a rural community so overwhelmed that its inhabitants feared destruction before the dawn of another day.

All his life he had been drawn to the revival, whether of Methodists, Pentecostalites, Adventists, devotees of the Burning Bush, or no denomination in particular or all denominations in one tidal wave of evangelistic fervor.

He had observed certain constant elements indigenously American in the rise and fall of the spiritual waters and had differentiated between the outer depths and the surf on the shoals. And yet in his own heart he believed that in this fathomless sea of faith, without beginning, without end, lay the only hope of peace for a restless, unsatisfied world.

The newspaper man had ceased speaking. All were contemplating the dying embers of the fire. The master of research broke the silence by abruptly saying: "You are the one to write this book." And the publisher added: "You must."

The newspaper man demurred. Though every night of his life for years he had pitted all his mental and nervous energy against a flood of news from all over the world, the aggregate of which would dwarf an eighteenth-century novel, he hesitated at venturing into the creation of a book that in a hundred thousand words or so would tell the story of the incessant evangelizing of America.

But in the end he accepted the assignment. He knew that all the heart and imagination he possessed would be at the service of his pen.

II

Then came the months of assaying what others had already written on the subject. The newspaper man began

to realize the gingerbread nature of pretentious bibliographies. Every book he tackled had one of these. He even compiled one of his own only to find that one day he was compelled to cease wasting his time, and that of his eventual reader, and to plunge in straightway and begin to write.

He soon discovered that only rarely had the critical function been exercised, that his predecessors in the field had taken houselot subdivisions of it and then, intruding their own honestly biased appraisal of men, doctrines and events, had, with a few notable exceptions, lapsed finally into the indiscriminate and the superficial.

Denominational histories, individual biographies, especially such incisive studies as that of Dwight L. Moody by Gamaliel Bradford, periodic and sectional accounts, of which one of the best was Catherine Cleveland's "Great" Revival in the West, 1797-1805," contributed in a measure restricted by a standard of values set by the comprehension of the whole. Psychological analyses, like those of William James and Sydney G. Dimond helped toward a generous understanding of the springs of action underlying the revival.

But despite a few ambitious attempts, among which might be mentioned Beardsley's "History of American Revivals," Headley's "American Evangelists," Thompson's "Times of Refreshing," and the works of Davenport, Goss and Torrey, there was no sweep of the entire two centuries of American evangelism. And above all, there was no objective, journalistic record of the onward marches, with the inevitable strategic retreats, in the militant conquest that began on this continent in the days of Jonathan Edwards and is being carried on into a future beyond prophecy.

To supply this need is the sole justification for adding one more book in a world where "of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh."

To those who have experienced personally the power of the revival this book would recall their great hour, the forces that lay behind it and the circumstances that make it akin to the timeless, limitless manifestations invoked by others wearing the mantle of Elijah.

To those who have only observed the typical revival, whether with indifference, antagonism or sympathy, this book would bring a realization that all the tributaries of evangelism in this country from the early Colonial sources to the present day flow into one continuous stream whose varying watermark, higher or lower, records the molding of lives, for better or worse, in every generation.

The preachers pass in review, from stalwart saints to mountebanks of Mammon. Between are the self-anointed egotists expounding their own dogma and the mesmeric exhorters kindling the fires of their hell in the minds and even the bodies of those under their sway.

The circumstances that pushed these men forward, or of which some took advantage, in the rolling up of one evangelistic movement after another, and the "messages" they delivered, all converge upon the multitudes who heard them in clearings of the wilderness, under canvas by village roadsides, beneath the open rafters of a city tabernacle or amid the splendor of a temple dedicated to the prophet of the hour.

Of these things this book will tell and it is concerned with no more than the telling. It is the work of a journalist who knows no other way.

G. C. L.