In the Days of the Comet

Everywhere there was laughter, everywhere tears.

Men and women in the common life, finding themselves suddenly lit and exalted, capable of doing what had hitherto been impossible, incapable of doing what had hitherto been irresistible, happy, hopeful, unselfishly energetic, rejected altogether the supposition that this was merely a change in the blood and material texture of life.  They denied the bodies God had given them, as once the Upper Nile savages struck out their canine teeth, because these made them like the beasts.  They declared that this was the coming of a spirit, and nothing else would satisfy their need for explanations.  And in a sense the Spirit came.  The Great Revival sprang directly from the Change—­the last, the deepest, widest, and most enduring of all the vast inundations of religious emotion that go by that name.

But indeed it differed essentially from its innumerable predecessors.  The former revivals were a phase of fever, this was the first movement of health, it was altogether quieter, more intellectual, more private, more religious than any of those others.  In the old time, and more especially in the Protestant countries where the things of religion were outspoken, and the absence of confession and well-trained priests made religious states of emotion explosive and contagious, revivalism upon various scales was a normal phase in the religious life, revivals were always going on—­now a little disturbance of consciences in a village, now an evening of emotion in a Mission Room, now a great storm that swept a continent, and now an organized effort that came to town with bands and banners and handbills and motor-cars for the saving of souls.  Never at any time did I take part in nor was I attracted by any of these movements.  My nature, although passionate, was too critical (or sceptical if you like, for it amounts to the same thing) and shy to be drawn into these whirls; but on several occasions Parload and I sat, scoffing, but nevertheless disturbed, in the back seats of revivalist meetings.

I saw enough of them to understand their nature, and I am not surprised to learn now that before the comet came, all about the world, even among savages, even among cannibals, these same, or at any rate closely similar, periodic upheavals went on.  The world was stifling; it was in a fever, and these phenomena were neither more nor less than the instinctive struggle of the organism against the ebb of its powers, the clogging of its veins, the limitation of its life.  Invariably these revivals followed periods of sordid and restricted living.  Men obeyed their base immediate motives until the world grew unendurably bitter.  Some disappointment, some thwarting, lit up for them—­darkly indeed, but yet enough for indistinct vision—­the crowded squalor, the dark inclosure of life.  A sudden disgust with the insensate smallness of the old-world way of living, a realization of sin, a sense of the unworthiness of all individual things, a desire for something comprehensive, sustaining, something greater, for wider communions and less habitual things, filled them.  Their souls, which were shaped for wider issues, cried out suddenly amidst the petty interests, the narrow prohibitions, of life, “Not this! not this!” A great passion to escape from the jealous prison of themselves, an inarticulate, stammering, weeping passion shook them. . . .

I have seen------ I remember how once in Clayton Calvinistic
Methodist chapel I saw—­his spotty fat face strangely distorted
under the flickering gas-flares—­old Pallet the ironmonger repent. 
He went to the form of repentance, a bench reserved for such
exhibitions, and slobbered out his sorrow and disgust for some
sexual indelicacy—­he was a widower—­and I can see now how his
loose fat body quivered and swayed with his grief.  He poured it
out to five hundred people, from whom in common times he hid his
every thought and purpose.  And it is a fact, it shows where reality
lay, that we two youngsters laughed not at all at that blubbering
grotesque, we did not even think the distant shadow of a smile. 
We two sat grave and intent—­perhaps wondering.

Only afterward and with an effort did we scoff. . . .

Those old-time revivals were, I say, the convulsive movements of a body that suffocates.  They are the clearest manifestations from before the Change of a sense in all men that things were not right.  But they were too often but momentary illuminations.  Their force spent itself in inco-ordinated shouting, gesticulations, tears.  They were but flashes of outlook.  Disgust of the narrow life, of all baseness, took shape in narrowness and baseness.  The quickened soul ended the night a hypocrite; prophets disputed for precedence; seductions, it is altogether indisputable, were frequent among penitents! and Ananias went home converted and returned with a falsified gift.  And it was almost universal that the converted should be impatient and immoderate, scornful of reason and a choice of expedients, opposed to balance, skill, and knowledge.  Incontinently full of grace, like thin old wine-skins overfilled, they felt they must burst if once they came into contact with hard fact and sane direction.

So the former revivals spent themselves, but the Great Revival did not spend itself, but grew to be, for the majority of Christendom at least, the permanent expression of the Change.  For many it has taken the shape of an outright declaration that this was the Second Advent—­it is not for me to discuss the validity of that suggestion, for nearly all it has amounted to an enduring broadening of all the issues of life. . . .