CHAPTER TWO: The Great Revival and the Camp Meeting

Just as the Great Awakening, in the midst of the eighteenth century, had turned the tide against forces of irreligion in the colonies, so the Great Revival, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, saved the church of the infant nation from decadent ecclesiasticism and rationalistic unbelief, gave it a sense of its vital mission to the world, and stimulated the great missionary and philanthropic movements of the nineteenth century. Following the Great Awakening had come a spiritual decline, as a result of the French and Indian War and the unrest culminating in the Revolution. ^{1F. G. Beardsley, Religious Progress, pp. 26, 27; Daniel Dorchester, Christianity in the United States, pp. 195, 338.} The rise of Deism paralleled the theory of the natural rights of man. The successful Revolution and the new Republic brought not only the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights but also a reaction against “orthodoxy”; and the pendulum swung to the other extreme.PFF4 36.1