God's
own sanctuary. No wonder that prayer and song find such grand perfection
in the Camp-Meeting. It is there they find their highest inspiration.

But another advantage of the Camp-Meeting lies in the unbroken chain of
religious thought and feeling which it affords. In the ordinary
experiences of life, the secular and the religious strongly mingle and
intercept each other. But in the tented grove the secular is shut away
from the mind, and the religious holds complete mastery. One service
follows another, and one religious impulse succeeds another so rapidly
that the soul finds no interval for communion with the world. And as the
ore, by long tarrying in the furnace, where no breath of cooling
currents can reach it, flows as a liquid and is ready to take any form,
so the soul, held in hallowed communion with the Divine spirit, is
prepared to receive the perfect image of God.

To the soul who has no knowledge of these delightful experiences, there
hangs a mystery around the Camp-Meeting, but to Christians the whole
subject is as clear as the noon-day. Like the disciples on the mount of
transfiguration, they are prepared to say, "Master, it is good for us to
be here." With them Christ is the central figure, and it is his presence
that hallows the temple in the wilderness.

It is sometimes objected that the exercises at Camp-Meetings are too
boisterous, and lead to extravagances. To this objection there are two
replies. First, it must be conceded that Camp-Meetings are not the only
meetings that may be denominated boisterous. At political meetings, and
on other occasions, I have witnessed the equal, at least, of anything I
have seen at Camp Meetings.

But the other reply is more to the point. No one can well deprecate the
boisterous and extravagant in religion more than I do, and yet I accept
both as a necessity. To move men to right action, they must be swayed by
right influences. If men were susceptible to the good, then gentle
influences might sway them, but as they are steeped in evil, and largely
lost to the better influences, the sterner only can reach them. If this
shall be found to be true in the individual, then certainly it is more
emphatically true of men in the aggregate. To move a multitude, then, to
the acceptance of Christ, the congregation must be put under an intense
moral pressure. And it will be found that the measure of pressure that
will move the great mass, will sometimes move individuals of pec