In the Days of the Comet Read online

  Section 7

  Everywhere there was laughter, everywhere tears.

  Men and women in the common life, finding themselves suddenly litand exalted, capable of doing what had hitherto been impossible,incapable of doing what had hitherto been irresistible, happy,hopeful, unselfishly energetic, rejected altogether the suppositionthat this was merely a change in the blood and material texture oflife. They denied the bodies God had given them, as once the UpperNile savages struck out their canine teeth, because these madethem like the beasts. They declared that this was the coming of aspirit, and nothing else would satisfy their need for explanations.And in a sense the Spirit came. The Great Revival sprang directlyfrom the Change--the last, the deepest, widest, and most enduringof all the vast inundations of religious emotion that go by thatname.

  But indeed it differed essentially from its innumerable predecessors.The former revivals were a phase of fever, this was the firstmovement of health, it was altogether quieter, more intellectual,more private, more religious than any of those others. In the oldtime, and more especially in the Protestant countries where thethings of religion were outspoken, and the absence of confessionand well-trained priests made religious states of emotion explosiveand contagious, revivalism upon various scales was a normal phasein the religious life, revivals were always going on--now a littledisturbance of consciences in a village, now an evening of emotionin a Mission Room, now a great storm that swept a continent, andnow an organized effort that came to town with bands and bannersand handbills and motor-cars for the saving of souls. Never atany time did I take part in nor was I attracted by any of thesemovements. My nature, although passionate, was too critical (orsceptical if you like, for it amounts to the same thing) and shyto be drawn into these whirls; but on several occasions Parload andI sat, scoffing, but nevertheless disturbed, in the back seats ofrevivalist meetings.

  I saw enough of them to understand their nature, and I am notsurprised to learn now that before the comet came, all about theworld, even among savages, even among cannibals, these same, orat any rate closely similar, periodic upheavals went on. The worldwas stifling; it was in a fever, and these phenomena were neithermore nor less than the instinctive struggle of the organism againstthe ebb of its powers, the clogging of its veins, the limitationof its life. Invariably these revivals followed periods of sordidand restricted living. Men obeyed their base immediate motivesuntil the world grew unendurably bitter. Some disappointment, somethwarting, lit up for them--darkly indeed, but yet enough forindistinct vision--the crowded squalor, the dark inclosure of life.A sudden disgust with the insensate smallness of the old-world wayof living, a realization of sin, a sense of the unworthiness of allindividual 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, criedout suddenly amidst the petty interests, the narrow prohibitions,of life, "Not this! not this!" A great passion to escape from thejealous prison of themselves, an inarticulate, stammering, weepingpassion shook them. . . .

  I have seen------ I remember how once in Clayton CalvinisticMethodist chapel I saw--his spotty fat face strangely distortedunder the flickering gas-flares--old Pallet the ironmonger repent.He went to the form of repentance, a bench reserved for suchexhibitions, and slobbered out his sorrow and disgust for somesexual indelicacy--he was a widower--and I can see now how hisloose fat body quivered and swayed with his grief. He poured itout to five hundred people, from whom in common times he hid hisevery thought and purpose. And it is a fact, it shows where realitylay, that we two youngsters laughed not at all at that blubberinggrotesque, 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 ofa body that suffocates. They are the clearest manifestations frombefore the Change of a sense in all men that things were not right.But they were too often but momentary illuminations. Their forcespent itself in inco-ordinated shouting, gesticulations, tears.They were but flashes of outlook. Disgust of the narrow life, ofall baseness, took shape in narrowness and baseness. The quickenedsoul ended the night a hypocrite; prophets disputed for precedence;seductions, it is altogether indisputable, were frequent amongpenitents! and Ananias went home converted and returned witha falsified gift. And it was almost universal that the convertedshould be impatient and immoderate, scornful of reason anda 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 hardfact and sane direction.

  So the former revivals spent themselves, but the Great Revival didnot spend itself, but grew to be, for the majority of Christendomat least, the permanent expression of the Change. For many it hastaken the shape of an outright declaration that this was the SecondAdvent--it is not for me to discuss the validity of that suggestion,for nearly all it has amounted to an enduring broadeningof all the issues of life. . . .