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
it might be true.
[Illustration:
WESTON FAVEL CHURCH,
(Where James Hervey Preached.)
]
The new creed of Hervey changed the whole character of his preaching.
The little church of Weston Favel, a short distance from the town of
Northampton, became quite a shrine for pilgrimages; he was often
compelled to preach in the churchyard. He was assuredly an intense lover
of natural scenery, a student of natural theology of the old school. His
writing is now said to be meretricious and gaudy. One critic says that
children will always prefer a red to a white sugar-plum, and that the
tea is nicer to them when they drink it from a cup painted with coloured
flowers; and this, perhaps, not unfairly, describes the style of Hervey;
we have prettiness rather than power, elegant disquisition rather than
nervous expression, which is all the more wonderful, as he must have
been an accomplished Latin scholar. But he had a mind of gorgeous
fullness, and his splendid conceptions bore him into a train of what now
seem almost glittering extravagances. Hervey was in the manner of his
life a sickly recluse, and we easily call up the figure of the old
bachelor—for he never married—alternately watching his saucepan of gruel
on the fire, and his favourite microscope on the study table. He was
greatly beloved by the Countess of Huntingdon, perhaps yet more by Lady
Fanny Shirley—the subject of Walpole’s sneer. He was, no doubt, the
writer of the movement, and its thoughts in his books must have seemed
like “butter in a lordly dish.” But his course was comparatively brief;
his work was accomplished at the age of forty-five. He died in his
chair, his last words, “Lord, now lettest Thou Thy servant depart in
peace, for mine eyes have seen Thy most comfortable salvation;” shortly
after, “The conflict is over; all is done;” the last words of all,
“Precious salvation.” And so passed away one of the most amiable and
accomplished of all the revivalists.
John Gambold, although ever an excellent and admirable man, lived the
life rather of a secluded mystic, than that of an active reformer. He
became a minister of the Church of England, but afterwards left that
communion, not from any dissensions either from the doctrines or the
discipline of the Church, but simply because he found his spiritual
relationships more in harmony with those of the Moravians, of whose
Church he died a bishop. We presume few readers are acquainted with his
poetical works; nor are there many words among them of remarkable
strength. _The Mystery of Life_ is certainly pleasingly impressive; and
his epitaph on himself deserves quotation:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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