As every evangelist will hark back to the hour in which he was "called to preach," so the writer of this book is moved to record how his "call" came. It was around a fireside in Gramercy Park in the house where once dwelt Edwin Thomas Booth, by windows that looked across to the site of the New York home of Colonel Robert G. Ingersoll.
But the shades of the great actor and the agnostic orator had nothing to do with the beginning of the book. A publisher was in search of an author and a newspaper man had brought him one who had made his name as a master of research, a thinker and a writer. The candidate said something more than his qualifications was needed, something he did not possess and could not acquire.
The conversation drifted into the very channel of the projected book. Gradually all became aware that they were listening to the newspaper man. He knew the revival because he had felt its power. He had heard Sankey sing and he knew the words, the melodies of a hundred hymns that have stirred the hearts of succeeding generations in the resurgent spirit of the American revival.
He recalled the burning denunciations, the militant commands, the tender pleadings of evangelists great and obscure, in thronged tabernacles and in wayside tents. He had seen a city shaken, a college caught up in a tumult of emotion greater than that stirred by "the big game," and