Isaiah 29:17-24 - Homiletics

Religious revivals.

It is sometimes supposed that religious revivals are modern inventions, concessions to the weakness of the degenerate man of the nineteenth century; and no doubt there have been features in many so-called "revivals" which have justified this view of them. But, in point of fact, revivals, if we follow out the history of religion, are found to be movements which have belonged to all ages, and without which it appears more than probable that religion in this world would stagnate and lose all vital energy. The subject may he best viewed under three heads.

I. REVIVALISM IS A LAW OF NATURE . Not only does Nature annually revive in spring from her winter's trance, but throughout the universe exhaustion is continually occurring at irregular intervals, and recoveries from exhaustion, i.e. revivals, are the only mode by which Nature is recruited and enabled to maintain herself. A long series of wet and cold seasons produces at any rate the impression that Nature's productive powers are declining and wearing out; when, suddenly, there is a complete inversion of what had come to be regarded as an established order, and a summer of brilliant sunshine causes an overflowing harvest and an agricultural reaction. The ozone in the atmosphere, so essential to human health, decreases for months; then, all at once, there is a revival, and the average of a century is exceeded. Electrical phenomena are for a time in abeyance, and the earth seems to have "used up" the power on which her vitality principally depends; when, lo! the reaction comes, fresh electricity is developed, or conveyed to the earth from without, and electrical phenomena become more frequent and more striking than ever.

II. REVIVALISM IS CONSISTENT WITH , AND CONDUCIVE TO , A CONSTANT ADVANCE . A priori we might have expected that all growth and progress would have been regular and gradual. But the fact is otherwise. In all the fields of human energy, in art, in science, in philosophy, in religion, long periods of comparative deadness and apathy occur, during which there is scarcely any perceptible advance at all, followed by shorter intervals of activity and energy, when progress is made "by leaps and bounds." The scientific energy of the last half-century is a ease in point. The artistic revival initiated by Reynolds and Gainsborough, is another. The history of the Church, dispassionately viewed, shows a manifest progress; but the progress has been far from uniform. Many centuries have been centuries of stagnation. Religion has just kept itself alive, and that has been all. Then some stir has come from within or from without, and a rush of vitality has supervened, which has exercised an influence for good on all later times. Indifference to doctrinal truth was overspreading the world, when the dogmatic revival of the fourth century at once saved the faith, and advanced it. The expansion of the Church, which is a special mark of its life, had almost ceased, when missionary zeal broke out suddenly in the West, and the seventh and eighth centuries saw the conversion of England, Scotland, Friesland, Batavia, Switzerland, and most of Germany. A general deadness and dullness had come over Christendom between the eighth and the eleventh centuries, when the Crusades, which were s political necessity, produced the revival of the twelfth and thirteenth. The greatest revival of all was the Reformation, which recovered spiritual religion when it seemed almost lost, and exerted a purifying influence even on those parts of Christendom which most opposed it. Lesser revivals have been—in Germany Pietism, in France Jansenism, among ourselves Methodism and the Church movement still in progress. It seems scarcely too much to say that, without revivals, religion—even the Christian religion—would perish.

III. REVIVALS ARE MOST COMMONLY THE RESULT OF CHASTISEMENTS . As it was with the Jews of whom Isaiah wrote, so in the Christian Church generally, revivals have been produced by judgments. The blasphemies of Arius, and the patronage of Afianism by the court, gave rise to the counter-movement of Athanasius. The contraction of Christendom in the East by the conquests of Mohammed and his immediate successors led on to its expansion in the West by renewed missionary effort. The alarming progress of the Saracens and Turks caused the revival connected with the Crusades. The exactions and tyranny of the court of Rome, being felt as a burden that could no longer be borne, brought about the Reformation. Among ourselves, the revival which dates from 1830 was due to the loss of ten Irish bishoprics and the other attacks made on the Church by her enemies at that period. Methodism is about the only Christian revival not provoked by some manifest calamity.