The Nature of a Real Revival - 1840

The need of revival: These I fear are the great leading features of our own times to a very awful and alarming extent. Infidelity - cold, careless, and inhuman as it is God-denying — is boldly avowed by many. The Gospel is openly classed by such with the bygone impostures of a departing age ; all its power is looked on as the deceit of men ; and all its claims as only new attempts to enthrall the human mind. And such infidelity is wide- spread as it is deadly: If its lurid lights have been put out or concealed in the high places of the earth , they have found their way in ten thousand groveling and polluted channels to the dense and crowded streets of the busy, the dark lanes of the poor and even the dismal dwellings of unprovided disease; and there, triumphing in the miseries she inflicts and the ruin she has wrought, she sits in mockery of her victims, and hears with bitter scorn their fears and cries, as , shivering and bereft of hope, they enter eternity, now too near to be denied, and too terrible to be trifled with.