Section 7
Everywhere there was laughter, everywhere tears.
Men and women in the common life, finding themselves suddenly lit
and exalted, capable of doing what had hitherto been impossible,
incapable of doing what had hitherto been irresistible, happy,
hopeful, unselfishly energetic, rejected altogether the supposition
that this was merely a change in the blood and material texture of
life. They denied the bodies God had given them, as once the Upper
Nile savages struck out their canine teeth, because these made
them like the beasts. They declared that this was the coming of a
spirit, and nothing else would satisfy their need for explanations.
And in a sense the Spirit came. The Great Revival sprang directly
from the Change--the last, the deepest, widest, and most enduring
of all the vast inundations of religious emotion that go by that
name.
But indeed it differed essentially from its innumerable predecessors.
The former revivals were a phase of fever, this was the first
movement of health, it was altogether quieter, more intellectual,
more private, more religious than any of those others. In the old
time, and more especially in the Protestant countries where the
things of religion were outspoken, and the absence of confession
and well-trained priests made religious states of emotion explosive
and contagious, revivalism upon various scales was a normal phase
in the religious life, revivals were always going on--now a little
disturbance of consciences in a village, now an evening of emotion
in a Mission Room, now a great storm that swept a continent, and
now an organized effort that came to town with bands and banners
and handbills and motor-cars for the saving of souls. Never at
any time did I take part in nor was I attracted by any of these
movements. My nature, although passionate, was too critical (or
sceptical if you like, for it amounts to the same thing) and shy
to be drawn into these whirls; but on several occasions Parload and
I sat, scoffing, but nevertheless disturbed, in the back seats of
revivalist meetings.
I saw enough of them to understand their nature, and I am not
surprised to learn now that before the comet came, all about the
world, even among savages, even among cannibals, these same, or
at any rate closely similar, periodic upheavals went on. The world
was stifling; it was in a fever, and these phenomena were neither
more nor less than the instinctive struggle of the organism against
the ebb of its powers, the clogging of its veins, the limitation
of its life. Invariably these revivals followed periods of sordid
and restricted living. Men obeyed their base immediate motives
until the world grew unendurably bitter. Some disappointment, some
thwarting, lit up for them--darkly indeed, but yet enough for
indistinct vision--the crowded squalor, the dark inclosure of life.
A sudden disgust with the insensate smallness of the old-world way
of living, a realization of sin, a sense of the unworthiness of all
individual things, a desire for something comprehensive, sustaining,
something greater, for wider communions and less habitual things,
filled them. Their souls, which were shaped for wider issues, cried
out suddenly amidst the petty interests, the narrow prohibitions,
of life, "Not this! not this!" A great passion to escape from the
jealous prison of themselves, an inarticulate, stammering, weeping
passion shook them. . . . I have seen------ I remember how once
in Clayton Calvinistic Methodist chapel I saw--his spotty fat face
strangely distorted under the flickering gas-flares--old Pallet
the ironmonger repent. He went to the form of repentance, a bench
reserved for such exhibitions, and slobbered out his sorrow and
disgust for some sexual indelicacy--he was a widower--and I can see
now how his loose fat body quivered and swayed with his grief. He
poured it out to five hundred people, from whom in common times
he hid his every thought and purpose. And it is a fact, it shows
where reality lay, that we two youngsters laughed not at all at that
blubbering grotesque, we did not even think the distant shadow of
a smile. We two sat grave and intent--perhaps wondering.
Only afterward and with an effort did we scoff. . . .
Those old-time revivals were, I say, the convulsive movements of
a body that suffocates. They are the clearest manifestations from
before the Change of a sense in all men that things were not right.
But they were too often but momentary illuminations. Their force
spent itself in inco-ordinated shouting, gesticulations, tears.
They were but flashes of outlook. Disgust of the narrow life, of
all baseness, took shape in narrowness and baseness. The quickened
soul ended the night a hypocrite; prophets disputed for precedence;
seductions, it is altogether indisputable, were frequent among
penitents! and Ananias went home converted and returned with
a falsified gift. And it was almost universal that the converted
should be impatient and immoderate, scornful of reason and
a choice of expedients, opposed to balance, skill, and knowledge.
Incontinently full of grace, like thin old wine-skins overfilled,
they felt they must burst if once they came into contact with hard
fact and sane direction.
So the former revivals spent themselves, but the Great Revival did
not spend itself, but grew to be, for the majority of Christendom
at least, the permanent expression of the Change. For many it has
taken the shape of an outright declaration that this was the Second
Advent--it is not for me to discuss the validity of that suggestion,
for nearly all it has amounted to an enduring broadening
of all the issues of life. . . .
