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

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Shall we, then, first attempt to obtain some adequate idea of what this Revival effected, by a slight effort to realise what sort of world and state of society it was into which the Revival came? One writer truly remarks, “Never has century risen on christian England so void of soul and faith as that which opened with Queen Anne, and which reached its misty noon beneath the second George, a dewless night succeeded by a dewless dawn. There was no freshness in the past and no promise in the future; the Puritans were buried, the Methodists were not born.” It is unquestionably true that black, bad and corrupt as society was, for the most part, all round, in the eighteenth century, intellectual and spiritual forces broke forth, simultaneously we had almost said, and believing, as we do, in the Providence which governed the rise of both, we may say, consentaneously, which have left far behind all social regenerations which the pen of history has recited before. Of almost all the fruits we enjoy, it may be said the seeds were planted then; even those which, like the printing-press or the gospel, had been planted ages before, were so transplanted as to flourish with a new vigour.