There is nothing improbable in the claim that phenomena like these, strange, weird, startling, "were so much like miracles that they had the same effect as miracles on unbelievers." They helped break up the apathetic torpor of the church and summon the multitudes into the wilderness to hear the preaching of repentance and the remission of sins. But they had some lamentable results. Those who, like many among the Methodists,[241:1] found in them the direct work of the Holy Spirit, were thereby started along the perilous incline toward enthusiasm and fanaticism. Those, on the other hand, repelled by the grotesqueness and extravagance of these manifestations, who were led to distrust or condemn the good work with which they were associated, fell into a graver error. This was the error into which, to its cost, the Presbyterian Church was by and by drawn in dealing with questions that emerged from these agitations. The revival gave rise to two new sects, both of them marked by the fervor of spirit that characterized the time, and both of them finding their principal habitat in the same western region. The Cumberland Presbyterians, now grown to large numbers and deserved influence and dignity in the fellowship of American sects, separated themselves from the main body of Presbyterians by refusing to accept, in face of the craving needs of the pastorless population all about them, the arbitrary rule shutting the door of access to the Presbyterian ministry to all candidates, how great soever their other qualifications, who lacked a classical education. Separating on this issue, they took the opportunity to amend the generally accepted doctrinal statements of the Presbyterian churches by mitigating those utterances which seemed to them, as they have seemed to many others, to err in the direction of fatalism. About the same time there was manifested in various quarters a generous revolt against the existence and multiplication of mutually exclusive sects in the Christian family, each limited by humanly devised doctrinal articles and branded with partisan names. How these various protesting elements came together on the sole basis of a common faith in Christ and a common acceptance of the divine authority of the Bible; how, not intending it, they came to be themselves a new sect; and how, struggling in vain against the inexorable laws of language, they came to be distinguished by names, as _Campbellite Baptist_, _Christ-ian_ (with a long _i_), and (+kat' exochen+) Disciples, are points on which interesting and instructive light is shed in the history by Dr. B. B. Tyler.[242:1] * * * * *