The Great Revival of the Eighteenth Century with a Supplemental Chapter on the Revival in America

It cannot be too often remembered or repeated that when the Bible has been brought face to face with the conscience of corrupt society, in every age it has shown itself to be that which it professes, and which its believers declare it to be—“the great power of God.” It proved itself thus amidst the hoary and decaying corruptions of the ancient civilisation, when its truths were first published to the Roman Empire; it proclaimed its power to the impure but polished society of Florence, when Savonarola preached his wonderful sermons in St. Mark’s; and effected the same results throughout the whole German Empire, when Bible truth sounded forth from Luther’s trumpet-tones. The same principle is illustrated where the great evangelical truths of the New Testament entered nations, as in Spain or France, only to be rejected. From that rejection and the martyrdoms of the first believers; those nations have never recovered themselves even to this hour; and of the two nations, that in which the rejection was the most haughty and cruel, has suffered most from its renunciation.

England has passed through three great evangelical revivals.

The first, the period of the Reformation, whose force was latent there, even before the waves of the great German revolution reached its shores, and called forth the pen of a monarch, and that monarch a haughty Tudor, to enter the lists of disputation with the lowly-born son of a miner of Hartz Mountains. What that Reformation effected in England we all very well know; the changes it wrought in opinion, the martyrs who passed away in their chariots of fire in vindication of its doctrines, the great writers and preachers to whose works and names we frequently and lovingly refer.

Then came the second great evangelical revival, the period of Puritanism, whose central interests gather round the great civil wars. This was the time, and these were the opinions which produced some of the most massive and magnificent writers of our language; the whole mind of the country was stirred to its deepest heart by faith in those truths, which to believe enobles human nature, and enables it to endure “as seeing Him who is invisible.” There can be no doubt that it produced some of the grandest and noblest minds, whether for service by sword or pen, in the pulpit or the cabinet, that the world has known. Lord Macaulay’s magnificently glowing description of the English Puritan, and how he attained, by his evangelical opinions, his stature of strength, will be familiar to all readers who know his essay on Milton.