Читать книгу The Great Revival of the Eighteenth Century: with a supplemental chapter on the revival in America онлайн

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England has passed through three great evangelical revivals.

The first, the period of the Reformation, whose force was latent there, even before the waves of the great German revolution reached its shores, and called forth the pen of a monarch, and that monarch a haughty Tudor, to enter the lists of disputation with the lowly-born son of a miner of Hartz Mountains. What that Reformation effected in England we all very well know; the changes it wrought in opinion, the martyrs who passed away in their chariots of fire in vindication of its doctrines, the great writers and preachers to whose works and names we frequently and lovingly refer.

Then came the second great evangelical revival, the period of Puritanism,[1] whose central interests gather round the great civil wars. This was the time, and these were the opinions which produced some of the most massive and magnificent writers of our language; the whole mind of the country was stirred to its deepest heart by faith in those truths, which to believe enobles human nature, and enables it to endure “as seeing Him who is invisible.” There can be no doubt that it produced some of the grandest and noblest minds, whether for service by sword or pen, in the pulpit or the cabinet, that the world has known. Lord Macaulay’s magnificently glowing description of the English Puritan, and how he attained, by his evangelical opinions, his stature of strength, will be familiar to all readers who know his essay on Milton.