The Great Revival of the Eighteenth Century: With a supplemental chapter on the revival in AmericaHood, Edwin Paxton
History
The Great Revival of the Eighteenth Century: With a supplemental chapter on the revival in America
Hood, Edwin Paxton
Evangelical Revival
Thus the Puritan was made up of two different men: the one all
self-abasement, penitence, gratitude, passion; the other proud, calm,
inflexible, sagacious. He prostrated himself in the dust before his
Maker, but he set his foot on the neck of his king. In his devotional
retirement, he prayed with convulsions, and groans and tears. He was
half maddened by glorious or terrible illusions. He heard the lyres of
angels or the tempting whispers of fiends. He caught a gleam of the
Beatific Vision, or woke screaming from dreams of everlasting fire. Like
Vane, he thought himself entrusted with the sceptre of the millennial
year. Like Fleetwood, he cried in the bitterness of his soul that God
had hid His face from him. But when he took his seat in the council, or
girt on his sword for war, these tempestuous workings of the soul had
left no perceptible trace behind them. People who saw nothing of the
godly but their uncouth visages, and heard nothing from them but their
groans and their whining hymns, might laugh at them. But those had
little reason to laugh who encountered them in the hall of debate, or on
the field of battle. These fanatics brought to civil and military
affairs a coolness of judgment and an immutability of purpose which some
writers have thought inconsistent with their religious zeal, but which
were in fact the necessary effects of it. The intensity of their
feelings on one subject made them tranquil on every other. One
overpowering sentiment had subjected to itself pity and hatred, ambition
and fear. Death had lost its terrors and pleasure its charms. They had
their smiles and their tears, their raptures and their sorrows, but not
for the things of this world. Enthusiasm had made them stoics, had
cleared their minds from every vulgar passion and prejudice, and raised
them above the influence of danger and of corruption. It sometimes might
lead them to pursue unwise ends, but never to choose unwise means. They
went through the world, like Sir Artegal’s iron man Talus with his
flail, crushing and trampling down oppressors, mingling with human
beings, but having neither part nor lot in human infirmities, insensible
to fatigue, to pleasure, and to pain, not to be pierced by any weapon,
not to be withstood by any barrier.—_Macaulay’s Essay on Milton._
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APPENDIX B (PAGE 21).
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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