W CHAPTER I WHAT IT IS TO BE CONVERTED At the Cross, at the Cross ISAAC WATTS, 1674-1748. 'HEN the "Fire" has descended and circled through the "Camp," consuming guilt and fear and shame and hate, purifying and then exalting as it spreads from one human consciousness to another till at last the single mind of all is ablaze in one intense sacrificial flame, behold the American revival is come. All things of earth have melted away. The heavens have opened and where there was darkness there now is light, where there was uncertainty there now is security, where there was conflict there now is peace. The sense of freedom is complete, the assurance of understanding perfect. This is at once individual and collective. It is conversion, the fruit of the revival. Perhaps the trapdoor of a hell had been lifted, perhaps the floodgates of divine love had been loosed. The sacerdotal strategy for the winning of souls may have been on the level of gross sensationalism or on the plane of finelywrought emotional appeal. The conversion may have been the mere triumph of the evangelist or one genuinely dedicated to the God invoked by a despairing being who found ultimate and absolute relief in self-surrender. It may have been for the moment or for a lifetime. In retrospective analysis the evangelist discriminates and speaks of the "truly converted." Such, Jonathan Edwards tells us, have been conscious of two states, "a state of condemnation," in which they, are in which they, are even "willing to be damned," and "a state of justification and blessedness" regenerated by supernatural power. More than a century later, Dwight L. Moody pleaded with men to "let the will of God be done" in them as it had been in him, challenged the manner of their living and believing, and, in "inquiry meetings" when preaching was over, broke down the barriers to faith by taking the load of sin's consciousness from their minds. Throughout all the evangelizing of America, however, underlying both pulpit plea and resultant response, there is one fundamental ruling motive-the ever-welling yet constantly frustrated human impulsion to escape. It is the insatiable longing of the race for peace away from conflict, for quietude away from restlessness. It is the highly individualized desire to burst the bonds of earth and it brings men and women to the mercy seat or down the sawdust trail in the alluring hope of a vision into the hitherto impenetrable Beyond with security for all eternity as the reward. Salvation from hell has always meant escape from the perpetual human predicament. When Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield were kindling America's first great revival fires in the third and fourth decades of the eighteenth century, they were preaching in the shadow of the primeval forest where the danger of savages and wild beasts had not yet become remote. It was along a new and still more hazardous frontier that James McGready carried the Gospel torch at the dawn of the nineteenth century in the camp meetings of Kentucky and Ohio where the phenomena of conversion reached the most poignant stage of all revival history. In the writhing of body and torturing of mind the "redeemed soul" was visibly wrenched from the clutches of "the world, the flesh and the Devil." Each revival movement has been progressive to a peak of saturation or satiation. Not that any part of the country was ever fully "redeemed," but that people would no longer be able to endure the sustained tension and the crusading energy would burn itself out. A decline in spiritual responsiveness would follow the revival, sometimes lasting for years. Then at the lowest point of the pessimism consequent upon apathy or disillusion, the revival was reborn and with it another of the cycles of revivalism that have characterized the American way of getting religion, losing it and finding it yet again. Even when the fruits of a revival were preserved in the forming of a new denomination, like the Methodists under the Wesleyan apostles, Francis Asbury and Dr. Thomas Coke, who took root in the post-Revolutionary despair of the struggling young nation and spread to its uttermost fringes along the Gospel trails of such circuit riders as Peter Cartwright, still it has been found necessary in succeeding generations as altars grew cold to return to the primal evangelical spirit. It was in the second century after Roger Williams founded Providence on their faith that the Baptists were led by Jacob Knapp and Jabez Swan to make one of the greatest extensions of the fold of those who symbolize their salvation by total immersion. Swan baptized ten thousand with his own hands. Then again, denominations have clashed in the fury of |