The Revival of Religion: Publisher’s Introduction

Author Donald John Maclean

Category Book Excerpts

Date June 25, 2025

The Banner of Truth Trust has always been an organization which longs for the true revival of religion. Indeed, in many ways, that desire is the pulse beat of the Banner.¹ But what revival is, and why we long for it, is often misunderstood. Indeed, the original preface to this volume begins by noting, “The very term, ‘Revival of Religion,’ … causes some persons to recoil with a species of instinctive antipathy, as if it inevitably brought before their minds nothing but images of wild and extravagant fanaticism.” That statement, sadly, remains true today.

Thankfully, however, the men who contributed to these addresses on The Revival of Religion present us with a theology and practice of revivals which, if prayerfully read, will surely overcome these many objections. The authors of this volume knew that genuine revivals were as far removed from “extravagant fanaticism” as night is from day.² They believed this, in part, because they had experienced, and were living through, genuine times of revival.

In the forty years prior to these lectures, Scotland had been favoured with true revivals, for example, at Moulin in 1800; in Skye in 1814; in Arran in 1818; in Lewis, 1834; and at Kilsyth in 1839.³ This adds a special lustre to this book. It is no theoretical reflection on revival. Those who delivered these lectures knew what they wrote about. Indeed, it was “in consequence of… the time of refreshing” at Kilsyth that “it was thought expedient that a course of lectures should be delivered in Glasgow on the subject of Revivals of Religion, for the purpose of communicating right views and removing prejudices on that all-important topic.”

But it was no mere experience that formed these men’s views on revival. Indeed, references to contemporary events are remarkably few, either relating to revivals of the time, such as Kilsyth, or the momentous events which would lead to the formation of the Free Church of Scotland.⁴ Rather, it was theological conviction, born from a close study of Scripture and informed by church history which led these men to the views on revival that they held. And it is these timeless truths which are outlined in this volume.

Indeed, this volume forms a virtual systematic theology of revivals, addressing the nature of revival from almost every perspective. That in itself makes the book valuable. But the names of the authors themselves stand out as worthy of hearing on any topic, far less one as important as this. Consider the names of Robert Candlish, Patrick Fairbairn, A. Moody Stuart, Charles Brown, William Burns.⁵ When these men speak, we do well to listen. But what specifically do they say regarding revival?

Defining revival?

The original preface defined revival as “an unusual manifestation of the power of the grace of God in convincing and converting carelesssinners, and in quickening and increasing the faith and piety of
believers.” John Bonar, who contributes the chapter on “The Nature of a Religious Revival” agrees, stating that “Viewed then with respect to the church, a time of revival is a time of newness of life. Viewed with respect to the world, whether professing or openly careless, it is a time of multiplied conversions.” Revival, then, has a twofold effect. The dead world experiences life from the dead, and the existing life in the church is fanned into new flame. This is just an increase in the ordinary effectiveness of the work of the church.

Building on this, William Arnot, in his chapter on “The Godly Life of Believers,” helpfully outlines that “revival” is not a different species of religion, but simply a heightened blessing on the ordinary means of grace.⁶ He says, “There is no generic—there is not even a specific difference. The things are the same; they are one thing, but in different degrees. Sinners converted in greater numbers than usual, and saints more lively in their faith and love. There is no other difference.” William Burns, writing on “The Mode of Conducting a Revival” echoes this theme.⁷ He states, “A revival of religion is an unusually successful dispensation of religious ordinances, the effect of a copious effusion of the influences of divine grace; but in other respects it comes under the same rules with the more ordinary dispensation, where the effects of the word of grace are less obvious and prominent.”

This emphasis on “ordinary means of grace revivals” is helpful, and stands in contrast to man-made or “manufactured” revivals which are, according to the original Preface, “so mingled with errors, and lead to such abuses, that it is very dangerous to give them any countenance.” These were particularly a feature of revivals connected with “our American brethren” where “they have fallen into such multifarious errors and abuses, in their zealous attempts to ‘get up’ and ‘conduct’ revivals.”

Given this danger of “false” revivals there was “most urgent necessity for the exercise of the most sound religious prudence on the part of those who are friendly to the cause of revivals.” Correct views were to be determined by “the study of the word of God, in the spirit of humility, and teachableness, and prayer” which would lead to being “able to discriminate between what is essential and what is secondary and adventitious—between what is real and what is counterfeit—between what belongs to conversion and what to sympathetic excitement between what is God’s and what is man’s.” The men in this book, having followed this model, lay out their advice and conclusions. Their settled views on revivals, true and false, stand explicitly in the tradition of Jonathan Edwards and W. B. Sprague.⁸

The need for revival

For the authors of this book revival was to be deeply desired. The need for revival is greatest when, according to John Bonar, the condition of church and nation are spiritually low. He states, regarding the nation, revival is most needed “Where darkness is most visible… Where men have most grieved the Spirit of God, most quenched his influences, most striven against them, there is it most needful that he should not depart lest all should utterly perish in their own corruption.” He commented that “these I fear are the great leading features of our own times to a very awful and alarming extent. Infidelity, cold, careless, and inhuman, as it is God-denying, is boldly avowed by many. The Gospel is openly classed by such with the bygone impostures of a departing age; all its power is looked on as the deceit of men and all its claims as only new attempts to enthral the human mind.” If these things described Scotland in 1840, how much more most of the Western world as the second quarter of the twenty-first century begins. If there was need for revival in 1840, there is a tenfold need now! Bonar similarly felt a particular need of revival in his day, as the church had “been deeply affected by the atmosphere with which she has been surrounded, and in which she has too much lived and breathed”. As a result she had “become dim and unsteady; her trumpet has given an uncertain sound; her unity has become broken, and her enemies have triumphed over her.” Again, the parallel to today hardly needs to be drawn out. All to say that if there was a pressing desire for revival in the church in 1840, the urgency and fervour behind our desire today should be even greater.

The means of revival

If revival is needed, what can we humanly do to make it more likely? This is not an unspiritual question, for as the original preface notes, “No sane and intelligent Christian will deny, that even in the economy of grace, the result is not to be expected without the employment of means.” William Burns, who saw revival at Kilsyth, made the same point: “it is obvious that human agency is employed and that wisdom and zeal and activity… prudence… wise consultation, and… untiring watchfulness and activity, are to be called forth in the period of an awakening.” But what are the means to encourage revival? John M‘Naughtan in his address on “The Necessity of the Revival of Religion” notes that “There are two great duties incumbent on the church in all ages, the simultaneous discharge of which is essential to her prosperity, namely, the maintenance of the truth, and the propagation of it in the earth. She must hold fast the form of sound words; and she must go out into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature.”⁹ As these are the duties of the church in every age, faithfulness in these is the great means to promote and encourage revival. Under these general duties, prayer is the foremost means for encouraging revival. So, Alexander Cumming in his chapter on “Prayer” states, “Blessings of great magnitude are associated with ardour and perseverance in prayer.”¹⁰ He viewed this as the cause of the recent revivals in Scotland, positing that “perhaps the recent effusion of the Holy Ghost dispensed to some favoured localities in Scotland may be partly owing to the spirit of prayer awakened by the danger in which our establishment has been involved.” Cumming’s chapter on prayer is perhaps the most convicting and encouraging in the volume —how we need a greater spirit of prayer! William Burns joins Cumming in striking the same note: “It has been remarked, as an important and encouraging fact in the history of the revivals with which we are best acquainted, that the moving spring of them all has been prayer—believing, earnest, united; by a small number, it may have been only a very few at first, but immediately preceding the remarkable awakenings, by a greater number of Christians brought together, as on sacramental occasions.”

If prayer is the great engine of revival, then obviously believers should pray together frequently, and in particular as a gathered church. Burns makes a practical application of this point by “earnestly pressing upon my fathers and brethren in the ministry the duty and the privilege of having a weekly prayer meeting, wherever circumstances will allow of it, on some evening of the week, over which the minister should preside.” Whilst the particulars of how this is worked out may vary, the general call for a weekly corporate gathering for prayer is one that churches today need to heed, and Christians need to devote their time to. Surely none of us wish to fall under the censure of Charles Brown as he discusses “Symptoms and Fruits of Revival”, that “in dead churches there is little prayer.”¹¹

As well as prayer, preaching is the great means of revival. Burns comments, “while prayer, as we have seen, is the spirit of a revival of religion, the substance of a revival, the pillar and ground of all is the sound, zealous, pointed preaching of Christ.” For Burns this preaching of Christ, to be biblically faithful, had to leave the impression “God was in earnest in calling them, and willing to save them.” The free offer of the gospel is a central feature of preaching in times of revival. Related to this, the preaching that would be used in revival was, for Burns, “not distinguished by what is called talent; few of them exhibit marks of powerful genius… No attempt at oratorical display; no poetical description; no metaphysical dissertation; no learned criticism: but simple, practical truth forcibly presented, illustrated, and applied.” He said, “May the numbers of such preachers be increased a hundred-fold in all the churches; may the Lord pour out his Spirit more copiously on preachers and hearers; then there will be a speaking as of dying men to dying men, feeling themselves so!” This is a prayer we would all do well to take up.

Another means to encourage revival is the godly lives of believers. Bonar noted that “The only book of Christian doctrine or of Christian evidences, which most men can think of reading is the lives of professed Christians. From these they judge what it is to be a Christian, and what claims Christianity has upon them.” Arnot viewed church discipline as a means to encourage and to restore godly living in Christians: “Strict enforcement of discipline is a difficult thing, but it is essential: without it we have no good ground to expect a general revival.” Fasting was also important with Nathaniel Paterson lamenting, in his chapter on “Practical Addresses and Counsel” that “Fasting in not in our day denied to be an ordinance of God; but how seldom, how feebly and formally is it observed.”¹² What was true in general for all believers, was specifically true of the need for godliness in ministers. Arnot noted, “A minister’s example is at least of equal importance with his preaching.”

But all these means were as nothing without the blessing of the Spirit. Paterson so rightly calls us to acknowledge “the agency of the Spirit in the work of revival” and to see “how unavailing, without a divine power, all human efforts are.”

Hindrances to revival

But if there are means to encourage revival, there are also hindrances or impediments to revival. To a degree these are the inverse of the means to encourage revival. But there are important differences and additional factors.

Bonar notes that present lack of success can lead to a defeated and defeatist spirit which hinders revival. He says, “One great cause of this heartlessness is the want of [current] success… Conversion has become so rare that people have almost ceased to look for it… [or] to mourn over the want of it as a deadly symptom of their state. We live on and on from Sabbath to Sabbath, and meet and part from time to time, and no awakening amongst dead souls—no conversion, and yet no deep sense of the awfulness of such a state is felt.” The danger Bonar is highlighting is that we become content to be as we are—dispirited, with no expectations things will change.

Bonar is realistic about how hard it is to lift ourselves above circumstances where “the precious blessings of the gospel are everywhere despised and rejected by those who are perishing for lack of them.” But he is nonetheless clear it ought not to be so, “Our faith failed, and we thought our hope had perished from the Lord. Hence the heartlessness which had come so darkly over the work of the ministry, the work of the eldership, and the work of doing good to souls in general.” Patrick Fairbairn makes the same point in his contribution on “Hindrances to Revival of Religion” that we “are too much satisfied with things as they are, or disposed to make too much of the difficulties standing in the way of reformation.”¹³ If we have no expectation, no prayer in faith, this is undoubtedly a hindrance to revival.

Fairbairn also notes the impact of material circumstances, “the depressed and hard-wrought condition of the great mass of the people… furnishes them with a ready excuse for neglecting the means of grace, and tends, by excessive and long-continued employment about worldly things, to induce upon their whole feelings and character an impress and character most unfavourable to a work of genuine revival.” It is not “unspiritual” to acknowledge the impact of poverty, and so seek to address that. Abject poverty is a hindrance to spiritual work. However, Fairbairn is alert to the opposite danger of being overly concerned with the material and political. He noted that in his day, “from the highest to the lowest ranks of society every man is more or less a politician, and with multitudes politics form such an engrossing theme as to consume nearly the whole of their leisure thought and reading and converse.” This left no time for spiritual thought, and for higher concerns, and this too is a barrier to revival. However, perhaps the most serious hindrance to revival is unnecessary divisions among God’s people. Fairbairn again notes, “[A] great hindrance to a revival of religion, [is] the spirit of division and discord, which prevails in the church, and the consequent absence of that fervent love in which Christ enjoined his disciples with the utmost care and devotedness to walk.” M‘Naughtan says much the same: “By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, by your love one to another—must not unnecessary division, unauthorised schism, provoke his displeasure, quench his Spirit, and result in the withholding of the grace without which the church must wither and weaken and decay?” The church is sadly all to familiar with this barrier to revival today.

Effects of revival

Despite these hindrances, the men who wrote this volume believed that revival was an ongoing feature of the church of Jesus Christ. Christ would not leave his church without days of blessing and favour. These times of revival, to return to the definition of revival, would not produce new experiences or fruits, but more of the ordinary fruits and graces of Christian experience. In particular, revival could be known, not just by a large number of conversions, but by an increased love for the ordinary means of grace.

So, Brown comments: “Wherever there is a genuine work of God in the soul, there will infallibly be a high regard for the sanctuary of God, for the Sabbath of God, for the mercy-seat of God, for the word of God; for the holy table of God, for the very instruments employed and blessed of God to the soul’s eternal welfare.” Or, again, “The delight of the living soul is in the God of the ordinances. It esteems them only as means of enjoying him. It loves the sanctuary, to behold his beauty, the communion table, as a place of meeting with him, the Sabbath, for the Lord of the Sabbath, the messengers, for their message—their work’s sake.”

True revival then does not produce a taste for the new or the novel. It creates a deep love and thirst for the greater experience of the known and the ordinary—public worship, the Lord’s Day, prayer, the hearing of the word, and the enjoyment of the sacraments. Conversely, the neglect of the Lord’s Day and decline in attendance at public worship, is a sure sign of a cool spiritual climate, and reveals a crying need for God’s people to be revived.

Another effect of revival is highlighted by Brown, namely that “Every revived church will be a missionary church. In living churches, the glory of Christ and the salvation of men will be deemed the business of every man.” An insular church, a church that does not live and breathe evangelistic passion, a church which is not a missionary church, is a church desperately in need of renewal. It is to be feared this renewal is needed in many otherwise sound and conservative churches. Revival would certainly lead every affected church to greater evangelistic zeal and a burden for conversions flowing out into practical outreach.

Revival and Christian union

But there is one further effect of revival that is too significant to subsume among others. And that is an increased unity among Christians. Bonar commented on the sad state of things in his day, “Never for instance were brethren more unworthily or unhappily divided than they have been of late.” Matters have become dramatically worse in the intervening 184 years. However, Bonar went on to say so helpfully and hopefully:

It is gloriously impossible for those who are reconciled to God in Christ Jesus to be permanently unreconciled to one another, and a time of revival, bringing out all the great realities in which they are at one, and sinking all the minor points on which they are divided, has a blessed tendency to unite their hearts, and so gradually to unite their hands in the work of the Lord… It is sweet to find that the divided and separated body of Christ is yet one. It is sweet to discover, beneath the rents at which the world has so long mocked, cords of love still, which bind them fast together by binding them all to one great centre, and that centre Christ.

No less pertinently and profoundly Brown commented:

I believe, brethren, that in one day the outpouring of the Spirit would extinguish the fire of a hundred controversies. The grand spring of discord is pride. Men once brought to their knees… might by duty be forced, but assuredly would not by inclination be drawn into the field of contention. What is the source of many of our keenest controversies? It is the low state of vital religion… Disputes and discords rush in to fill up the very vacuum. In such a soil, to change the figure, disputes of their own accord spring up in rank luxuriance. I am quite well aware that, in existing circumstances, many controversies must be continued; but let the church only be revived—let a spirit of faith and holiness be but extensively poured forth—and the circumstances will change; and we shall find far too much to do in setting ourselves against the common enemy, to have either leisure or heart for conflicts and contentions among ourselves.

There are few greater needs than increased unity among true Christians. The fairest flower of genuine revival among God’s people will be an increased eagerness to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace (Eph. 4:3).

Eschatology

Perhaps the feature of this volume least likely to receive a favourable hearing is the underlying postmillennial eschatology. This appears infrequently through the book but is the focus of John Lorimer’s chapter, “Encouragements from the Promises and Prophecies of Scripture.”¹⁴ The relation of an optimistic eschatology to evangelistic endeavour and hope for revival will be familiar to readers of Iain Murray’s The Puritan Hope.¹⁵ Those who have read Murray will know Lorimer does not set out a peculiar understanding of the future of the church, but a (perhaps the) common view of the leading divines of the seventeenth to mid-nineteenth centuries.

So, when Lorimer asks “Is there anything to encourage Christians to expect and pray and labour for a revival of religion among their fellow men?” and answers that the word of God holds out “assurances and prophecies of a day of coming universal religious revival” he is simply rehearsing the Reformed teaching he was brought up in. This vision is explicitly postmillennial: “The Millennium shall have its thousand years of joy.” However, this vision is not to be confused with the hopes of the later liberal Protestantism. No, Lorimer comments, “what a contrast is true Christianity to all the systems of man—intellectual or moral or religious, philosophical or superstitious! They can boast of no age of future glory; they have no hope with which to cheer the hearts of their adherents. They may talk of a return of the golden age; but they delude themselves with dreams, their age is an age of iron, and the longer they reign their darkness and tyranny are always the more despotic and hopeless.” Lorimer’s future “golden age” for the church was not to be achieved through human progress, but a by a mighty outpouring of the Spirit.

Nevertheless, Lorimer’s explicit postmillennialism is likely to leave many unpersuaded. However, what should be persuasive is the underlying message of Lorimer’s chapter: that the church has a great task (Matt. 28:19-20) and great promises (John 16:8), and that the church can therefore confidently and expectantly pray for revival.

Other themes

There are too many other themes in this book to dwell long on them. Jonathan Anderson provides a wonderful short explication of the person and work of Christ.¹⁶ Alexander Moody Stuart is equally helpful on the work of the Holy Spirit.¹⁷ Michael Willis provides a wonderful balance on God’s sovereignty.¹⁸ Robert Candlish has much to say on value of preaching generally, and on not neglecting the ordinary means of grace or using lack of revival as an excuse.¹⁹ James Munro provides a run-through of biblical “revivals” and historical revivals, focusing, naturally, on Scotland though also giving attention to the Methodist revivals around the time of Whitefield and Wesley.²⁰

Conclusion

This is a significant volume. The need for revival is great. A prayerful reading of this volume will reveal to us the many ways, tragically, we are hindering revival. It will likewise call us to positive action to use all the means likely, under God’s sovereign blessing, to bring about conditions favourable for revival. Above all it will, surely, take us to the throne of grace, to plead with our merciful Father, Psalm 85:4-6 (ESV): “Restore us again, O God of our salvation, and put away your indignation toward us! Will you be angry with us forever? Will you prolong your anger to all generations? Will you not revive us again, that your people may rejoice in you?”

DONALD JOHN MacLEAN
President, Westminster Seminary UK
Trustee, The Banner of Truth Trust
December 2024

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Addresses by Scottish Evangelical Leaders delivered in Glasgow in 1840

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The Banner of Truth Trust has always been an organization which longs for the true revival of religion. Indeed, in many ways, that desire is the pulse beat of the Banner. But what revival is, and why we long for it, is often misunderstood. Indeed, the original preface to this volume begins by noting, “The […]

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