You would have thought that the fire of the Reformation would have burnt a long time, but just 36 years later, after most of the leaders had died, the flames had been reduced to glowing embers. We read of a ‘spreading moral desolation over the land’ with the population increasingly being ‘light and wanton in behaviour’, and the ministry degenerating into a clinical routine with little of the life of God’s Spirit. Concerned Christians began to pray fervently for a visitation of God in Scotland and he heard their cries.
John Davidson, the minister of Prestonpans, near Edinburgh, was deeply stirred about the complacency and compromise in the church and the growing decadence of the nation. He called the Presbytery in Haddington to press the Assembly to set aside prime time for addressing this problem. The leaders of the Church of Scotland agreed, and on 24th March 1596, something significant happened. John Davidson read out a document indicting everyone from the king down to the least of them, about the abounding sins of their time, and exposed the negligence and compromise of the clergy. The ministers of the church were so struck with anguish at the spiritual state of the church and nation, that 400 pastors and leaders met on the next Tuesday for a day of humbling before the Lord. As Davidson led the Assembly in a prayer of confession in St Giles’, Edinburgh, the Holy Spirit came upon them. ‘Then it was that the ancient Cathedral Church saw a strange sight…There were suche sighes and sobs,’ wrote R. Moffat Gillon, ‘with shedding of tears among the most part of all estats that were present, everie one provoking another by their example, that the Kirk resounded, so that the place might worthily have been called Bochim [i.e a place of weeping, see Judges 2:1-5]; for the like of that day was never seen in Scotland since the Reformatioun, as everie man confessed. There have been manie days of humiliatioun for present or immanent dangers, but the like for sinne and defectioun was there never seen.’
On this day all of the ministers, except for one, raised their hands in a solemn covenant with God, and determined to live wholly for Christ. The ministers spread out through the nation, calling their congregations to repentance and reform, in which scenes like that at St Giles’ were witnessed amongst Christians in places like Dunfermline, for ‘The Lord steirit upe sic a motioun of hart, that all war forcit to fall down befor the Lord, with sobbes and teares in aboundance, everie man mightelie commovit with affectionnes of their conscience in the presence of their God.’ How we need such a revival in the Church of Scotland today, and in all the churches in this nation, which are riddled with compromise and complacency. But such a revival surely begins with us!
‘Blessed is the man whose strength is in You, whose heart is set on pilgrimage. As they pass through the Valley of Baca [weeping], they make it a spring; the rain also covers it with pools. They go from strength to strength; each one appears before God in Zion’ (Psalm 84:5-7, NKJV).
Image: St Giles’ on the Royal Mile, Edinburgh, Paul James-Griffiths. It was here, in the east section, that the 1596 revival broke out among the ministers.