and song. The example was followed until at one
time, in the spring of 1858, no fewer than twenty "daily union
prayer-meetings" were sustained in different parts of the city. Besides
these, there was preaching at unwonted times and places. Burton's
Theater, on Chambers Street, in the thick of the business houses, was
thronged with eager listeners to the rudimental truths of personal
religion, expounded and applied by great preachers. Everywhere the
cardinal topics of practical religious duty, repentance and Christian
faith, were themes of social conversation. All churches and ministers
were full of activity and hope. "They that feared the Lord spake often
one with another."

What was true of New York was true, in its measure, of every city,
village, and hamlet in the land. It was the Lord's doing, marvelous in
men's eyes. There was no human leadership or concert of action in
bringing it about. It came. Not only were there no notable evangelists
traveling the country; even the pastors of churches did little more than
enter zealously into their happy duty in things made ready to their
hand. Elsewhere, as at New York, the work began with the spontaneous
gathering of private Christians, stirred by an unseen influence. Two
circumstances tended to promote the diffusion of the revival. The Young
Men's Christian Association, then a recent but rapidly spreading
institution, furnished a natural center in each considerable town for
mutual consultation and mutual incitement among young men of various
sects. For this was another trait of the revival, that it went forward
as a tide movement of the whole church, in disregard of the
dividing-lines of sect. I know not what Christian communion, if any, was
unaffected by it. The other favorable circumstance was the business
interest taken in the revival by the secular press. Up to this time the
church had been little accustomed to look for cooeperation to the
newspaper, unless it was the religious weekly. But at this time that was
fulfilled which was spoken of the prophet, that "holiness to the Lord"
should be written upon the trains of commerce and upon all secular
things. The sensation head-lines in enterprising journals proclaimed
"Revival News," and smart reporters were detailed to the prayer-meeting
or the sermon, as having greater popular interest, for the time, than
the criminal trial or the political debate. Such papers as the "Tribune"
and the "Herald," laying on men's breakfast-