satisfy their need for explanations.
And in a sense the Spirit came. The Great Revival sprang directly
from the Change--the last, the deepest, widest, and most enduring
of all the vast inundations of religious emotion that go by that
name.

But indeed it differed essentially from its innumerable predecessors.
The former revivals were a phase of fever, this was the first
movement of health, it was altogether quieter, more intellectual,
more private, more religious than any of those others. In the old
time, and more especially in the Protestant countries where the
things of religion were outspoken, and the absence of confession
and well-trained priests made religious states of emotion explosive
and contagious, revivalism upon various scales was a normal phase
in the religious life, revivals were always going on--now a little
disturbance of consciences in a village, now an evening of emotion
in a Mission Room, now a great storm that swept a continent, and
now an organized effort that came to town with bands and banners
and handbills and motor-cars for the saving of souls. Never at
any time did I take part in nor was I attracted by any of these
movements. My nature, although passionate, was too critical (or
sceptical if you like, for it amounts to the same thing) and shy
to be drawn into these whirls; but on several occasions Parload and
I sat, scoffing, but nevertheless disturbed, in the back seats of
revivalist meetings.

I saw enough of them to understand their nature, and I am not
surprised to learn now that before the comet came, all about the
world, even among savages, even among cannibals, these same, or
at any rate closely similar, periodic upheavals went on. The world
was stifling; it was in a fever, and these phenomena were neither
more nor less than the instinctive struggle of the organism against
the ebb of its powers, the clogging of its veins, the limitation
of its life. Invariably these revivals followed periods of sordid
and restricted living. Men obeyed their base immediate motives
until the world grew unendurably bitter. Some disappointment, some
thwarting, lit up for them--darkly indeed, but yet enough for
indistinct vision--the crowded squalor, the dark inclosure of life.
A sudden disgust with the insensate smallness of the old-world way
of living, a realization of sin, a sense of the unworthiness of all
individual things, a desire for something comprehensive, sustaining,
something greater, for wide