HISTORY AND NATURAL HISTORY OF REVIVALS. Is a previous number
of this journal we drew attention to the religious epidemic then raging in Ireland.* So remarkable a phenomenon as that of a conspicuous, immediate, and extensive conversion, in an age of growing scepticism, must, unless we at once admit it to be of supernatural origin, have ascertainable cha- racteristics and explicable causes and conditions. In an article in the current number of the Westminster Review, a praiseworthy, and, in part at least, successful attempt has been made to bring together in a compact form a variety of valuable fact, and inge- nious as well as sound suggestion on the history, nature and causes of this extraordinary spiritual fever. Of our resetting of these philosophical jewels our contemporary, we are assured, will not disapprove.
"The Irish revival seems to have been originated by certain Irish clergymen." These clergymen purposely went over to America to witness the revivals there. In that country the con- version of a quarter or even half a million souls had been effected by the joint prayers of the faithful. As far back as 1850 "the spiritual temperature" began to rise, when a union prayer meet- ing was established at Boston the excitement spread, and, six years after, Philadelphia caught the impulse. In October, 1857, when the commercial panic had, in Homeric phrase, "loosened the knees" of men, this genuflectory prostration augmented. About the same time a convention lay and ministerial, was held at Pittsburgh. It lasted for three days, resulting in an address (1st January, 1858) "recommending. practical measures for the revival of true religion." A similar convention was held in Cin- cinnati. In Ohio, too' a prayer movement, having its origin in a special cause, mingled with the common stream of revival inspira- tion.
Imported. into Ireland, the contagion was rapidly and effectively propagated, chiefly it would seem amcnot' the descendants of that "knot of Irish men and women who, in Swift's days, abstracted themselves from matter, bound up all their senses, and allowed the imagination to usurp the throne of the reason." At Bally.- dare, we are told, a large meadow was covered with a multitude of people in all attitudes, praying, weeping, lying helpless, scarce able to articulate their petitions for mercy. Presently we read of twenty milk-girls, who work thirteen hours a day, and whose diet often consists wholly of bread and tea, struck down in an instant, some insensible, some uttering agonizing cries, some re- maining seemingly conscionsless, with a beautiful spiritual radiance beaming from their faces and one, at least, lying with closed eyes, her body curved archlike on her heels and the hind part of her head, and finally falling back nerveless, as before some sight of appalling terror. Again we are told by Arehdeaceue Stopford that "every girl now struck in Belfast has visions, and would think the work only half done if she had not." In these visions, Christ appears in divine splendour. To one fair ecstatic he gives a gown of glory ; to another he brings a suit of righteous- ness. Some are struck dumb : one girl is said to have remained speechless for three weeks • another had seventy paralytic seizures in one day. Blindness toe, is an allotted accompaniment of this epidemic affection. It is instructive to learn that "the friends; and bystanders are so persuaded of the miraculous nature of these concomitants that they would resent any attempt to test them."
In the prevailing physical and mental susceptibility the mere sight of a person already suffering sufficed to bring on an attack. The malady was regarded by the oommon people as contagious. "She took it (the revival) and was very bad with it," said one. The most fearful symptom of this spiritual disease is that of in- sanity. A distinguished physician who presided over a lunatic asylum in America had a large number of Revivalist patients ; and the church dignitary already quoted affirms that ' a very brief space of time and in a very limited circle of inquiry, he' saw or heard of more than twenty cases" in Ireland.
The phenomena of modern revivalism are not without pre- cedents. During Wesley's preaching at Bristol, "scores of men and women" dropped senseless to the ground. At a Methodist revival in Cornwall 4000 persons fell into convulsions. At Cambuslang, where Whitfield once preached, "the people seemed to be slain by scores." One section of Methodists was tinguished by a jumping mania. During the great Presby- terian revival' which passed over Kentucky and Tennessee in the beginning of this century, the "falling exercise" was succeeded by the jerking exercise. At a remoter period, in a neighbouring country, the Convulsionnaires de Saint Medard exhibited similar characteristics. Certain young women, while praying at the tomb of the beatified Jansenist, Paris' overwrought by religions exul- tation," became the "subjects of a violent hysterical affection." So rapidly did the malady spread, that at the end of two years, between 700 and 800 fair maidens of the most refined city in Eu- rope, under the names of jumpers, barkers, and mowers, displayed before an astounded world the most singular feats of saltatory and vociferatory skill. Further back still, we have the dancing mania of Aix in Chapelle, which followed the Black death in 1374; the Tarantula dance, which began in Apulia, "but at the close of the fifteenth century had spread far beyond its bean- See sr.-Pastor, October 1, 1859.
daries" ; the boy crusaders in 1212, both in France and Ger- many, who " pined with sorrow and fell ill with trembling of the limbs," till they were allowed to set out for the Land of the Holy Sepulehre. Once more descending to our own times, we have the preaching epidemic which broke out in Sweden in 1842-3; when boys and girls of eight years of age were inspired to preach the gospel ; when the patients had "quaking fits," "saw visions, and preached while in an ecstatic state." "Every feature of the physical phenomena of modern revivals," says the Westminster Critic, "betrays their essential identity with those of the various maladies we have passed in review." Surveying the formidable array of the symptoms indicated or im- plied, he feels no hesitation in pronouncing the malady they re- present to be Hysteria, defined by Dr. Aitken as a complex mor- bid condition of all the central functions of a chronic kind, pro- bably associated with some morbid state of the emotional cen- tres." Any structural or functional disorder of the special seat of hysterical affection may, it can easily be shown, exert an ab- normal influence on the heart or any of the great vital organs, by means of the Sympathetic nerve. Moreover, any of these organs may become the primary seat of the derangement. The morbid influence generated in the brain or stomach will, in impression- able organisms, rapidly and uncontrollably spread and dominate over the whole. Again : "the intimate connexion of sensation and motion,—by which sensation becomes a frequent exciter of motion, and by which voluntary motion is always, in a state of health, attended with sensation, is in harmony with the intimate union of the structures which are the alleged organs of these functions, and at the same time suggests why violent emotions, such as the terror and exaltation incident to religions revivals, often give rise to violent and extraordinary muscular movements." Thus terrific pictures are conceived and the accompanying motions generated in the convolutions of the brain ; corresponding sensa- tions are then excited in the sensorium ; the muscular system is next stimulated into action ; and finally the well-known convul- sive movements occur. In persons subject to religious terror, the force and extravagance of these muscular manifestations depends on the predisposition of their general nervous organization to hysterical excitement. Such is the theory of the reviewer. We come now to its application. Are the phenomena of the recent revivals the results of supernatural agency ? Similar phenomena were attributed by Wesley a century ago, and in the age of the Reformation by Ifelanothon, to the Devil. Those of our own day are by many ascribed to the operation of the Holy Spirit. Others again refuse to admit divine or diabolic interposition to explain effects per- fectly explicable by natural causes. They allege that the inti- mate relation of mind and body, the "extraordinary potency of feeling and. imagination to induce bodily changes," are amply competent to account for the strange exhibitions of the Revival- ists. The medicinal and restorative action of the imagination, the witch-like power of fright, or any strong emotion, are ap- pealed to as instances of this natural magic,. Under their influ- ence bread pills have been known to effectually replace mercury ; an unwounded soldier to lay motionless all night, wider the im- pression that a cannon-ball had carried off his legs ; a lady, unin- jured but apprehensive of injury to a child's ankle, to be con- fined to her bed for many days with an inflamed. foot ; the hair to tarn suddenly gray, and predicted death really to ensue. In applying this interpretation, the writer of the article from which we are borrowing premises that general and simultaneous activity both of the intellect and of the emotions is unnatural ; that thought and feeling are antagonistic to each other. Hence, to effect sudden conversions, a first condition is ignorance. The principal converts of Wesley and Whitfield were peasants, miners, colliers, and the "heathen masses of large towns." Such also are, in general, the converts of the present day. Next to igno- rance, the most effective condition is the complete freedom of the laity from doctrinal and disciplinal restraint, securing the co- operation of all the members of a church in preaching, mutual exhortation, and prayer, thus favouring the development of an untutored individualism with a tumultuous collective enthusiasm, as cc final result. A third condition consists in rendering the intellect inactive, exciting the imagination and emotions, and powerfully stimulating the sentiment of fear. All these conditions are satisfied in the modern revivals. Ignorant men and women, ill-fed and physically exhausted, are crowded together in a badly ventilated, dimly lighted room, where "the quiescence of the ob- servant and reflective faculties is facilitated," the imagination excited till it conjures up appalling representations of the terrors of another world, and the sentiments of fear and hope intensified till despair ,'produces exhaustion, and exhaustion is succeeded by rapturous elation, when the converting process is completed. In the Church of England, where the requisite conditions are non-existent, there are no revivals ; the ranks of the educated, and of those who control emotion by intellect, furnish no deserters to this church militant of new "Muscular Christians." Thus the abnormal manifestations which characterize the triumph of Re- vivalism are an additional plea for the extension of national education, for the spread of scientific truth, simplified and made available for popular uses ; the great reality of life being con- fronted with human fancies, to give the reason its proper nutri- ment, to sober the imagination, and discipline the feelings. For the cultivation of these last, which form the poetic elements of our nature, must equally be included in any educational pro- gramme. Slaves of the lamp if they are wisely treated, they will be rebellious and destructive genii if they are subjected to tyran- nical compression. With a secured enjoyment of all " lifo-pro- meting " influences, we should have no reason to apprehend the ulterior consequences of a religious movement which, like the Revivals in Ireland, might not be unproductive of great moral good ; no reason to fear lest a fresh impulse to fanaticism, the spread of nervous disease, and the generation of insanity, should more than counterbalance the diminution of crime, the decrease of litigation, and the general social improvement, which, the Chief Baron Pigott testifies, make the bright side of this ambiguous revolution. When "all the stops of life are filled with the tune- ful breath" of a divine wisdom, there will he no danger in en- thusiasm, no distrust in religion, while the sweet low music of humanity will take a new and double sweetness from that con• secreting modulation.
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