it, and rarely those who are most pious, but the lukewarm, lazy professor [of religion] is subject to it. The wicked are more afraid of it than of smallpox or yellow fever and are subject to it; but the persecutors are more subject to it than any and they have sometimes cursed and swore and damned it while jerking." Among the naïve backwoodsmen the agitations were counted valuable and essential to soul salvation. Even Peter Cartwright at first attributed the "jerks" to the judgment of God though later he realized that conversions obtained by such means were often spurious and that the impressions under them, mistaken for perceptions of truth, might be delusive. The whole species of Americana horribilis probably started with genuine religious feeling. Then the vivid imagery of personal sin and its desert of eternal damnation took possession of the subliminal consciousness and induced a psychic storm. The subsequent contortions and falling into rigidity were pure hysteria. Involuntary imitation was responsible for the spread of the devotional delirium into orgies of nervous excitement. And the suppressed fear of yielding was doubtless the most potent cause for the seizure of resistants. The preachers, on their side, were carried along with the current. They were exhilarated like actors in a play that is evoking an emotional response from its audience. They could justify to themselves their course as availing against hardness of heart and as producing manifest results. In fact, they did declare that the morals and religion of the new West improved following the revival. But this does not condone the gamut of excesses that was finally checked by the limit of endurance, a fear of bedevilment and some rationalized opposition. The revival that had come from East to West and run wild now took the reverse direction and, strong and stirring in spirit but bereft of its morbid phenomena, it touched nearly every State in the Union. In New England, for instance, mild and simple measures were employed in emphasizing the immutability of the moral law and the necessity of regeneration. And in the West the camp meeting, now a permanent national institution for religious renewal, settled down to straight preaching of balanced men, the rugged, earnest, honest circuiteers of such stuff as brought out Cartwright, Finley, and Finis Ewing. The fate of the promoters of the sound and fury is what might be expected with the return to more normal ways of getting religion. McGready of the hypnotic eyes and awful voice spent himself with his effort and died in 1817 at the age of about fifty-seven. The others repudiated their churches and became schismatics. Their teachings had been subversive of ecclesiastical authority, a phase of one type of evangelism that still prevails, in claiming for each convert an inner light which interpreted the Scriptures and directed worship regardless of accepted interpretation and prescribed forms. Separatism was the consequence and more "New Lights." McNemar was tried for anti-Calvinism and suspended from the Presbyterian Church together with Thompson, Marshall, Stone and John Dunlevy, who joined with him in forming a new presbytery. The sect incorporated the worst features of the late revival, introducing voluntary leaping, dancing, skipping, jerking, rolling and barking, holding prayer matches to decide controversies and making much of visions. Grasping one another by the hand, the devotees would indulge in a general holy shaking till their church edifices rocked with them. This was the "right hand of fellowship" to increase the working of the spirit in accordance with their basic belief that God abiding in the soul of man was magnified by such exercise of the inward feelings. The New Lights suffered considerable persecution, some of which might be traced to a suspicion that in trying to perpetuate these aspects of the camp meeting they were endangering the morals of the community. It is true that unbridled passions were loosed in the utter lapse of selfcontrol at some of the camp meetings. The human and the spiritual love motives have always been closely akin. And precautions finally had to be taken to protect the chastity of the young. Even so it is recorded that "bastardy increased" in the aftermath of camp meetings. Their absolute freedom of worship disrupted the schismatics in June, 1804. Marshall and Thompson returned to the Presbyterian fold. McNemar and Dunlevy joined the Shakers, "Mother Ann" Lee's "United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing." And Elder Stone alone remained steadfast, till in 1832 he took the remnant of the New Lights over into the Christian Church organized by Alexander Campbell. The Shakers had come into Kentucky from Watervliet, near Albany, New York, in 1805 proclaiming that the revival there was the culmination of their millennial hope. Their name was derived from the violent tremblings that overtook them under strong religious emotion. Pledged to lives of celibacy and severe simplicity in dress and conduct, they dwelt in agricultural colonies on a communistic basis of labor. Ann Lee was the "first mother, or spiritual parent, in the line of the female." To this day the sect are known for their frugality, temperance, industry and honesty. The revival strengthened the Shakers, the Baptists and the Methodists, but the Presbyterians lost ground in the consequent schism. In 1803 there were thirty-one presbyteries, three hundred and twenty-two ministers, fortyeight probationers; in 1804 there were twenty-seven presbyteries, one hundred and thirty ministers and thirty-three probationers. Lacking enough ordained ministers, the Church had to license lay preachers, some of whom insisted upon reservations denying the predestinarian tenets. Three of these men,-Finis Ewing, Samuel King and Samuel McAdow, all powerful revivalists,—finally stepped out and formed the independent Cumberland Presbytery that was more Methodist than Presbyterian. In the border country the Baptists gained ten thousand members and the Methodists another ten thousand. But the Methodists profited most of all. They took over as their own the sounder, saner type of camp meeting that developed and used it throughout the Union with a resultant increase of forty thousand communicants. Bishop Asbury expected to see five hundred camp meetings in a single year. The revival that ushered in the nineteenth century was a long time in subsiding and its effects were felt permanently in the establishment of the Sunday school and foreign missions, as well as the camp meeting that kept religion abreast of the migration westward. In New England it accomplished the transition from State aid to the selfsupport of the Church which took on fresh life and vigor. And it implanted the humanitarian feeling and force that were to energize the movement for the abolition of slavery and spiritualize the material advance of the nation. 1 T CHAPTER IX SINGING A NEW SONG Awake, my soul, stretch ev'ry nerve, A heav'nly race demands thy zeal And an immortal crown! PHILIP DODDKIDGE. OWARD the rounding out of its first century as a transcendent force upon this continent, now rising, now waning only to return with renewed power, the religious revival was borne more and more on the wings of song, first the hymns inspired by liberated spirituality across the sea and then, in the camp meetings of the frontier, the anthems that burst spontaneously from the hearts of the American people. The story of evangelical music is interwoven with all the annals of the revival and yet it stands by itself as something above and beyond preachers and preaching. For the hymn was the prayer of the penitent and the hallelujah of the redeemed. And to others it was the metrical version of an experience to be shared, the dynamic source of evangelistic persuasion. A sense of personal participation and the universal responsiveness of the human race to natural rhythm, the very core of the group spirit, are inherent in revival singing. Lacking such a background, pulpit eloquence is like |