Revivalism and Social Reform - American Protestantism on the Eve of the Civil War (Paperback)

REVIVALISM AND SOCIAL REFORM American Protestantism on the Eve of the Civil War baRpenf coRcbuooks A reference-list of Harper Torchbooks, classified by subjects, is printed at the end of this volume. REVIVALISM AND SOCIAL REFORM American Protestantism on the Em of the Civil War TIMOTHY L. SMITH HARPER TORCHBOOKS f The Academy Library Harper Row, Publishers, New York PREFACE Could Thomas Paine, tlie free-thinking pamphleteer of the American and French revolutions, have visited Broadway in 1865, he would have been amazed to find that the nation conceived in rational liberty was at last fulfilling its democratic promise in the power of evangelical faith. The emancipating glory of the great awakenings had made Christian liberty, Christian equality and Christian fraternity the passion of the land. The treasured gospel of the elect few passed into the hands of the baptized many. Common grace, not common sense, was the keynote of the age. The Calvinist idea of foreordination, rejected as far as it concerned individuals, was now transferred to a grander object the manifest destiny of a Christianized America. Men in all walks of life believed that the sovereign Holy Spirit was endowing the nation with resources sufficient to convert and civilize the globe, to purge human society of all its evils, and to usher in Christs reign on earth. Religious doctrines which Paine, in his book The Age of Reason, had discarded as the tattered vestment of an outworn aristocracy, became the wedding garb of a democratized church, bent on preparing men and institutions for a kind of proletarian marriage supper of the Lamb. This is not the place, of course, to measure the vast gap between these hopes and theirfulfillment. Historians acquainted with the scandalous conduct of good churchmen like Jay Gould and Daniel Drew will be understandably skeptical. Instead of a marriage supper after the Civil War we had what Vernon Louis Parrington called the Great Barbecue. And only men of privilege were invited. Those who lived through the twenty-five years before 1865, however, thought the hopes were grounded in reality. What has made the preparation of this book exciting has been the dawn ing discovery that revivalistic religion and the quest of Christian perfection lay at the fountainhead of our nations heritage of hope. My original purpose was simply to trace the extent and significance after 1850 of what I thought REVIVALISM AND SOCIAL REFORM was by then the declining influence of these two spiritual traditions in America. The simplest justification for such a study was that ignorance of these matters hindered understanding of the exact way in which other worldly faith had nurtured the impulse to social reform. Another was the guess that the persistence of popular religious ideas had been too much overlooked, leaving even theologians no alternative but to attribute the rise of small sects and the recurrent sweep of revivals in the twentieth century to economic and social tensions. The stanchest adherents of modern holiness and evangelistic movements, I knew, were the children and grand children of shouting Methodists and praying Presbyterians. And most of them took literally the Biblical injunction to be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth. As the work progressed, so many unsuspected but obviously interrelated facts came to light that a general revaluation of mid-nineteenth-centuryProtestantism seemed necessary. The manuscript which was finally pre sented for a graduate degree set forth a new interpretation of that era. It seems advisable, therefore, to state the major thesis clearly at the begin ning of this published version, so as to let the reader know where he is going. Relevant facets are repeated at the beginning or toward the close of each chapter. The gist of it is simply that revival measures and perfectionist aspiration flourished increasingly between 1840 and 1865 in all the major denomina tions particularly in the cities...

General

Imprint:	Read Books
Country of origin:	United Kingdom
Release date:	March 2007
First published:	March 2007
Authors:	William Warren Sweet
Dimensions:	216 x 140 x 15mm (L x W x T)
Format:	Paperback - Trade
Pages:	264
ISBN-13:	978-1-4067-4951-9
Categories:	Books > Humanities > History > General Books > History > General
LSN:	1-4067-4951-6
Barcode:	9781406749519

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