Or again, he may have had a worried and troubled week, full of personal anxiety and sorrow.  He has not had full time to study—­he feels quite unprepared, and enters the pulpit with a halting step, and a choking fear of failure at his heart.

In a moment, the world changes.  Something imperceptible, but sweet and comforting, steals over him,—­an uplifting atmosphere of attention, sympathy, affection.  He begins to speak, very quietly at first, with quite an effort.  But the congregation leads him on, to deeper thoughts, to nobler words, to modulations of voice that carry him quite beyond himself.  His voice rises, and every syllable is firm and musical.  His language springs from some far centre of inspiration.  He is conscious of superb power, and as sentence after sentence falls from his lips——­sentences that amaze himself more than any other——­he enters into the supreme height of joy, that of being a spiritual messenger to the hearts of longing men and women.  He and they together talk of God.

This sympathetic atmosphere makes great preachers and great men.  In return, there flows from a pastor toward his people a love that few can know or understand.

2.  His rule is also over spiritual enthusiasm.  What is a revival?  We confound it with a local excitement, a community-sensation of an hysterical and passing type—­with sensational disturbances, falling exercises, shouts, weeping, and the like.  A revival is something far different.  A revival is an awakening of the community heart and mind.  It is a quickening of dead, backsliding, or inattentive souls.

Man as an individual is quite a different person from the same man in a crowd.  One is himself alone; the other is himself, plus the influence of the Social Mind.  A revival is a social state, in which the social religious enthusiasm is stirred up.  It is a lofty form of religion, just as the patriotism which breaks forth in tears and cheers as troops go out to war is a finer type than the mere excitement and fervor of one patriotic man.  What would the Queen’s Jubilee have been, if but one soldier had marched up and down?  A great commemoration!  If we grant the reality of national rejoicing in the royal jubilees, commercial rejoicing in business men’s processions, university enthusiasm on Commencement Day—­shall we not grant the reality of the religious interest and enthusiasm of a great revival, in which whole communities shall be led to a clearer knowledge of spiritual things?

The Crusades were a magnificent revival.  The Reformation was a revival.  The Salvation Army movement is a revival.  But the greatest revival of all times is even now upon us:  it is a revival in the scientific circles of the race.  Time was when science and religion were supposed to be at odds; to-day the intellectual phalanxes are sweeping Christward with an impetus that is sublime!  Thinkers are finding in the large life of religion a motive power for their thought, their growth—­a reason for their existence—­a forecast of their destiny.  We are beginning to realize the dynamic value of Belief.  This revival is coming, not with shouts and noise, but with the quiet insistence of new ideas, of new facts—­with the still voice of scientific announcement.  The atheist is being overcome, not by emotion, but by evidence; the scoffer is being put down by cool logic.