Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: September 2, 2025
"See here, uncle," said the captain almost sternly, "I'm not going to groan, sigh, weep, and take on in any of your camp-meeting tactics. I am before the last great enemy and I know how to meet him like a man and soldier, if not a Christian. I'm willing to do anything not insincere or unmanly to meet my wife and children again.
During the months of July and August this broad river, with its fantastic islands, is at night simply a highway of glory. The worldlings and the camp-meeting gatherings vie with each other in the display of colored lights and fireworks.
We were soon to go East to a camp-meeting. Although, when George left home he had only means enough to take him to the camp-meeting, yet God had shown him that he should come farther west before he went to the meeting. Before the time came for us to start, the railroad had cut rates so that we could travel for about one-third fare. God had worked it out so that we all could attend the meeting.
He was converted when a mere youth at a camp-meeting in southern Kentucky; soon after, he was licensed to preach, and became a circuit rider in that State, and later was of the Methodist vanguard to Illinois. It was said of him that he was of the church military as well as "the church militant." He was of massive build, an utter stranger to fear, and of unquestioned honesty and sincerity.
There was no theorising in those camp-meeting sermons to which the people of this land were listening a hundred years ago; no "honest doubt" in those invitations heard upon the greens of the villages and in the market-places of the towns while yet the last century was young. Here were preachers as sure of their message as they were of their own existence.
The free mind, that preferred its own folly to another's wisdom; the open spirit, that found companions everywhere; above all, the restless impulse, that had so often made me wretched in the midst of enjoyments: these were my claims to be of their society. "My friends!" cried I, stepping into the centre of the wagon, "I am going with you to the camp-meeting at Stamford."
Rylands hesitated a moment, then, with a preliminary cough, lifted a voice as crude as hers, but powerful through much camp-meeting exercise, and roared a chorus which was remarkable chiefly for requiring that archness and playfulness in execution which he lacked. As the whole house seemed to dilate with the sound, and the wind outside to withhold its fury, Mr.
Indeed, popular report gave to these external phases of the camp-meeting an even more evil fame than attached to the later moonlight husking-bees, or the least reputable of the midwinter dances at Dave Randall's low halfway house. Cynics said that the Methodists found consolation for this scandal in the large income they derived from their unruly visitors' gate-money. This was unfair.
It was the same sort of thing which one sees in the Temple of Isis at Pompeii, and the zeal which created it was no doubt the same that to-day originates the sacred fire which always comes down from heaven on Easter day into the Greek church at Jerusalem, the liquefaction of the blood of St. Januarius in the cathedral at Naples, and sundry camp-meeting utterances and actions in the United States.
The gathering was primitive and peculiar, like the gathering at a Western camp-meeting footmen, and men and women on horseback, and whole families in two-horse lumber wagons.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking