33* EARLY REMINISCENCES I found myself with a lot more young people in a room, perched on chairs, with all eyes fixed on the junior Evangelist. " I remember seeing among the crowd a girl about six years older than myself, whom I had always idealized and thoroughly adored. I thought she was already converted. As a matter of fact this girl had been commissioned to pilot me in. The next proceeding was very short. Each child had to walk to the table, shake hands with the Evangelist, repeat a specified text, and thereupon he or she was converted. " It occupied my thoughts for days and months afterwards, and I really wondered what had happened to me, and if I looked different after being converted. The people at the chapel seemed to consider me rather a prize convert. " At the outside four weeks after the 1 Revival,' when all the effervescence had cooled down, and the congregation became not a little sparse, the resident pastor, a Scotchman, spoke most sadly to the people. He said it was all very well to come with the attractions of a special preacher and swinging hymn tunes, but it did not say much for the reality of their resolution subsequently to stay away when these attractions were not there. " I think that the main cause of the hysterical quality of these Dissenting missions is the fact that they have not the backbone of our Sacramental system, the everlasting presence of Christ, the never-failing Grace of Repentance leading to a conversion of the life to one in God, it affords merely a transient spasmodic start of emotionalism. " For my own part I cannot see that these so-called conversions do lead to newness of life, that is to say of spiritual life, at all. I have known them to produce inordinate spiritual pride, and cruel uncharitableness, never, never to lowliness of spirit, and to charity in judgment." Now here were results obvious to the Evangelists, and encouraging them to prosecute their labours in the same course. They saw nothing of the after-deadness that set in. They were not informed of the lapses into sins of the flesh which, at all events, in country places, result from a revival. They were proud of the cocksured-ness of such as had been converted, and were unaware of the numbing effect on the conscience of these emotional convulsions. The Revival of the Baptist Chapel was comparatively innocuous
