THE BANDS OF SLOTH
About 1835, or certainly by 1840, although revivals were still extending across the country at a staggering rate, revivalists felt that the impulse was grinding to a stop. Bishop Mcllvaine recollected, in the confidence of 1858, how he had warned the faithful in 1836 that they had ceased to preach Christ. In the 1840’s, he said, the “world” could finally boast its victory over the churches, and cited humiliating examples “of prominent professors of religion disgracing the Christian name by grievous defections in pecuniary affairs.”
Even before the financial crisis of 1837, the more sensitive of revivalists were aware that some mysterious hitch had occurred in the triumphal procession. Nicholas Murray in 1836 published “The Causes
BOOK one: the evangelical basis
of Declension,” which was a more drastic confession than most of his colleagues were prepared to make. What the "causes” were, “every lover of Zion should be anxious to know”; Murray and like-minded worriers could enumerate at least a few of them.
Murray’s list, which was expanded monotonously during the next twenty years, constitutes an appraisal of American civilization within the perspective of the Revival. As early as 1836, and indeed for a decade before this, revivalists complained that the feelings of religious men had become so occupied with political issues that they could admit no religious consideration. Down to the actual rupture of war, this was to be the standard lament. South as well as North. If we leave aside, as I propose for the moment to do, the involvement of particular segments of Northern piety with abolitionism, we may note more specifically what evangelicals conceived to be the major distractions.
There is no way of judging how radically these evangelicals really intended to challenge the mercantile ethic. All one can say is that the rhetoric of the Revival conventionally accused the business spirit of having “done much to produce this lamented declension of vital piety.” As might be expected—while foreign observers found it amazing that pastors dared so to preach to rich parishioners—ministers regularly denounced as the great source of iniquity among the people their “haste to he rich” and inculcated Benjamin Franklin's method of “the steady, industrious, persevering course.” “Go thou,” said Hubbard Winslow in 1835, “and do likewise.”
What bothered the Revival was that such warnings, which had driven pioneers of Kentucky and Illinois to distraction, seemed to have progressively less effect on merchants in New York and Cleveland. Preachers made what they could of the Panic of 1837, presenting it as a judgment upon the commercial spirit, but they enjoyed little success. Except for sporadic responses, ministerial indictments that Americans were experiencing in 1837 and 1838 God's visitation upon their mad haste to be rich left the people only momentarily chastened. No great surge of repentance followed.
Evangelicals solaced themselves with the reflection that the whole Revival, spread over time, was a pulsation. While it is true, said The Christian Spectator in 1838, that love must reign through all variations, still it needs times of revival and then times of “tranquillity.” But they had to note that in periods of tranquillity the liturgical churches gained recruits. “Our forms are so simple and so few,” said Joseph Dudley in 1849, “that when the spirit of them is gone, our religion is gone.” For, Dudley admitted, there remains little to awe the mind: Our system of worship has no power, no charm, if the
heart be not in it; and just in proportion as we are losing this, we are losing ground, and giving advantage to those systems which consist mainly of external grandeur," Considerations of this sort led Horace Bushnell at Hartford, student of Nathaniel Taylor and child of the Connecticut Revival, to break with the whole system, to denounce it in his Discourse on Christian Nurture of 1847. The furor against it caused its printers, the Massachusetts Sabbath School Society, to withdraw it from publication. But Princeton, which would later join the hue and cry against Bushnell's theological heresies, seized this occasion to endorse Christian Nurture, and so to make more explicit than it had hitherto dared its distrust of revival methods. Many consider these extraordinary systems, said Professor Charles Hodge, the only means of promoting religion: “They seem to regard this alternation of decline and revival as the normal condition of the church; as that which God intended and which we must look for; that the cause of Christ is to advance not by a growth analogous to the progress of spiritual life in the individual believer, but by sudden and violent paroxysms of exertion." Princeton could now speak out: “Life in no form is thus fitful." Excitation is unavoidably followed by a corresponding depression.
The Revival struggled within the toils of its own logic. While ecstasies such as that of 1800 or of the Mohawk Valley in the 1820’s were ablaze, the gratifications were so engulfing that the idea of a depression was inconceivable. Yet even in the midst of them, anxieties arose; as the historian of the Oneida revivals said in 1827, **The amount of holy feeling and effort ought never to diminish” Ideally it should not, but the fact is that it did; so Finney and his fellow-incendiaries had to burn northern New York over and over.
Confronted with this problem, revivalists more and more gave thought not only to how to start a movement but how to keep it going, to prevent relapse. By the 1830’s they developed two methods for forestalling declension: they published innumerable manuals on the approved conduct of a revival, so that it might be permanently effective; and they produced a class of professional, itinerant revivalists who, by perpetually moving from place to place, would either keep the fires from going out or would fan languishing embers.
Beecher and Skinner led the way in 1832 with Hints to Aid Christians, imparting such directions as: “Break, then, the bands of sloth; engage at once in the work; be courageous; be wise; turn many to righteousness, and you shall shine as the brightness of the firmament, and as the stars, forever and ever." Ebenezer Porter’s Letters on the Religious Revival of the same year is a handbook for the novice, as
BOOK ONE: THE EVANGELICAL BASIS
circumstantial as a textbook on dentistry, telling how to answer questions, what texts to choose, how to emphasize topics. As in all these works. Porter, although he believed himself in the old Connecticut tradition and disliked the tumult of the West, elaborately argues that God does use “means” toward creating a revival and that the orthodox should have no theological scruples about doing God’s work for Him: experience has shown at one and the same time “the indispensable necessity of means, and the sovereignty of divine grace.” No law of nature is more invariable, said Skinner in 1838, “than that, in Revivals of religion, cause precedes effect, appropriate means are used to attain ends.” God shows His power in them, but they are not miracles. By 1859, Heman Humphrey’s Revival Sketches and Manual becomes just what the title indicates; there is no longer even a polite bow toward any theory of the Revival but only instructions on preaching, conservation of the preacher’s energies, and the proper conduct of “inquiry meetings.”
The drift toward formalizing the process became a tidal wave as the professionals began to eclipse the “settled” clergy. Connecticut had been proud in 1800 that its Awakening was conducted by the local ministry, except for the inoffensive itinerancy of Nettleton; the leaders at Cane Ridge attended as ambassadors from their churches; the Methodist circuit rider had his route laid out and was not free to heed a call from regions outside his jurisdiction. But Finney established, in this regard as in his methods, a precedent. He went where he was wanted or summoned, and never conceived of himself as fixed in one place, not even when he did for a few years hold forth regularly in the New York Tabernacle. Men like Jedediah Burchard (who relighted the fires in Finney’s New York), Edward Norris Kirk (who revolted against his Princeton training), the two mighty Baptists Jabez Swan and Jacob Knapp were the most prominent among several. Methodists followed suit by assigning their most effective rousers, John Newland Maffit, James Caughty, John S. Inskip, to the nation at large. Of these, even those who had been schooled in Calvinism banished any memory of historic dependence upon the capricious overflowing of God’s spirit; they openly “got up” revivals. Their techniques were susceptible of imitation.
But within a short time the vogue of these manuals and the achievements of the professionals created a perplexity more ominous than the one they were designed to solve. We have heard Baird and the early theorists insist that a revival was essentially “spontaneous.” Finney and his generation revolted against the tyranny of the intellect, cast out “metaphysics,” and identified religious expression with the heart.
How then could the Revival pretend that it was the same as in 1800 if it so palpably had, four decades later, to depend upon the set contrivances of the manuals, or on the standardized tricks of pious actors? John Woodbridge in 1841 attempted to forestall the question by admitting that perhaps “in the present state of the world we are not to expect revivals of the same character with those which existed forty years ago.” It is indeed a problem to keep alive the same depth of conviction, solemnity, self-scrutiny, in “this age of sanguine hope, bustle, enterprise and revolution.” No wonder that “new experiments” have to be tried. Yet no such plea could silence the objection of one of Finney’s disciples that "Lectures upon Revivals are not the chief thing the Church needs. . . . You cannot, but at a frightful risk, lay down rules for Revivals of Religion. No rules will apply in all cases. This is a subject about which we cannot legislate" Finney himself growled against standardization; yet the irony of the situation was that he himself contributed to it by his most famous book. Lectures on Revivals of Religion, in 1835. If ever an author “legislated” on his subject, that was Finney.
Furthermore, while the itinerants were always represented in the religious press, or in the public press, as staging successful meetings, there was an augmenting hostility to them among the evangelical ministers and congregations. “To the credulous multitude,” sneered Russell Streeter in 1835, “there is a charm in the very names of these men.” He despised Burchard: “People experience unusual emotions in coming into their presence or their meetings, as the young and uninformed do, in coming before some celebrated conjuror." The suspicion grew that these stimulators were mountebanks. In 1842 R. W. Cushman, of the Bowdoin Square Church in Boston, a Baptist, denied to Elder Jacob Knapp the use of his pulpit; some of his congregation were outraged, but Cushman published A Calm Review, in which he excoriated such “improved machinery for the advancement of religion.”
These hints of fissures in the foundation of American evangelism could momentarily be hidden by the gloss of professional unction, but they worried sincerely religious spirits. Meanwhile, a new set of internal tensions arose not so much within the foundation as in the wondrous superstructure which the Revival had erected to demonstrate its unity and through which it had mobilized its energies—the missionary organizations and the network of “agencies.”