him, he has brought me out. Never let me forget to love and serve and praise my God and my Redeemer." 3

The correspondence of the American revival with that of last summer, is shown not merely in the general process of conversion common to both, whether we understand by conversion something predominantly physical or something predominantly mental; but in the objections advanced by disbelievers in vindication of their disbelief. Against the dominant impression that the prostrations were of supernatural origin, the sceptics of 1801 urged the facts, that nervous females were the class principally affected; that the paroxysms generally were realized at the end of agitating meetings; that the known influence of sympathy in communicating nervous derangement, suggested the proper explanation of the phenomena in question. In answer to such objections, we find Rev. Samuel McCorkle referring exultingly to the fact, that although two sacraments at a place called Waxhaws, saw no "converts" of the male gender, and no attainment of "conversion," except towards the close of the meetings, "when the body was debilitated, and the mind impressed by a long series of dreadful sights and sounds; at the third sacrament, twenty cases of " conversion" occurred on the first day, and principally in the persons of men, some of whom had been loud in the proclamation of their disbelief. It appears, moreover, that one of these "converts" not only offered in his experience a manifestation of the power of the Spirit, but conveyed in his exclamations what was thought to be an authoritative confutation of a prevailing opinion of disbelievers. A young man, "struck" down in the woods, was impelled to call his friends around him, and tell them authoritatively that the work was the work of God and not of sympathy as some of them supposed. And, in the foregoing, have we not the very objections and answers thereto, that were familiar to the public mind during the agitation in Ireland of last summer?

Scotland and the neighboring islands have frequently witnessed revivals on their soil,-among them, the remarkable revivals of Cambuslang and Kilsythe, towards the beginning of the last century. We shall refer to a movement that is interesting to us as presenting the physical disorgan

3 Methodist Magazine. Vol. xxvi. p. 331.

ization, without the accompaniment of the enthusiasm of revival. In Shetland, about a hundred years ago, a poor woman, afflicted with nervous weakness, fell down in a epileptic fit, in the presence of the congregation; and in consequence, epilepsy, or an affection appearing now with epileptic and now cataleptic manifestations, became general in the island. There was no unusual excitement, except the excitement of curiosity or terror, to give strength to the distemper; in its production, sympathy appears to have been the single operating cause. The presence in a congregation of a single individual affected with the disease, was sufficient to carry the contagion to many. So that scarcely a Sunday passed round, without interruption of public worship by a series of sights and sounds, tending, perhaps, to awaken, but certainly not to instruct or edify. Women when attacked would fall down, toss their arms about, writhe their bodies into various shapes, move their heads suddenly from side to side, and with eyes fixed and staring, utter the most dismal cries." The paroxysms generally lasted for half an hour, and appeared in unequal force during the summer months. At length, the balmy influence of time, associated with the counter-irritation occasioned by a threat of immersion in water, restored the nervous equilibrium, and banished the disease.

In one sense, revivalism is a modern phenomenon; in another, it is not. The revivalistic ideal, which corresponds in theology with the spasmodic idea in poetry, and which aims in storm and thunder to realize religious progress, appears to have no existence in Christendom previous to the Reformation; religious enthusiasm, however, is probably as old as the creation. If every season of such enthusiasm, every awakening of the human mind to the great realities of God and eternity is to be termed a revival, the very planting of Christianity in the world was accomplished considerably by revival. Whether in the body or out of the body, St. Paul went up to the third heaven; and his epistles to the Corinthian believers clearly show, that a fervor of feeling, whose utterance approached to the unintelligible, characterized that tumultuous church. And, in after days, the ascetics who renounced the world aud maintained a precarious existence on berries and roots,-the crusaders travelling out

4 Hecker's Epidemics of the Middle Ages, p. 145.

under a burning sun, a long and wearisome journey to rescue the Holy Land from infidel profanation,-Luther, burning the pope's bull in Wittemberg, and in the presence of the magnates of the German empire declaring that he never would recant,-do not these exemplify that enthusiasm, which, when rightly directed, has done so much to ennoble character in the individual, and to promote refor mation in the mass? In fact, there are but two kinds of reformation, one affected silently and surely through the gradual development of thought and corresponding with the revolution that every summer clothes the earth with its robes of green, and the other achieved convulsively through the power of enthusiasm, and reminding us of the earthquake which upheaves the rock or the thunder which restores the electric equilibrium. If we desire to see enthusiasm in its more beneficent aspect we may go to the Low Countries about the year 1564, and behold the people of Antwerp and Haerlem going out in twenty thousands to hear a great preacher of the Reformation, and in the presence of God's sunshine and God's earth and God himself, gathering strength for the coming contest with the most powerful monarch of the world. And if we desire to see the same power with all its bright lineaments wanting, we may behold that monarch himself, sitting in solemn state, the dignitaries of the land around him, and witnessing the exit from life of a poor man clad in a cloak embroidered with horrible figures of the devil, and whose only crime was that he dared to think for himself on the subject of religion.

Nor is the nervous disorganization attributable to revival at all a novelty in the history of the world. A barking mania, which led persons usually possessed of sound reason to frequent solitary places and to howl or bark, visited Leicestershire in 1341 and other counties before and since. A tendency to mew once developed itself in a nun of a large convent in France, and falling on persons whose constitutions were rather impaired by the repressive discipline of the monastery, amplified into the dimensions of a regular nun mania. Cataleptic and hysteric affections, sometimes accompanied with a hideous perversion of the moral sentiments and universally attributed to demons, frequently converted the nunneries of the Middle Ages into hospitals

and seats of inquisition; and it has happened more than once that an unfortunate girl has been burned as a demoniac, because nature outraged in her person would assert its rights, and brand asceticism as a violation of its laws. We shall pass over such transient examples of nervous disorganization in order to glance at a colossal specimen of similar derangement-the dancing mania so graphically described by Professor Hecker, in his " Epidemics of the Middle Ages.'

A short time after the Black Death had devastated Europe, and before its effects had altogether passed away, a number of persons of both sexes appeared in Aix-la-Chapelle, and gathering in a circle, danced vehemently and long, regardless of the bystanders, in fact almost uncognizant of their presence. During the continuance of the impulse impelling them to dance, these individuals were unconscious of surrounding objects; but whilst their natural senses were obscured, their spiritual eye was opened and they beheld glorious visions of heaven, the Virgin Mary and God. These poor persons were victims of a disease which found no relief but in violent and continued exercise, and a tight bandaging of the waist following thereupon. Many of the phenomena of the disease were ludicrous though most of them were melancholy: for, example, the dancers could not endure square-toed shoes, and they flew into a passion at the sight of red colors. At the height of the epidemic, eleven hundred dancers were seen at once in the street of Mentz. In Cologne there were five hundred persons affected. "Peasants left their ploughs, mechanics their workshops, house-keepers their domestics, to join in the wild revels," which in consequence of the incoming of disreputable characters, and the opportunities granted to license, soon degenerated, and the bacchanalian frenzy ended in bacchanalian license. A similar Dancing Mania appeared in the year 1418, and in Italy about the end of the same century. The Italian epidemic was remarkable as originating partly in the false idea that the bite of the tarantula, a ground spider of Apulia, communicated the virus that could only be expelled by violent saltatory exercise. Of this disease weariness and dejection accompanied with loss of appetite were a prevailing symptom, and music, a considerable alleviation; though the exercise of the dance could alone

effect a complete cure. It is said that country-people, totally ignorant of music, acquired such an accuracy of ear during the epidemic, that they could detect a single false note, and though uninitiated in the terpsichorean art, moved with the gracefulness of practised dancers. Among the idiosyncrasies of the distemper we may mention this,-that whilst the dancers of Germany could not endure the sight of red, those of Italy loved it, and that whilst the Germans were exhilarated with visions of angels, the Italians found pleasure in the thought and sight of the sea. The Italian Mania lingered for centuries, and has left a memorial of its historic importance in a favorite national dance, the tarantella. It will be seen, then, that distempers exactly paralleling those which revivalism considers to be a sign from heaven, have occurred frequently in history; and were at one time propagated by sympathy, at another by a baseless imagination, at another by simple terror; distempers sometimes conveying no religious impression whatsoever, at others, an impression unequivocally bad, and requiring, consequently, to be placed under medical rather than theological supervision, and to be considered of no signification whatsoever as bearing on the business of salvation.

Yet a revival as constituting a type of religious progress, is undoubtedly a modern phenomenon; and, before sketching the Irish movement, we may inquire into the origin of the new ideal. In the Catholic Church, enthusiasm, being too impetuous for ecclesiastical management, is seldom countenanced; and, consequently, the great revivalists of religion in the Middle Ages were generally to be found in the ranks of heresy. They were principally the Mystics. But when, by the strong arm of Luther, freedom from ecclesiastical domination was realized, and by the doctrine of Justification by Faith alone, the religious consciousness was turned inward, larger encouragement, or at least opportunity, was offered to that zeal which in healthy exercise is the very atmosphere of true religion, but in extravagance produces the enthusiasm which deifies fancy, or the fanaticism which worships hate. The independence conceded to the individual by Protestantism, concurred with that attention to the inner which its theology superinduced, then, in producing the occasional extravagance of misdirected zeal. And, among particular phases of Protestantism, it is evi