A TRUE, God-sent revival means not merely a transient, emotional excitement bringing great temporary gladness to those who are affected by it. It means the purifying of social life, family life, commercial life, political life. It means the lifting of the whole nation on to a higher plane of thought and activity. There may be, probably will be, emotional excesses in some places in this revival, and undiscriminating men and women will condemn it because of these emotional excesses, but the man who does must be either ignorant of history or else uncandid in his attitude. Every great popular movement is accompanied by excesses in some directions. The Reformation under Martin Luther was accompanied with very grave excesses in some places and under some leaders. The great revivals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in England and America were accompanied by extravagant and unhappy excesses in some places and under some leaders. Every great political campaign, no matter how important the issues at stake, is accompanied with excesses on the part of the party that represents the right, as well as on the part of the party that represents the wrong. But anyone who condemns the Reformation because of its excesses, or who condemns great political agitations, whereby nations advance in intelligence and freedom and civilisation, on account of the excesses, is a thinker so shallow as to hardly merit consideration.

Many excellent men are constitutionally opposed to anything in religious work that savours of excitement, or that oversteps the conventional lines. But history abundantly proves that true revivals have had a most beneficent effect upon the Church and upon society at large. How much England owes to-day to the great Wesleyan revival! How much America owes to the great revival of 1857! How much both England and America owe to the work which God did under His servants, Moody and Sankey, in 1873 and the years that followed! Everywhere I have gone in China, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Tasmania, India, Germany, England, Scotland, Ireland, I have found that many of the leading men in the Church and in the Nonconformist bodies leaders also in social and political life, date the beginning of their religious earnestness from the work of Mr. Moody. If we were to take Out of the churches and chapels the men and women who owe their conversion to the direct or indirect influence of the revival under D. L. Moody, the gap left in the ranks would be appalling. No man who has the best interests of his country at heart can afford to withhold his sympathy from a revival.

I confess that personally I am not over-fond of undue excitement in religious meetings, or anywhere else, but I prefer excitement to stagnation and death. Of the need of a revival at the present moment, there is abundant evidence. For many years now the average number of true conversions in our churches has been few indeed. In our literature, and in our commercial life and in our individual lives, there has been a lack of the deep consciousness of God with the ennobling influence that comes from it. There has been plenty of sin, but a lack of conviction of sin. Seldom are men overwhelmed with a sense of their awful guilt in trampling under foot the Son of God. Sin is regarded as a “misfortune,” or as an “infirmity,” or even as “good in the making,” seldom as an enormous wrong against a holy God. Unbelief is rampant. Many have regarded it as a mark of intellectual superiority to reject the Bible, and even faith in God and immortality. Hand in hand with this widespread infidelity has gone gross immorality, as has always been the case. . Infidelity and immorality are Siamese twins. They always exist, and always grow, and always fatten together. This immorality is found in domestic life, in the theatre, in our literature, and in our art. Greed for money has become a mania with rich and poor. The multi-millionaire will often sell his soul and trample the rights of his fellow-men under foot in the mad hope of becoming a billionaire, and the labouring man will often commit murder to increase the power of the union and keep up wages. Licentiousness lifts its serpent head everywhere. The moral condition of the world in our day is disgusting, sickening, appalling.

We need a revival, deep, widespread, general, in the power of the Holy Ghost — a revival that means not merely a gathering of a large number of alleged converts into the churches and chapels, but a revival that means the purifying of the springs of our moral, commercial, social, and national life; a wind from heaven that will drive away the moral pestilence that has invaded our atmosphere. We need a revival that will bring in true faith in God, in His Word, in the eternal verities. It was not discussion, but the breath of God that relegated Tom Paine, Voltaire, Volney, and others of the old infidels to the limbo of forgetfulness; and we need a new breath from God to send the modern infidel propagandist to keep them company. Thank God this wind from heaven is beginning to blow.