, and so began his long and much-publicized career in ministry, bringing some twenty thousand into his church and prompting him to boast that “there was not a seat in the Tabernacle but someone had been saved in it.”

In 1861, still in his twenties, his congregation moved to the new Metropolitan Tabernacle. Here his preaching ministry continued to thrive. He paced the platform as he took on the character of biblical figures, bringing Scripture stories to life. His illustrations featured pathetic tales of penitent prisoners and prostitutes and wayward children dying before their time. It was the best Sunday show in town, especially for evangelicals, whose Sabbath strictures limited their activities. But as his popularity soared, so did the sneers of his critics. Sometimes compared with the popular entertainer Tom Thumb, he was called a “pulpit buffoon” and worse. As an authoritarian strongman, he wielded power in the church and was referred to as a pope. Theological issues, however, created the most bitter controversies of his ministerial career. A staunch Calvinist, he condemned those who disagreed with him. “Arminian perversions,” he railed, “are to sink back to their birthplace in the pit.” Teaching that one could lose salvation was “the wickedest falsehood on earth.”

Caricature of Charles Spurgeon from Vanity Fair, December 10, 1870

“A vigorous temper is not altogether an evil. Men who are easy as an old shoe are generally of little worth.”

C. H. Spurgeon

But the most publicized and drawn-out battle of his ministry involved the “Downgrade Controversy” within his own Baptist Union. He was convinced that many of his fellow ministers were becoming liberal on the issues of biblical infallibility, eternal reprobation, Christ’s atonement, and other long-held orthodox doctrines. Those who are the targets of his accusations charge him with magnifying minor differences. Finger-pointing deteriorates into nasty allegations, Spurgeon claiming that some of his Baptist brethren do not preach enough gospel “to save a cat.” Accusing him of arrogance and impudence, some of the students in his own preachers’ college part company with him. In the end, the Baptist Union votes to censure him—after he has already resigned. The theological storm has negative consequences for the Baptists as well as for Spurgeon. His supporters lament that the uproar took a toll on his health, resulting in a premature death. In their eyes, he had become a martyr to orthodoxy.

SEX SCANDAL OF THE CENTURY

Long before Jim Bakker, Jimmy Swaggart, and Ted Haggard were making headlines, Henry Ward Beecher (1813–1887) captured the attention of the world in a lurid court case. Son of celebrated minister Lyman Beecher and brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe (author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin), he was the most famous preacher in America of his day. As minister of the prestigious Plymouth Church in Brooklyn, he was middle-aged and at the peak of his career when the bubble burst. The woman (twenty-two years younger than he) was Elizabeth (Libby) Tilton, wife of a prominent church member. Libby sought Beecher’s counsel for marital problems. Beecher was sympathetic, and for more than a year he counseled and kissed. Then Libby told her husband. In the spring of 1871, the story broke publicly. The case dragged out for several years, Beecher admitting kissing but denying adultery. After a six-month trial, he was acquitted of any wrongdoing. A church committee, alleged to be stacked in his favor, later exonerated him. All the while, the presses cranked out the scandal of the century.

Prior to this storm of controversy, he had offended “conservatives” in his midst—and around the world. Already having been criticized for drinking alcohol, he made matters worse when he went public with his smoking. In 1874 an American preacher was invited to join Spurgeon on the platform and make some remarks. Spurgeon’s sermon had been on forsaking sin, and the visiting minister made application by challenging listeners to leave behind their besetting sins—including smoking. Instead of allowing the remarks to pass, Spurgeon had the last word: “Well, dear friends, you know that some men can do to the glory of God what to other men would be a sin. And … I intend to smoke a good cigar to the glory of God before I go to bed tonight.” The press had a heyday with the story, also reporting on his lavish lifestyle and his country estate “fit for a prince.”

Spurgeon preaching at Surrey Music Hal

Spurgeon is a Victorian gentleman who hires servants and bestows jewels on his wife. And Susannah, for her part, is a most dutiful wife. Like too many Victorian women, she takes to her bed as an invalid. But from her boudoir, she is a powerhouse of publicity for her husband. She writes letters and raises large sums of money for the Sermon Fund and the Book Fund, supplying poor ministers with bound copies of her husband’s writings. The books are a godsend, often more than doubling the minister’s library holdings of the Bible, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, and Pilgrim’s Progress. At the same time, Spurgeon’s star rises as he becomes the most quoted source in Sunday sermons throughout England and far beyond.

Susannah is not the only family member actively involved in Spurgeon’s ministry. His brother James serves as assistant pastor of the Metropolitan Tabernacle, and, when he dies at fifty-seven, he is succeeded by his son Thomas.

Dwight L. Moody: Father of Modern Campaign Evangelism

Dwight L. Moody (1837–1899), the most indomitable and influential evangelist of the nineteenth century, turned revivalism into big business. His boundless enthusiasm was contagious, and evangelical religion came of age under his ministry. His work became the benchmark for all revivalists who followed him. A pushy shoe salesman turned pushy evangelist, he refused to be limited by his lack of education and low social status, turning private religion into a public campaign. It is said that he once stopped a man on the street and asked, as was his custom, “Are you a Christian?” “It’s none of your business,” the offended pedestrian replied. “Yes, it is,” insisted Moody. “Then you must be Mr. Moody,” the man said.

Born in Northfield, Massachusetts, he had a difficult childhood. His alcoholic father died at forty-one when Moody was four. His mother was left deeply in debt and alone with nine children under the age of thirteen. Creditors quickly made their move. The farm was put into foreclosure. Furniture and anything else of value was divided like spoils. The older children were sent out to families, where they worked for their room and board. Even little Dwight was soon sent to live with a family, working for them more than attending school and barely learning to read. At seventeen he moved to Boston to work in his uncle’s shoe store. Here, living under his uncle’s rules, church attendance was required—a requirement that led to his conversion. Mr. Kimball, a Sunday school teacher, tells the story:

I started down to Holton’s shoe store. When I was nearly there, I began to wonder whether I ought to go just then, during business hours. And I thought maybe my mission might embarrass the boy…. While I was pondering over it all, I passed the store without noticing it. Then when I found I had gone by the door, I determined to make a dash for it and have it over at once. I found Moody in the back…. I simply told him of Christ’s love for him and the love Christ wanted in return. That was all there was. It seemed the young man was just ready for the light that then broke upon him, and there, in the back of the store in Boston, he gave himself and his life to Christ.

Despite his enthusiasm to follow Jesus, Moody was initially denied church membership, having failed the most simple Bible knowledge test. “I can truly say,” Kimball recalled, “that I have seen few persons whose minds were spiritually darker than was his when he came into my Sunday school class.” But what he lacked in book learning he made up for in street smarts and salesmanship. He moved to Chicago where he excelled in sales and organized evangelistic outreach, shoddy as it was. “The first meeting I ever saw him at was in a little old shanty that had been abandoned by a saloon-keeper,” wrote an observer. He was “standing up with a few tallow candles around him, holding a negro boy, and trying to read to him the story of the Prodigal Son and a great many words he could not read out, and had to skip. I thought, If the Lord can ever use such an instrument as that for His honor and glory, it will astonish me.”

“Everything I could get hold of in print that he ever said I read—Oh, Lord, help me to preach and minister like Charles Spurgeon!”

D. L. Moody

FANNY CROSBY AND REVIVALISM

When one reflects on the phenomenal rise of the evangelical movement in the latter quarter of the nineteenth and the early years of the twentieth centuries, three spiritual stalwarts stand out as the most influential: Evangelist Dwight L. Moody, musician Ira D. Sankey, and hymn writer Fanny J. Crosby. In his later years, Sankey himself once remarked that the success of the Moody-Sankey evangelistic campaigns was due, more than any other human factor, to the use of Fanny Crosby’s hymns.

In the period of 1870 to her death in 1915, it is estimated that Fanny Crosby wrote between 8,000 and 9,000 gospel hymn texts, more than any other known hymn writer…. These include such popular hymns still found in our hymnals as “Safe in the Arms of Jesus,” “Blessed Assurance,” “Pass Me Not, O Gentle Savior,” “Jesus, Keep Me Near the Cross,” … “To God Be the Glory,” and “Rescue the Perishing.”

Kenneth W. Osbeck, 101 More Hymn Stories

This work led to the founding of a Sunday school of some six hundred children and sixty volunteers. It was so noteworthy that on November 25, 1860, President-elect Abraham Lincoln visited and offered remarks to the class. How did Moody attract so many youth in his ministry outreach? As a salesman he used the tricks of the trade: passing out candy and offering free pony rides. Needing a permanent home for the growing class, he started a church in Chicago, the Illinois Street Church, its purpose to be a home for poor immigrant families. For several years he also headed up the Chicago YMCA.

The most momentous event of his early ministry is his meeting fifteen-year-old Emma Revell. Despite the striking difference in their social status, they marry four years later in 1862. Throughout their marriage she works beside him, manages the family, and anguishes over wayward sons. He regards her as a more effective teacher and one-on-one evangelist than he is. According to their son Paul, “Till the day of his death he never ceased to [be amazed at] the miracle of having won the love of a woman he considered so completely his superior.”

In 1871 Moody teamed up with gospel singer Ira D. Sankey. Later that year, Mrs. O’Leary’s cow kicked over the lantern and all of Chicago was ablaze. Moody later remarked that he lost everything except his Bible and his reputation. It was a terrible circumstance, but it launched him out of one city and into the world. In the summer of 1873, he and Sankey set out for England. As a self-made American rags-to-religion hick, he quickly rises to superstar status. After preaching for two years in England, Scotland, and Ireland, he can point to revivals not only among miners and urban poor but also among the aristocrats and university elite. Students flock to his meetings. Among his converts are the “Cambridge Seven,” some of them England’s most celebrated cricket players, who will soon head overseas as missionaries with the China Inland Mission.

“if eloquence is measured by its effect upon an audience and not by its balanced sentences and cumulative periods, then there is eloquence of the highest order. In sheer persuasiveness, Mr. Moody has few equals, and, rugged as his preaching may seem to some, there is in it a pathos of a quality which few orators have ever reached, and appealing tenderness which not only wholly redeems it, but raises it not unseldom almost to sublimity.”

Henry Drummond

He returns to America in 1875 as an internationally famous revivalist. Every city wants him to hold a campaign. By trial and error he develops his methods: an ecumenically diverse invitation, house-to-house canvassing, funding from wealthy philanthropists, free newspaper publicity, rental of large buildings, trendy music, and volunteer counselors for an enquiry room.

Unlike modern-day evangelists, Moody did not invest heavily in print advertising. Reporters jostled each other in getting the lead story, his eccentricities and homespun personality serving them well. His self-deprecating style and his quotable quips perfectly suited the hungry press, eager to sell penny-papers; and his lack of education and proper etiquette, his poor grammar and pronunciation made him all the more endearing. Newspapers who ignored or belittled him did so to their financial peril.

Moody’s uncle once quipped, “My nephew Dwight is crazy, crazy as a March hare.” An unrelated observer offered a different slant: “There was the revivalist Moody, bearded and neckless, with his two hundred and eighty pounds of Adam’s flesh, every ounce of which belonged to God.” Still another reported that he was “a genuine kick-in-the-pants.” H. L. Mencken, the wit and satirist of the day, was the source for much of the contemporary reflection on Moody. “When he started out, an evangelist had no more dignity and social position among us than a lightening-rod salesman,” wrote Mencken. “When he finished, he was friendly with leading merchants, industrialists, and public figures of the day, including Cyrus McCormick and such august characters as John Wanamaker, Morris K. Jesup, and General O. O. Howard.” Again, Mencken wrote:

He wore a bristling beard, cultivated a paunch, and [had] the hearty innocent manner of a high-geared drummer in the pulpit; he was, indeed, always far more the business man than the theologian…. He discharged the obvious with all the explosive effort of an auctioneer. And, he knew how to weep, and how to make others weep. His pathetic stories—of drunkard’s children, wives, sisters, aunts, grandmothers … of atheist soldiers dying on the battlefield, of heroic missionaries garroted in the slums—were famous in their day, and kept the country damp [with tears].

MOODY AND THE PRESS

It was Luther who remarked that the printing press was “God’s highest act of grace” because the spread of his ideas help to make the Reformation possible. Moody certainly felt a similar solicitude. “I pray Heaven’s richest blessing to rest upon the press in Chicago,” he told them in a widely quoted benediction that was adapted for every occasion. “I hope they will continue to spread the Gospel of Christ as they have done during these meetings.” He could pay them no higher compliment…. Moody and Chicago’s mass media grew up together, knew each other, and needed one another. Moody needed to reach those at a distance through the pages of the press. Newsmen needed a good story. Together they crafted a civic spectacle of unprecedented proportions.

Bruce J. Evensen, God’s Man for the Gilded Age

Moody, however, was more than a charismatic revivalist. The uneducated shoe salesman became an educator, establishing three schools in Northfield, Massachusetts, and Moody Bible Institute in Chicago—all founded in part to train more evangelists. When Moody died three days before Christmas in 1899, it was a time of mourning and homage. “Chicago at one time claimed this mighty preacher,” a hometown newspaper eulogized. “But when he died the whole world claimed him.” The New York Tribune offered a similar tribute: “The death of D. L. Moody is an almost irreparable loss to evangelical Christianity. He was probably the greatest religious revivalist of the present century.”

Moody lived and died in the nineteenth century, but his evangelistic legacy, as well as that of Finney, would profoundly influence virtually every twentieth-century evangelist, including Billy Graham. Moody Bible Institute in Chicago would likewise serve as a benchmark for the Bible institute/college movement that fueled worldwide evangelism for several decades following Moody’s death. Twentieth-century evangelism was a direct descendant of its nineteenth-century forebears.

What if …

What if Richard Allen had backed down and submitted to Methodist leaders instead of leaving the church and organizing a black denomination with other disgruntled African Americans? Without the African Methodist Episcopal Church would blacks have fallen away from the Methodist Church altogether?

What if Charles Finney had given up after his early apparent failures as an evangelist? How did his ministry affect not only evangelical theological foundations but also abolition and women’s rights?

What if a teenage boy heading for a church social had not stopped by a Methodist chapel on a stormy night? And what if the uneducated layman at that service had been too fearful to stand up and preach? Would C. H. Spurgeon have become the “prince of preachers,” still read and admired today?

What if Edward Kimball had not turned around and gone back into Holton’s shoe store to share the gospel with young Dwight L. Moody? How different might the evangelical world be today without his ministry more than a century ago?

20. An Age of Societies: Nineteenth-Century Revival and Social Outreach

20. An Age of Societies: Nineteenth-Century Revival and Social Outreach

CHAPTER 20

An Age of Societies

Nineteenth-Century Revival and Social Outreach

PARADE OF HISTORY

AMERICA’S MOST HONORED REFORMER

Richard Allen: Founder of the African Methodist Episcopal Church

EVERYDAY LIFE

HALLOWED GROUND IN PHILADELPHIA

DELIVERED FROM THE SNARE OF THE DEVIL

THE SECOND GREAT AWAKENING AND BEYOND

Charles G. Finney: Evangelist of the Second Great Awakening

JOHN JASPER

Phoebe Palmer: Revivalist and Social Activist

METHODIST CIRCUIT RIDERS

GEORGE MÜLLER

Charles Haddon Spurgeon: London’s Boy Preacher

SEX SCANDAL OF THE CENTURY

Dwight L. Moody: Father of Modern Campaign Evangelism

FANNY CROSBY AND REVIVALISM

MOODY AND THE PRESS

What if …

Further Reading