Check out the words to these old Methodist revival songs as reported on the Church History Blog.In Stith Mead’s Methodist songbook, Hymns and Spiritual Songs of 1807, the initial impression of a convert is reported:
‘The Methodists were preaching like thunder all about.
At length I went amongst them, to hear them groan and shout.
I thought they were distracted, such fools I’d never seen.
They’d stamp and clap and tremble, and wail and cry and scream.’
Or how about:
A later Methodist songbook, The Hesperian Harp of 1848, has a dialogue song between a Methodist and a ‘Formalist’.
In this segment we hear the Formalist’s impression of the Christian meeting he attended:
Such groaning and shouting, it sets me to doubting.
I fear such religion is only a dream.The preachers were stamping, the people were jumping,
And screaming so loud that I nothing could hear….The men they were bawling, the women were squalling,
I know not for my part how any could pray….Amid such a clatter who knows what’s the matter?
Or who can attend unto what is declared?To see them behaving, like drunkards, all raving,
And lying and rolling prostrate on the ground.
I really felt awful, and sometimes felt fearful
That I’d be the next that would come tumbling down.
Maybe the "Toronto Blessing" Renewal wasn't as new a phenomena as most thought?
John Wesley faced similar ridicule from religious people, leading him to believe that the Montanist sect in early church history was a genuine move of the Holy Spirit.
ReplyDeleteHe wrote in his diary, "...the grand reason why the miraculous gifts were so soon withdrawn, was not only that faith and holiness were well nigh lost; but that dry, formal, orthodox men began even then to ridicule whatever gifts they had not themselves, and to decry them all as either madness or imposture."
I think endorsing the bad doctrine of movements like the Montanists, or of so much going on within "charismania" today, is the answer. But I can see Wesley's point.
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