Authors: William Maxwell
The agitations were very uncommon indeed. There was the falling exercise: “The subject … would generally, with a piercing scream, fall, like a log … and appear as dead.” And the jerks: “When the head alone was affected, it would be jerked backward and forward, or from side to side, so quickly that the features of the face could not be distinguished. When the whole system was affected, I have seen a person stand in one place and jerk backward and forward, in quick succession, their hands nearly touching the floor behind and before.” And the dancing exercise. And the laughing exercise—while giving way to loud hearty laughter (which excited laughter in no one else) the subject appeared rapturously solemn. And the running exercise, and the barking exercise, and most remarkable of all, the singing exercise: “The subject, in a very happy state of mind, would sing most melodiously, not from the mouth or nose, but entirely in the breast.… Such music silenced everything and attracted the attention of all. It was most heavenly. None could ever be tired of hearing it. Doctor J. P. Campbell and myself were together at a meeting, and were attending to a pious lady thus exercised, and concluded it to be surpassing any thing we had known in nature.”
As one would expect, Mrs. Trollope carried away a rather different impression: “When we arrived, the preachers were silent; but we heard issuing from every tent
mingled sounds of praying, preaching, singing, and lamentation.… At midnight a horn sounded through the camp, which, we were told, was to call the people from private to public worship; and we presently saw them flocking from all sides to the front of the preachers’ stand.… One of the preachers began in a low nasal tone … and assured us of the enormous depravity of man as he comes from the hands of his Maker, and of his perfect sanctification after he had wrestled sufficiently with the Lord to get hold of him,
et caetera.
The admiration of the crowd was evinced by almost constant cries of ‘Amen! Amen!’ ‘Jesus! Jesus!’ ‘Glory! Glory!’ and the like. But this comparative tranquility did not last long: the preacher told them that ‘this night was the time fixed upon for anxious sinners to wrestle with the Lord;’ that he and his brethren ‘were at hand to help them,’ and that such as needed their help were to come forward into ‘the pen.’ … The crowd fell back … and for some minutes there was a vacant space before us. The preachers came down from their stand and placed themselves in the midst of it, beginning to sing a hymn, calling upon the penitents to come forth. As they sung they kept turning themselves round to every part of the crowd, and, by degrees, the voices of the whole multitude joined in chorus.… The combined voices of such a multitude, heard at dead of night, from the depths of their eternal forests … did altogether produce a fine and solemn effect … but ere I had well enjoyed it, the scene changed, and sublimity gave way to horror and disgust.… Above a hundred persons, nearly all females, came forward, uttering howlings and groans, so terrible that I shall never cease to shudder when I recall them. They appeared to drag each other forward, and on the word being given, ‘let us pray,’ they all fell on their knees; but this posture was soon changed for others that permitted greater scope for the convulsive movements
of their limbs; they were soon all lying on the ground in an indescribable confusion of heads and legs.… Hysterical sobbings, convulsive groans, shrieks and screams the most appalling, burst forth on all sides.… The preachers moved among them, at once exciting and soothing their agonies. I heard the muttered ‘Sister! dear sister!’ …
“A very pretty girl, who was kneeling … immediately before us, amongst an immense quantity of jargon, broke out thus: ‘Woe! woe to the backsliders! hear it, hear it, Jesus! when I was fifteen my mother died, and I backslided, Oh Jesus, I backslided! take me home to my mother, Jesus! take me home to her, for I am weary! Oh John Mitchell! John Mitchell!’ and after sobbing piteously behind her raised hands, she lifted her sweet face again, which was pale as death, and said, ‘Shall I sit on the sunny bank of salvation with my mother? my own dear mother? Oh Jesus, take me home, take me home!’
“Who could refuse a tear to this earnest wish for death in one so young and so lovely? But I saw her, ere I left the ground, with her hand fast locked, and her head supported by a man who looked very much as Don Juan might, when sent back to earth as too bad for the regions below.
“One woman near us continued to ‘call on the Lord,’ as it is termed, in the loudest possible tone, and without a moment’s interval, for the two hours that we kept our dreadful station. She became frightfully hoarse, and her face so red as to make me expect she would burst a blood-vessel.…
“The stunning noise was sometimes varied by the preachers beginning to sing; but the convulsive movements of the poor maniacs only became more violent. At length the atrocious wickedness of this horrible scene increased to a degree of grossness, that drove us from our station; we returned to the carriage at about three o’clock in the morning, and passed the remainder of the night in listening to the ever increasing tumult at the pen. To sleep was impossible.
At daybreak the horn again sounded, to send them to private devotion; and in about an hour afterwards I saw the whole camp … joyously and eagerly employed in preparing and devouring their most substantial breakfasts.”
The worship of the Golden Calf in the backwoods of Indiana is what it seems most like, but my Grandmother Maxwell spoke of attending camp meetings as casually as we would speak of going to the movies.
When Stone went home and reported what he had seen, many of the congregation at Cane Ridge left the church weeping. He hurried over to Concord to preach that night and “two little girls were struck down under the preaching of the word, and in every respect were exercised as those were in the south of Kentucky.” He had an appointment to preach the next day at William Maxwell’s, and as he arrived at the gate, his friend Nathaniel Rogers, “a man of the first respectability and influence in the neighborhood,” saw him and shouted aloud the praises of God and the two men rushed into each other’s arms, Rogers still praising the Lord aloud. In twenty minutes from the time Stone started preaching, scores of people had fallen to the ground. Others tried to flee from the scene and couldn’t. An intelligent deist of the neighborhood went up to Stone and said, “Mr. Stone, I always thought before that you were an honest man; but now I am convinced that you are deceiving the people.” Stone spoke a few words to him mildly, and the deist “fell as a dead man, and rose no more till he confessed the Saviour.”
McGready and the other revivalists moved north with the spring weather. Every Sunday all through May and June there were meetings at the churches around Lexington, and the attendance got larger and larger. Between five and
six thousand people thronged to Stone’s church at Concord. The whole countryside appeared to be in motion.
In July, Stone was married to Elizabeth Campbell, the daughter of a colonel and the granddaughter of General William Russell of Virginia. She was a pious woman, and much engaged in religion. After the ceremony they hurried up from Muhlenberg County, where her mother lived, to Cane Ridge, to be in readiness for what turned out to be the most famous of all the great camp meetings.
It began on the seventh of August, and lasted six days and nights. The attendance was estimated at twenty thousand—ten per cent of the entire white population of Kentucky at that time. Stone says, “The numbers converted will be known only in eternity. Many things transpired there, which were so much like miracles, that if they were not, they had the same effects as miracles on infidels and unbelievers; for many of them were by these convinced that Jesus was the Christ, and bowed in submission to him.” Presbyterian, Methodist, and Baptist ministers preached, sometimes simultaneously, at different stations throughout the woods.
It was not Stone’s meeting, nor did it take place at his church, but he was not merely an interested spectator. “Since the beginning of the excitement I had been employed day and night in preaching, singing, visiting and praying with the distressed, till my lungs failed, and became inflamed, attended with a violent cough and spitting of blood. It was feared to be the beginning of consumption.”
His doctor forbade him to preach any more, and he felt himself fast descending to the tomb. “Viewing this event near, and that I should soon cease from my labors, I had a great desire to attend a camp meeting near Paris.”
At this meeting, in a shady grove a few miles from Cane
Ridge, for the first time a Presbyterian preacher spoke out against the work of the revivalists. He also insisted that the assembled multitude leave the camp and continue the meeting in town, in a church that wouldn’t hold half of them. They couldn’t do this without leaving their tents and wagons exposed, which a great many were unwilling to do. The consequence was, the meeting was divided. “Infidels and formalists triumphed at this supposed victory, and extolled the preacher to the skies; but the hearts of the revivalists were filled with sorrow. Being in a feeble state, I went to the meeting in town. A preacher was put forward, who had always been hostile to the work, and seldom mingled with us … I felt a strong desire to pray as soon as he should close. He at length closed, and I arose and said, let us pray. At that very moment another preacher of the same cast with the former, rose in the pulpit to preach another sermon. I proceeded to pray, feeling a tender concern for my fellow creatures, and expecting shortly to appear before my Judge. The people became much affected, and the house was filled with cries of distress. Some of the preachers jumped out of a window back of the pulpit, and left us. Forgetting my weakness, I pushed through the crowd from one to another, pointed them the way of salvation, and administered to them the comforts of the gospel. My good physician was there, came to me in the crowd, and found me wet with sweat. He hurried me to his house, and lectured me severely on the impropriety of my conduct. I immediately put on dry clothes, went to bed, slept comfortably, and rose next morning relieved from the disease which had baffled medicine, and threatened my life.”
In the eyes of orthodox Presbyterians, it was all ignorant profanation, a parody of Divine Grace. They were just as offended by the fact that preachers of different denominations took part in the same meeting as they were by the
men who circulated through the outskirts of the crowd selling whiskey. But the greatest outrage of all, and no doubt what made the formalists jump out of the window, was the doctrine that Jesus died for all and salvation depended only on believing in Him. It was simply not what Calvin said.
Three months later, at a special session of the Washington (Kentucky) Presbytery, which included churches on both sides of the Ohio River, a lay elder arose and entered a verbal complaint against one of the most conspicuous figures at the Cane Ridge meeting, Richard McNemar, as a propagator of false doctrines. There were so many revivalists ready to come to his defense that his accusers were reluctant to force the question to a vote. The investigation was dragged out for two years, and then, without ever giving McNemar a hearing, the Presbytery concluded that his views amounted to Arminianism and were hostile to the interests of all true religion. A copy of this judgment was sent to every church under the supervision of the Washington Presbytery, and, at the same time, McNemar was appointed to preach among the vacant congregations as usual. It is the sort of logic that
Alice in Wonderland
is so full of.
The Synod of Kentucky looked into the matter, and after censuring the Presbytery for various irregularities, it went on to try two of the Cane Ridge evangelists on charges of its own. It was also looking into the opinions and statements of Stone and three other revivalists—Marshall, Thompson, and Dunlavy. “The four of us well knew what would be our fate,” Stone says, “for it was plainly hinted to us, that we would not be forgotten by the Synod. We waited anxiously for the issue, till we plainly saw it would be adverse to McNemar and consequently to us all. We then withdrew to a private garden where, after prayer for direction … we drew up a protest against the proceedings of
the Synod in McNemar’s case, and a declaration of our independence, and of our withdrawal from their jurisdiction, but not from their communion. This protest we immediately presented to the Synod through their Moderator—it was altogether unexpected by them, and produced very unpleasant feelings; and a profound silence for a few minutes ensued. We retired to a friend’s house in town, whither we were quickly followed by a committee from the Synod, sent to reclaim us.” Old father David Rice reminded them “that every departure from Calvinism was an advance to atheism. The grades named by him were, from Calvinism to Arminianism—from Arminianism to Pelagianism—from Pelagianism to deism—from deism to atheism. This was his principal argument, which could have no effect on minds ardent in the search of truth.”
In Scotland it had happened many times that a group of Presbyterians had withdrawn from the general organization of the church and continued to be Presbyterians. What was unprecedented here was that they were repudiating the church’s right to determine the doctrines set forth in the Bible. After several more tactful attempts to win the evangelists over, the Synod suspended them for departing from the standards of the church, declared their pulpits vacant, and appointed substitutes to take over their churches. The evangelists published a hundred-page pamphlet, in which they stated their objections to the Westminster Confession and all other confessions and creeds.
The main body of Stone’s two congregations adhered to him, and asked him to continue as their pastor. He informed them that he would continue to preach among them, though not in the relation that had previously existed, and in their presence he tore up the contract by which they had obligated themselves for his support.
His only means of making a living now was his farm. But he preached every night and frequently in the daytime,
and since he had emancipated his two slaves and had no money to pay hired hands, he often found that the weeds were getting ahead of his corn. Though he was fatigued in body, his mind was, he said, as happy and calm as a summer evening. He took pen and ink with him to the cornfield, and as thoughts worthy of note occurred, he stopped plowing and committed them to paper, and so accumulated matter for a pamphlet on the doctrine of Atonement.