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"Oh, almost altogether!" cried the little man enthusiastically. "Mr. Van Ness's name, as you will understand, gives it authority among all religious people. We distribute prospectuses at camp-meetings and at all sectarian seaside resorts. Shares go off this summer like hot cakes. There's nothing like religion, sir, to back up business enterprise. There's Stokes, for instance.
As the autumn began to wane, the people were clamorous for permission to have their preaching inside the city. The new buildings could not be finished before the winter; but in the mean time the camp-meetings were becoming, in the stormy seasons fast approaching, a very inconvenient mode of worship.
Many of the scenes at these camp-meetings were very distasteful to men whose religion was not emotional and who shrank from the fury of excitement into which the great masses were thrown, for under the strain many individuals literally became like men possessed, whether of good or of evil spirits, falling into ecstasies of joy or agony, dancing, shouting, jumping, fainting, while there were widespread and curious manifestations of a hysterical character, both among the believers and among the scoffers; but though this might seem distasteful to an observer of education and self-restraint, it thrilled the heart of the rude and simple backwoodsman and reached him as he could not possibly have been reached in any other manner.
With them Christ is the central figure, and it is his presence that hallows the temple in the wilderness. It is sometimes objected that the exercises at Camp-Meetings are too boisterous, and lead to extravagances. To this objection there are two replies. First, it must be conceded that Camp-Meetings are not the only meetings that may be denominated boisterous.
The customary social gatherings were at horse-racings, at corn-shuckings, at political speech-makings, at weddings, whereat the coarse proceedings would not nowadays bear recital; at log-rollings, where the neighbors gathered to collect the logs of a newly cleared lot for burning; and at house-raisings, where they kindly aided to set up the frame of a cabin for a new-comer; at camp-meetings, where the hysterical excitement of a community whose religion was more than half superstition found clamorous and painful vent; or perchance at a hanging, which, if it met public approbation, would be sanctioned by the gathering of the neighbors within a day's journey of the scene.
The institution of camp-meetings, introduced with so much success by the Methodists, those noble pioneers of Christianity, seem to have been the necessary result of the attempt to preach to the sparsely settled population of a new country. The following is said to be the origin of those camp-meetings which have done incalculable good, socially, intellectually, and religiously.
Her earnestness expressed itself more by the intensity of the tone than its rise. "Evidently a tolerable regular attendant at Methodist camp-meetings," thought Harry, rousing a little from the torpor into which he was falling. Her faded check flushed with a little confusion at having suffered this outburst, and picking up her knitting she nervously resumed work.
Every sympathy of my being was continually solicited for the ignorance, for the rudeness, for the aberrations, for the avarice, for the quarrelsomeness of the men among whom I was, and I was trying every form and presenting Christ as a medicine to men. I went through the woods and through camp-meetings and over prairies.
Being himself self-supporting and unassuming, he won easily the confidence of the people. He preached a highly emotional religion that worked his audience into the ecstasy that all primitive people love. And he introduced a mighty agent of evangelization among outdoor folk when he started the camp-meeting. The season for camp-meetings is from mid-August to October.
According to this, the tune must certainly have been a familiar one. The whole scene, with its extemporized words, its clapping of hands to mark the rhythm, and its alternation of solo and chorus, was probably not unlike the singing at some of the negro camp-meetings on the Southern plantations. Foremost among the patrons of the art in Grecian mythology are the Muses.
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