The Second Great Awakening

Barton Stone was the Presbyterian minister of two congregations in Bourbon County, Kentucky, Cane Ridge and Concord (Stone, Biography, p. 25). In the spring of 1801, hearing of a “religious excitement” in the south of the state under James McGready and other Presbyterian ministers, he went to a camp-meeting in Logan County, where he saw many fall “as men slain in battle” and lie for hours as if dead, then rise “shouting deliverance” and exhort the crowd (Stone, Biography, pp. 34–35). He judged it “a good work—the work of God”, though he adds that he saw then and later much that he thought fanaticism (Stone, Biography, pp. 34–35).

When he told his own people what he had seen, the same things began among them, and the effect, he says, was “like fire in dry stubble driven by a strong wind” (Stone, Biography, pp. 36–37). A great meeting was appointed at Cane Ridge for August 1801 (Stone, Biography, pp. 37–38). Stone describes roads crowded with wagons, carriages, riders and people on foot; four or five preachers speaking at once in different parts of the camp; and Methodist and Baptist preachers working alongside the Presbyterians, all urging “free salvation” by faith and repentance; military men on the ground, he reports, judged the crowd at between twenty and thirty thousand (Stone, Biography, pp. 37–38). The meeting went on for six or seven days and nights and ended when food ran short (Stone, Biography, pp. 37–38). He lists the bodily “exercises” seen in those years: falling, the jerks, dancing, barking, laughing and singing (Stone, Biography, p. 39).

People who had come from Ohio and other distant parts carried the same spirit home with them (Stone, Biography, pp. 37–38). Stone and several colleagues then withdrew from the Synod of Kentucky, which suspended them, and he records “great commotion and division in the churches” (Stone, Biography, pp. 47–50). They formed the Springfield Presbytery, rejecting “all authoritative creeds, but the Bible alone”; within about a year they gave up that name too and called themselves simply Christians (Stone, Biography, pp. 47–50). Their Last Will and Testament of the Springfield Presbytery is dated 28 June 1804: “We will, that this body die, be dissolved, and sink into union with the Body of Christ at large” (Stone, Biography, pp. 51–53).

A generation later Charles Finney, an evangelist who had become a pastor, gave a course of lectures to his congregation, which the editor of a religious newspaper took down (Finney, Lectures on Revivals of Religion, preface); they were in print by 1835 (Finney, Lectures on Revivals of Religion, title page of the New York printing of 1835). A revival, he taught, “is not a miracle, or dependent on a miracle, in any sense. It is a purely philosophical result of the right use of the constituted means” (Finney, Lectures on Revivals of Religion, Lecture I). He defended new measures such as the “anxious seat”, a place set apart where those troubled about their souls could come forward to be spoken with and prayed for (Finney, Lectures on Revivals of Religion, Lecture XIV).

Stone wrote that he had always believed the work to be of God (Stone, Biography, pp. 34–35); Finney taught his hearers to expect revivals wherever the appointed means were rightly used (Finney, Lectures on Revivals of Religion, Lecture I). For the earlier revivals see the Great Awakening and John Wesley and the Rise of Methodism.