Free Ancestors by William Maxwell Page B

speak when I shall be lying under the clods of the grave. Calvinism is among the heaviest clogs on Christianity in the world. It is a dark mountain between heaven and earth …” Suddenly a way around the mountain was revealed—the tidal wave of religious interest and excitement that in later years came to be known as the Great Western Revival. It began about 1800, lasted three years, and was confined almost entirely to Kentucky and Tennessee. The meetings had to be held out of doors, at some church rather than in it, for no church was large enough. And the guiding spirit and principal evangelist was that beady-eyed, gravel-voiced Presbyterian, James McGready, whose preaching had so upset Stone in his youth.
    In Mrs. Trollope’s
Domestic Manners of the Americans
there is an account of a Methodist camp meeting in the backwoods of Indiana, in 1829, that in appearance and in spirit would not have been very different from those a generation earlier. “The spot chosen was the verge of an unbroken forest, where a space of about twenty acres appeared to have been partially cleared for the purpose. Tents of different size were pitched very near together in a circle round the cleared space; behind them were ranged an exterior circle of carriages of every description, and at the back of each were fastened the horses which had drawn them thither.… The first glance reminded me of Vauxhall, from the effect of the lights among the trees, and the moving crowd below them; but the second showed a scene totally unlike anything I ever witnesed. Four high frames, constructed in the form of altars, were placed at the four corners of the enclosure; on these were supported layers of earth and sod,on which burned immense fires of blazing pinewood. On one side a rude platform was erected to accommodate the preachers, fifteen of whom attended this meeting, and … preached in rotation, day and night, from Tuesday to Saturday.”
    Stone was returning to Kentucky from North Carolina when the first news of the revival reached him. He was traveling in the company of a Dr. Hall, and they were met by some men from Tennessee who had letters for Hall. “We stopped in the woods. The doctor began to read silently; but soon cried out aloud, and burst into a flood of tears. At first we were at a loss for the cause; but soon learned from the bearer of the letters, and from the letters themselves, that which equally affected us all. It was an account of a wonderful meeting at Shiloh in Tennessee—that many had been struck down as dead, and continued for hours apparently breathless, and afterwards rose, praising God for his saving mercy—that the saints were all alive—and sinners all around weeping and crying for mercy—and that multitudes were converted and rejoicing in God.”
    In the spring of 1801 Stone made a journey of two hundred miles across the state of Kentucky to attend a camp meeting on the edge of the prairie, and what he saw there astonished and moved him. No longer content with frightening people out of their wits, McGready was now bent on inducing the direct action of the Holy Spirit, through what were spoken of as “exercises”—seizures that looked like an epileptic fit, and were, of course, not that but men, women, and children declaring the wonderful works of God and the glorious mysteries of the gospel. Falling down as though slain in battle, they continued in that state for hours, sometimes exhibiting signs of life by a deep groan, or a piercing shriek, or a prayer for mercy most fervently uttered. After which they would rise shouting deliverance, and address the surrounding multitude,and many more would fall down in the same state from which the speakers had just been delivered. Stone sat patiently for hours beside the unconscious body of a man he knew to be a careless sinner, and observed everything that passed from the beginning to the end, and was convinced that it was the work of God. “So low had religion sunk, and such