When two relatively unknown American men, Dwight L. Moody and Ira D. Sankey, arrived to minister in England in 1873, they received an invitation from Revd John Kelman of Leith to come up to Edinburgh with the message of Christ. The previous revival had brought much new life to the city, but there was a need of a fresh movement. When Moody and his singing companion arrived in Edinburgh, they found that the ground was so well prepared that within a week the city was buzzing with their message. Ministers from across the Protestant denominations welcomed them and worked shoulder to shoulder to bring in a huge harvest of converted people. “Within a short time,” says Lennie, “the whole city was said to have been moved to its core.”
The unusual working of this revival was that it impacted every class of people, from the poor, right up to the well-to-do, professors, national leaders, and especially university students. The Monthly Visitortract distributed to most of Scotland and “circulated to every Family in the City”, covered the 1873-4 revival with gushing words of enthusiasm:
““What do you think of it?” was a common saying in Edinburgh, when six months ago this gracious work was beginning. Few who believe in conversion ask that question now… All classes – the rich and the poor – lawyers, doctors, soldiers, students, merchants, artisans, boys and girls at school, are enlisting for Christ; men of the world, drunkards and blasphemers, infidels, the very chief of sinners, are pressing into the kingdom… Truly “Jesus of Nazareth is passing by…” Go where you will, you hear people speaking of salvation, and no one wonders.”
Another report was equally fascinating, as it recalls that “For all the month of December nothing else was spoken of in Edinburgh. The work, the meetings, and the men were spoken of at breakfast, at dinner, on the streets, and even in the ball-rooms. What does it all mean? What is all this about? At certain hours there seemed no one in Princess [sic] Street who did not carry a hymn-book, the tramway cars were full of hymn-books, and often it happened that nearly everyone in them was interested in the same subject, and pleasant Christian fellowship was exchanged.”
One of the key elements that made this movement such a success was the unity of most of the churches in Edinburgh, Glasgow and across the nation. Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Baptists, Methodists, and others, prayed together, laboured together, and harvested together. As an example of this unity the open-air meetings in Edinburgh, which typically gathered between 10,000 and 20,000 people, were led by ministers from different churches who shared the preaching. Back in 1837 David Nasmith had pleaded for a united gospel movement and preached that “the object of the mission is not to make people Protestants or Roman Catholics, Baptist, Episcopalians, Methodist or any other sect: its object was in no way sectarian, but to unite all denominations of Christians, and by one strong effort, to pluck sinners as brands from the burning.”
It was this inter-denominational and evangelical approach of the mission societies which broke down the sectarianism in the Scottish Protestant Church. There had already been a partial movement of this during the previous revivals, but now there was a fullness. Evangelical leaders were to be found in almost all of the Protestant groupings, and they put their full weight behind Moody’s visits. For example, the late Patricia Meldrum wrote her PhD thesis on forgotten evangelicals of the 19th century in Scotland, and found that the Episcopalian Church, which in the past had tended to see mission as the fanatical work of enthusiasts, now had twenty-four chapels in Edinburgh served by ninety-one evangelical clergy, most of whom were English. Besides this, the Evangelical Alliance had been founded in London in 1846, nurturing co-operation among gospel believing Christians across the denominations of Britain. The key person who inspired this alliance was Dr Thomas Chalmers from Edinburgh. Dr John Nicholls, formerly Director of London City Mission, wrote:
“This concern for a “Universal Home Mission” was also expressed in connection with the new Evangelical Alliance. In 1846 he [Dr Chalmers] published a pamphlet which advocated “each denomination through all its local congregations co-operating for the evangelisation of their respective neighbourhoods.””It was this groundwork between 1839 and 1861, which had prepared the way for the largest ingathering of people to Christ in Scottish history, in the 1873 movement.
“If My people who are called by My name will humble themselves, and pray and seek My face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land” (2 Chronicles 7:14, NKJV).
Image: Fire: Oscar, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons.