N CHAPTER XV POST-PANIC REPENTANCE Stand up, stand up for Jesus, GEORGE DUFFIELD, JR. EW motive as well as new method distinguished the advance of the American revival of religion into the second half of the nineteenth century. Economic incitation, whether spontaneous or designed, appeared alongside though not superseding the preachment of future torment as a compelling factor behind the natural human impulse to escape the immemorial plight of mankind. Hell was materialized on earth. It was experienced. Men traced the consequential course of their own lives toward it till they stood on the brink of utter despair. Broken bankers and breadline derelicts were one in being actually "lost" while the soul was still in the body. Neglect of religion was the accepted cause of disaster; return to religion was the way out of the enveloping darkness. Faith became first palliative, then propitiative and finally restorative. And the discovery that it "paid to serve the Lord" was the origin of the talking point for the eventual super-salesmanship of salvation which triumphed under William A. Sunday. Eternal hell was only enhanced. It remained as something so much worse than temporal misery and for another seventy years gave the revivalist a double advantage over the world, the flesh and the devil. None can question the personal and public good in religious redemption from moral and material failure. The street-preaching Salvation Army and Volunteers of America have salvaged the down-and-outer with drumbeat and trumpet call of "the Blood and the Fire." No soldier will ever forget the followers of the Booths who put religion into doughnuts in France and knelt by the stretchers pressing to parched lips the cup in the Name of Him Whose brothers were lying there. But there is another side of the utility of religion. Its value has been recognized and deliberately used by masters of this world's affairs and possessions to keep the "havenots" mindful of their eternal welfare rather than that of their condition here on earth. Sometimes they have profited merely incidentally by the humbling effects of a revival; sometimes they have actually instigated a revival for the express purpose of maintaining the economic status quo. John Wanamaker, the merchant of pious memory, was perhaps unaware of the significance that might be attached to his words when he said of the Moody revival in Philadelphia: "I give this testimony as a business man standing in the witness box and bearing witness to the truth. Hundreds of men converted, out of work and wandering about the streets, have been kept in the way they chose when they embraced the religion of Jesus Christ." It was the way of safety for the constituted social and economic system. It gave a mansion yonder for those who had no place to lay their heads here and the bread of eternal life to make up for the lack of a square meal. Mill bosses in Connecticut gladly stopped their waterwheels while Jabez Swan exhorted their lint-dusted girls at the looms. Charles G. Finney melted a whole roomful into tears when he eyed down a young woman trying to mend a broken thread at New York Mills, near Utica. William A. Sunday has always carried his message from the tabernacle to the worker in the shop. The steel men of Pittsburgh welcomed him to the mills where union organizers get no admittance. He talked perhaps of the wages of sin and surely not of those which enter into collective bargaining to feed, clothe and shelter the children of labor. Yet these evangelists were supremely concerned with the saving of souls no matter where they found them. The making of better employees was merely collateral and then only in the mind of an observant employer. Slave traders in ante-bellum days always put a premium on Christian chattels. And now "free" labor is doubtless more grateful for what it receives, less likely to grumble and more submissive when it is sufficiently preoccupied with religion. The accomplishment of this desideratum is worth a going price in the modern industrial South. This is on the word of one of today's leading evangelists of the South, himself the son of an evangelist famous on both sides of the Atlantic: some Southern cotton mill managements pay half the cost and supply the location for revivals that keep their workers in constant concern for their souls. It is good business. It maintains industrial peace regardless of wages, hours or any such mundane and transitory considerations. And the lesser order of under-Aarons who perform these rites are to be relied upon as loyal to the standards set by the masters of the mills. Plant and capital have been moved down from New England, leaving unions and protective legislation behind. Gastonia, the very name redolent of Boston genealogy, in North Carolina has forty-two mills within a mile of the court house. Mill villages have risen in both Carolinas, Georgia and Virginia. In every one are the inevitable Methodist and Baptist churches whose pastors are "dependable," industrially speaking. And the traditional susceptibility of the people to the revival makes their territory a stamping ground for a continuous succession of travelling exhorters in tent, tabernacle and camp meeting en-, closure. Verily religion there is a refuge and one should not be uncharitable toward those who so thoughtfully help to provide it! The first widespread revival in response to economic stimulus, however, was neither premeditated nor constrained. The name of no great evangelist can be attached to it, nor the designation of any denomination. For once in religious history a people of themselves, upon their own initiative, suddenly joined hands and invoked their God. They did not need prophet or prophecy. Their common conscience told them why they had to pray and their common predicament dictated what to pray for. It was the wave of repentance that swept this country after the panic of 1857. A financial crash reverberated through the money centers of the world on October 14, 1857. Wall Street caved in and great speculative fortunes tumbling down dislodged the pillars of sound business itself. An era of reckless prosperity vanished in a forenoon. Public confidence was prostrate. Industry stood still. Ruin confronted leaders in finance and business and immediate desperate poverty was the lot of the wage-earner. Down in the heart of America's mart of marts a solitary man began praying. For days Jeremiah Lanphier broadcast an invitation but knelt alone every noon in the upper room of the Old North Dutch Church in Fulton Street. "Lord, what wilt Thou have me to do?" was the burden of his prayer. One man joined him, then six, then twenty, then a hundred and finally the meeting-house could not hold the throng of suppliants. Other churches, halls and theaters in New York and Brooklyn were packed daily. The universal petition may well have been "O God, save my soul and restore my credit!" or "O God, save my soul and get me a job!" But in the end it was "I put myself in Thy hands; show me the way out; I will follow Thee!" An item from a newspaper tells the story: "In the busiest hour of the day, it is in the busiest street of the city, noisy with machinery of all kinds, even puffs of smoke coming up from under the ground. Take a seat and watch the worshippers collect. Porters, handcartmen, policemen, ministers and business men, of all ages, gather here for one hour to ignore and get out of the maelstromwhirl. They feel as if their souls needed care as well as their bodies. Here is sympathy, companionship, with no stress on creeds." And they all sang straight from the heart. It was Lanphier that started them singing till their hymns rang in the streets of the city. One noonday his pulpit was banked in flowers, the gift of a drunkard who had been redeemed from his weakness. Down on the docks stevedores paused for prayer and aboard two hundred ships seafaring men |