successful practitioners in the art of the Anxious Bench show themselves lamentably defective in the power of serious godliness, as well as in mental cultivation generally. The general habit of their lives is worldly and vain, and their religion, apart from the occasional whirlwinds of excitement in which they are allowed to figure in their favorite way, may be said to be characteristically superficial and cold. Nay, the evidence may be palpable that religion has nothing at all to do with the system in cases where it is employed with the greatest apparent effect. Nothing is more common than for those even who glory in the power of the Anxious Bench, as employed within their own communion, to look with entire distrust on its results as exhibited in the practice of other sects. What is trumpeted in the one case as a glorious revival, is allowed to pass in the other without notice as at best a questionable excitement. In this way it is practically acknowledged that the system does not necessarily involve spiritual power. It can be made to work as well in connection with error, as in connection with truth. It is as fully at the service of quackery and imposture, as it can be available in the cause of genuine religion. It is well adapted, indeed, to become the sport of quacks under every name. All wild and fanatical sects employ it with equal success. Campbellites,131 Winebrennerians and Universalists132 show the same power, when necessary, in producing revivals under this form. Millerism, and Mormonism,133 it may be added, are just as capable of doing wonders in the same way; though the last has declared itself not favorable to the Anxious Bench as interfering with regular and rational worship.
Nothing can be more precarious, then, than the argument for this system, as drawn from its apparent effects and results. In the sphere of religion, as indeed in the world of life generally, the outward can have no value, except as it stands continually in the power of the inward. To estimate the force of appearances, we must try their moral constitution; and this always involves a reference to the source from which they spring. A miracle, in the true sense, is not simply a prodigy, nakedly and separately considered. It must include a certain moral character.
Especially there must be inward freedom and divine strength in the person from whom it proceeds. No wonder-works could authenticate the mission of a man pretending to come from God who should display in all his movements an inward habit at war with the idea of religion. And just as little are we bound to respect, in the present case, the mere show of force, without regard to the agency by which it is exhibited. Those who deal in the Anxious Bench are accustomed to please themselves with the idea that it is an argument of power on the part of their ministry, to be able in this way to produce a great outward effect.134 This is considered sufficient, it might seem, apart from the personality of the preacher altogether, to authenticate his strength. But no judgment can be more superficial. The personality of the preacher must ever condition and determine the character of his work. It were easy to give a score of living examples in which the semblance of success on a large scale, in the use of this system at the present time, is at once belied by palpable defect here. The men are of such a spirit that it is not possible to confide intelligently in any results it may seem to reach by their ministry. We are authorized before all examination to pronounce them valueless and vain. So utterly weak, in this argument, is the appeal to facts, as managed frequently by superficial thinkers. In every view of the case, the fruits of the Anxious Bench must be received with great caution, while to a great extent they are entitled to no confidence whatever.
124. “It proves nothing against it,” we are told from the other side. The remark is most true; but most foreign at the same time from the point, so far as the position of the tract is concerned. The object of this chapter is, not to present any positive argument against the Bench, but simply to undermine certain presumptions in its favor, which are known to stand in the way of a calm and dispassionate consideration of its merits, as afterwards examined. The argument here is negative, not positive. The patrons of the system, it is plain, make much account of its popularity, of the success with which it seems to be attended, and of the power it is supposed to manifest on the part of those who can use it with effect. In the present chapter it is attempted to show simply that opportunity and apparent success prove nothing, and that the measure is of such a character as to call for no particular moral force to give it effect. In the following chapter the argument becomes positive, showing that there is actual weakness and quackery at the bottom of the whole system.
125. This has been contradicted; with more courage, however, than wisdom. It is notorious to all who know anything about the subject that the system of New Measures, in the sense of the present tract, as represented some years since in the north by such men as Burchard [Jedediah Burchard (1791–1864), a prominent revivalist associated with Finney] and Finney, has latterly fallen into discredit and general disuse throughout the Congregational and Presbyterian Churches. They still cherish of course prayer meetings, protracted meetings, and revivals; and it is quite possible that a number of ministers may still have recourse to the anxious bench as a particular measure at certain times; but the system, to which this measure of right belongs, is no longer in vogue. By general consent the churches have fallen back upon the evangelical method to which the use of the anxious bench can adhere only as an accident, if it adhere at all. The revivals of last winter in the North, according to the testimony furnished concerning them in the New York Observer, were of a wholly different stamp from those of Mr. Finney’s school in former years. These last had strength; but it was such as a wasting fever imparts to a sick man, opening the way for a long prostration afterwards. The revivals of the past winter, it may be trusted, have been the first fruits only of the quiet and enduring vigor that springs from renovated health.
126. “Who can behold a congregation of christians wrestling for an altar full of penitent, anxious sinners, and witness the success of such instrumentality, and say, this is ignorance or fanaticism? God blesses only one way, which is the right way; He has blessed this way, therefore it is the right way”—Correspondence of the Lutheran Observer [10, no. 24], Feb. 17, 1843 [p. 2].
127. [W. H. C. Frend introduces monasticism in The Rise of Christianity, 574–79; M. A. Smith provides a popular treatment of the entire phenomenon in The Church Under Siege, 99–123. Nevin had not yet developed the appreciation of pre-Reformation Christianity he would evince after his interaction with Philip Schaff.]
128. [American William Miller (1782–1849), founder of the Adventist church, believed that the end of the world and the return of Christ would occur in 1843.]
129. [Written by an English Baptist pastor Edmund Jones (1722–1765) who introduced hymn singing to his Exeter congregation in 1759.]
130. “Females and persons who are quite young have souls to be saved, as well as males and persons who are advanced in life; nay ‘mere girls and boys’ have an eternal interest pending.”—Luth. Obs. [Lutheran Observer 11, no.17], Dec. 29, 1843 [p. 3].
“And was not woman last at the cross, and first at the tomb of the Son of God?”—Davis’ Plea [James M. Davis, A plea for new measures in the promotion of revivals, or, A reply to Dr. Nevin against the Anxious bench (Pittsburgh: A. Jaynes, 1844)], p. 45.
“‘Low and jejune’ indeed ‘must be the conception of a religion’ which can allow a divine to attempt to destroy a ‘measure,’ through which ‘females, girls and boys,’ run to as a means to enable them to flee the wrath to come.”—Denig’s Strictures [John Denig, Strictures on the mourners’ and anxious bench (Chambersburg: Thom. J. Wright, 1843)], p.
