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. . . .