ABSTRACT
Although the climacteric years of the Evangelical Revival may reasonably be said to have ended by the 1830s, it would be mistaken to suppose that the phenomenon of the religious revival ceased to appear. The change in the post-1830 age involved a certain lack of spontaneity. The revivals examined in this book were often characterized by their unpredictable and apparently impromptu nature, which caused such astonishment to contemporaries. Thereafter, there were numerous revivals, mainly of a local nature, but they were much more likely to be planned in advance. As Dr Bebbington comments, ‘spontaneity gradually gave way to arranged revivals’ (Bebbington 1989:116). Whereas in the early eighteenth century, mass conversions had led to the use of the term ‘revival’, from the early nineteenth century it was much more likely that a revival would be deliberately induced, in the hope of gaining conversions. Even before 1800 in the Methodist stronghold of Cornwall, Dr Luker has shown that the activation of revival was conscious policy and was part of a cyclical process involving fluctuations in membership in which a period of unusual enthusiasm within the Church itself led to revivalist preaching which led to an increase in recruitment which proved to be only temporary (Luker 1986:607-11). One reason for the more stereotyped and formulaic type of revival was the growth of a body of literature which took a somewhat prescriptive line, offering advice as to how revivals should be conducted. An important example was Lectures on Revivals in Religion, by Charles Finney, published in 1835 in America and four years later in Britain.
