post-panic waves of repentance in 1857 and 1907 and the Moody movement reaching its heights in the 80's.

Before the Great Awakening, revivals that were styled "ingatherings" and "harvests" of souls were sparsely chronicled in Massachusetts and Connecticut, beginning as early as 1679 at Northampton and recurring in 1683, 1696, 1712 and 1718. Similar "stirrings" were recorded at Hartford in 1696, at Taunton in 1795 and at Windsor in 1721, and the earthquake that shook New England in 1727 evoked widespread inquiry for a time concerning the way to salvation.

Following Moody and Sankey, only one evangelistic team can be considered comparable with them-Chapman and Alexander. This is conceded by the younger Gypsy Smith, who, in widening the field of his father in the South, has come to be recognized as a rationalizing force for better living as distinct from sensational pulpiteers.

In the latter days the itinerant spectacular individual evangelist has come to the fore, of whom the chief exemplar is William Sunday. With "big top" or rough-hewn tabernacle, Billy and his imitators borrow from Barnum in drawing their crowds and take a leaf from modern big business in selling salvation.

There are those who maintain perpetual motion evangelistic plants in centers calculated to attract people from afar. Aimee Semple McPherson has dedicated her own Angelus Temple with its stage settings and radio masts in Los Angeles to the idea of continuous performance. Frank Norris of Texas and John Roach Straton of New York City make every service in their Baptist edifices a revival throughout the year and keep the yeast of religion in constant ferment.

And modern evangelism pays material dividends. Billy

Sunday exacts his cash guarantee in advance. Mrs. McPherson packs in five thousand, hangs out the "Standing Room Only" sign and her collection plates are weighed down with greenbacks.

Be it said for the pioneer evangelists that their thoughts were not of this world but of the future of eternal souls they earnestly yearned to snatch from a hell and assure of a heaven which were very real to them. Some of the lesser revival periods in the two-century span came about from the inspiration of a single man, like Charles G. Finney, the Congregationalist lawyer, who turned to a client on the morning his case was set for trial and said: "Deacon B., I have a retainer from the Lord Jesus Christ to plead His cause and I cannot plead yours!"

Other revival seasons were purely denominational in character. And still others, which seemed to chroniclers to have been spontaneous, can be traced to the same cause— reaction from spiritual stagnation. In 1831 a revival swept over fifteen hundred towns with more than 100,000 persons added to the churches and then followed a decline, intensified by the disillusion in the failure of the Second Coming in 1843, that reached its lowest point on the eve of the great religious upheaval of 1857.

And here appears a mainspring of the American revival that cannot be neglected. It has been said that the 1857 revival came without a human herald, prearranged plan or purpose, a revival without a revivalist. But it was economic pressure that then forced the people to their knees. A financial crash had shaken the money centers of the world. All confidence was undermined. Industry stood still. Bewildered and fearful, men turned back to religion and prayed to God not only to save their souls but also to restore their credit.

It was the same after Wall Street floundered in 1907 and men surged to hear Alexander's vast choirs sing "All Other Ground Is Sinking Sand" and to heed Chapman's plea to fill again the vacant pews of the churches. It was the old, old urge to escape from that perplexity which transcends time and space in the annals of humanity.

For all the converted have been refugees. They have been saved not so much from the terrors of hell as from things as they are or at least as they only too rationally seem to be. The acute realization of the human predicament has given substance to the preaching of a hell that ceased to be theoretical and became something to be reckoned with.

The discrepancy between desire and destiny has confronted man since the dawn of his intelligence when his primal ancestor recoiled from the fury of the elements or in a calm night gazed in awe upon the star-studded sky and wondered what it was all about, whence it came and whither it led. The reasonings of scientists and philosophers have only deepened the mystery and made man the more conscious of his ignorance and helplessness. The physical world remains at once beautiful and sinister, and, if Godless, utterly indifferent to the intricate, subtle, sensitive mind of mankind that would thus appear to be superfluous and negligible upon one of the countless planets of an infinite universe.

In the misty beginnings, man invented gods to compensate this sterile void and devised rites for their propitiation. With time came theologians developing theological systems and doctrines and dogmas to support them. The simplest of these was Israel's "Jehova our God is One." Jehova made all and dealt directly with his creation.

But with the passing of centuries, despite evangelists

like Elijah and Isaiah, Jehova became aloof from Israel or Israel lost contact with Jehova. The Sadducees banished hope of immortality and the Pharisees fell back upon the barren formality of the Scriptural law. The imperial masters in distant Rome mocked the gods of their ancestors and darkness fell upon the world.

In the midst of all this despair the Man of Galilee was born and with Him the new hope that lives on through two thousand years. Apart from the doctrinal complexities woven about Him, one thing is plain. He brought God back to man and man back to God. And He did this by inculcating the conviction that the Power which was "mindful of the sparrow's fall" was the refuge and strength of every individual human being.

It was the first revival. Or perhaps it is the revival and all the revivals that have come since and have been like it are only continuous manifestations of the same fundamental elements-the decadence of hope and personal inspiration, the advent of a new light, and the exaltation of the individual. Again and again, it is the way of escape, escape from things as they are, escape from self. And finding that is what it is to be converted.

I

CHAPTER II

THE VOICE IN THE WILDERNESS

The morning light is breaking,

The darkness disappears;

The sons of earth are waking
To penitential tears.

NDIVIDUALISM, economic, social and political, in

spired the conquest of the new world. It reasserted

itself time and again against mass crystallization in every consolidating of the frontier and in the eventual rise of industrialism. Its persistency has made America the peculiarly fertile field of evangelism.

For one dynamic force actuating the first American religious revival and the constant element pervading the continuity of its spirit even to this day is this individualism challenging submergence in prescribed conformity, insisting upon the necessity of a personal experience and assuming the personal right to receive and proclaim a special understanding of God and His past, present and future relations with man.

In a broad sense, then, this revival is a revolt against the neglect or suppression of the individual by formal ecclesiasticism, against the aloofness and inertia of authoritatively established practice, against the failure of the Church so to reach and convict the individual mind that moral as well as religious sanctions generally have lost their force. Its fire burns against the icy wall of a frozen faith.