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

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Let not the allusion seem out of place. That age was the seed-time of the present harvest fields; in that time those great religious ideas which have wrought such an astonishing revolution, acquired body and form; and we ought to notice how, when God sets free some new idea, He also calls into existence the new vehicle for its diffusion. He did not trust the early christian faith to the old Latin races, to the selfish and æsthetic Greek, or to the merely conservative Hebrew; He “hissed,” in the graphic language of the old Bible, for a new race, and gave the New Testament to the Teutonic people, who have ever been its chief guardians and expositors; and thus, in all reviews of the development and unfolding of the religious life in the times of which we speak, we have to notice how the material and the spiritual changes have re-acted on each other, while both have brought a change which has indeed “made all things new.”

Contrasting the state of society after the rise of the Great Revival with what it was before, the present with the past, it is quite obvious that something has brought about a general decency and decorum of manners, a tenderness and benevolence of sentiment, a religious interest in, and observance of, pious usages, not to speak of a depth of religious life and conviction, and a general purity and nobility of literary taste, which did not exist before. All these must be credited to this great movement. It is not in the nature of steam engines, whether stationary or locomotive, nor in printing presses, or Staffordshire potteries, undirected by spiritual forces, to raise the morals or to improve the manners of mankind.