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REVIVALS OF RELIGION

This phrase is ordinarily applied to the spiritual condition of a Christian community, more or less limited in extent, in which a special interest is very generally felt in respect to religious concerns, accompanied with a marked manifestation of divine power and grace in the quickening of believers, the reclaiming of backsliders, and the awakening, conviction, and conversion of the unregenerate.

Theory of Revivals. -- The progress of Christianity in the world has rarely, for time, been uniform. Its growth in the individual and in the community is characterized by very obvious fluctuations. Like all things temporal, it is subject to constant change, exposed to influences the most varied and antagonistic. Now it makes rapid advances in its conflict with sinful propensities and developments; then it is subjected to obstructions and reverses that effectually check its onward course, and result in spiritual declensions.

The natural is ever at enmity with the spiritual. "The flesh lusteth against the spirit, and the spirit against the flesh; and these are contrary the one to the other." Growth in grace is attainable only by ceaseless vigilance, untiring diligence, unremitting conflict, and a faithful improvement of the opportunities and means of spiritual advancement. Any relaxation in the strife with moral evil tends to spiritual retardation: the evil gets the advantage over the good; the religious fervor abates; the soul becomes lukewarm, cold, dead.

As with the individual believer, so is it with the community. A church, a sisterhood of churches covering a large section of country, by reason of the predominating influence of some worldly interests, -- the greed of gain in a season of great commercial prosperity, the strife of party during a highly excited political campaign, the prevalence of a martial spirit in a time of international or civil war, or the lust of pleasure in a time of general worldly gayety and festivity, or any absorbing passion for mere temporal good,-- may be so diverted from the direct pursuit of holiness, and the prosecution of the work of advancing the kingdom of Christ, as to lose, to a considerable extent, the power, if not the life, of godliness. The spiritual and eternal become subordinate to the worldly and temporal. The blight of spiritual declension settles down upon them, and attaches itself to them with increasing persistency year by year. Such has been the history of Christian churches everywhere.

The ancient people of God were rebuked with great frequency by their priests and prophets for their proneness to spiritual declension. "My people are bent to backsliding from me." "Why is this people of Jerusalem slidden back by a perpetual backsliding?" This proneness was continually coming to the surface, in the days of Moses and the judges, under the kings, and both before and after the exile. Judges and rulers, priests and prophets, Deborah and Barak, Samuel and David, Elijah and Elisha, Jonah and Daniel, Ezra and Nehemiah, were raised up to beat back the waves of corruption, to arrest the tide of degeneracy, and to heal the backslidings of the people. The fire was kept burning on the altar only by repeated divine interpositions, resulting successively in a revival of religion.

Similar tendencies have from the beginning been developed in the history of the Christian Church: Ephesus loses her first love, Laodicea becomes lukewarm, Sardis defiles her garments, Philippi and Corinth yield to the blandishments of worldly pleasures. Worldliness and carnality, leanness and spiritual death, succeed, too often, a state of pious fervor, godly zeal, and holy living. The annual narratives of ecclesiastical communities bear painful testimony to this degenerating tendency.

Such being the testimony of universal experience to the proneness of human nature to decline from the spirit and power of godliness, how, it is asked, is this tendency to be checked? Obviously the true and only effective and appropriate remedy for a season of spiritual declension is a season of spiritual revival. Such a season, by whatever agencies or instrumentalities brought about, by whatever adjuncts of questionable propriety it may be accompanied, and of greater or less extent, may properly be termed "a revival of religion."

These manifestations, moreover, are to be regarded as the result of a special and peculiar effusion of the Holy Spirit. All spiritual life, all progress in the divine life, whether in the individual or in the community, in the church or in the nation, is the Spirit of God. The whole period of grace, from the Day of Pentecost to the final judgment, is properly termed "the dispensation of the Holy Spirit." Every true convert is begotten of the Spirit, and so becomes a child of God. The Spirit is always in and with the church, carrying forward the work of redemption.