tables and counting-room
desks the latest pungent word from the noon prayer-meeting or the
evening sermon, did the work of many tract societies.

As the immediate result of the revival of 1857-58 it has been estimated
that one million of members were added to the fellowship of the
churches. But the ulterior result was greater. This revival was the
introduction to a new era of the nation's spiritual life. It was the
training-school for a force of lay evangelists for future work, eminent
among whom is the name of Dwight Moody. And, like the Great Awakening of
1740, it was the providential preparation of the American church for an
immediately impending peril the gravity of which there were none at the
time far-sighted enough to predict. Looking backward, it is instructive
for us to raise the question how the church would have passed through
the decade of the sixties without the spiritual reinforcement that came
to it amid the pentecostal scenes of 1857 and 1858.

And yet there were those among the old men who were ready to weep as
they compared the building of the Lord's house with what they had known
in their younger days: no sustained enforcement on the mind and
conscience of alarming and heart-searching doctrines; no "protracted
meetings" in which from day to day the warnings and invitations of the
gospel were set forth before the hesitating mind; in the converts no
severe and thorough "law-work," from the agonizing throes of which the
soul was with no brief travail born to newness of life; but the free
invitation, the ready and glad acceptance, the prompt enrollment on the
Lord's side. Did not these things betoken a superficial piety, springing
up like seed in the thin soil of rocky places? It was a question for
later years to answer, and perhaps we have not the whole of the answer
yet. Certainly the work was not as in the days of Edwards and Brainerd,
nor as in the days of Nettleton and Finney; was it not, perhaps, more
like the work in the days of Barnabas and Paul and Peter?

* * * * *

It does not appear that the spiritual quickening of 1857 had any effect
in allaying the sharp controversy between northern and southern
Christians on the subject of slavery. Perhaps it may have deepened and
intensified it. The "southern apostasy," from principles universally
accepted in 1818, had become complete and (so far as any utterance was
permitted to reach the public) unanimous. The southern M