ening, became emphasized in the revival of
1800. That liberalism which had begun as a protest against a too
peremptory style of dogmatism was rapidly advancing toward a dogmatic
denial of points deemed by the opposite party to be essential. Dogmatic
differences were aggravated by differences of taste and temperament, and
everything was working toward the schism by which some sincere and
zealous souls should seek to do God service.

In one most important particular the revival of 1800 was happily
distinguished from the Great Awakening of 1740. It was not done and over
with at the end of a few years, and then followed by a long period of
reaction. It was the beginning of a long period of vigorous and
"abundant life," moving forward, not, indeed, with even and unvarying
flow, yet with continuous current, marked with those alternations of
exaltation and subsidence which seem, whether for evil or for good, to
have become a fixed characteristic of American church history.

The widespread revivals of the first decade of the nineteenth century
saved the church of Christ in America from its low estate and girded it
for stupendous tasks that were about to be devolved on it. In the glow
of this renewed fervor, the churches of New England successfully made
the difficult transition from establishment to self-support and to the
costly enterprises of aggressive evangelization into which, in company
with other churches to the South and West, they were about to enter. The
Christianity of the country was prepared and equipped to attend with
equal pace the prodigious rush of population across the breadth of the
Great Valley, and to give welcome to the invading host of immigrants
which before the end of a half century was to effect its entrance into
our territory at the rate of a thousand a day. It was to accommodate
itself to changing social conditions, as the once agricultural
population began to concentrate itself in factory villages and
commercial towns. It was to carry on systematic campaigns of warfare
against instituted social wrong, such as the drinking usages of society,
the savage code of dueling, the public sanction of slavery. And it was
to enter the "effectual door" which from the beginning of the century
opened wider and wider to admit the gospel and the church to every
nation under heaven.

FOOTNOTES:

[231:1] "Autobiography of Lyman Beecher," vol. i., p. 43. The same
charming volume contains abundant evidence that the