THE IRISH RELIGIOUS REVIVALS.

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 4, Issue 175, 26 January 1860, Page 4

THE IRISH RELIGIOUS REVIVALS.

[From the Saturday lievteto.j Dr. Mackay, in a popular book, —“ Memoirs of Extraordinary popular Delusions ” published a few year 3 ago, purposely excluded religious matters from bis catalogue of epidemic follies. This was, certainly, omitting the part of “ Hamlet” with a vengeance. It was once proposed by Porson to write the his-, tory of human folly in a neat compendium of 500 volumes; and the annals of religious madness would go far towards exhausting at least a solid' moiety of . the “ Encyclopaedia Morise.” The special department of the “ Anatomy of Melancholy”—by .which Burton meant madhe styles::*! Religious might be expanded tenfold, -dfo every age of the church, and in the ages before the churchy, religion lias had' a tendency. to .become epidemic ; and it yet. remains, among the physiological mysteries what is the physical cause of popular madness. Undoubtedly, the thing is catching. An enthusiast, we suppose, emits

which falls upon the nerves, Q* the hysteric organs, to receiving "dr imbibing the poison. CThisls the sort of thing which we are assured is the rationale of infection is ordinary physical epidemics, though the doctorh fail to give us any very satisfactory account on what the poison sporvles consist of, or whafe it is, which makes the ; patient peculiarly suscep. tible of zymotic infections. We know no more about the religious than the typhoid poison. Nobody has ever yet explained what generated the preaching madness, or the wild frenzy of the Flagellants in the Middle Ages, or—what is still more strange—the tendency which exists in all crowds and large assemblies, to act upon sympathy quite apart from reason or conviction. The whole history of religious revivals is but an illustration of the law of sympathy.,: In Pagan times we know that for the space of two hours a. whole multitude monotonously repeated, “Great is Diana of the Ephesians.” This was a religious revival, and in the Dark Ages we. read of the whole mass of Society suddenly turned by some wild enthusiast, and leaping at one bound from'the depths of sensuality into the very wildest excesses of religious rapture. Peter the Hermit thunders through Europe, and robbers leave their eagle nests, and kings their palaces, and every man his business and his senses, to follow in a Crusade, the wildest of chases. The monstrous guilt of all Christendom stirs some stern and solitary heart in the fastnesses of the Appennines; and a penitential frenzy spreads throughout Christendom. Every town is alive with the terrible procession of the Flagellants ; the scourge is wielded over a million of naked bodies; and a universal madness of religion blazes np, flashing with hasty and unprofitable conversions, soon to sink down into darkness made thicker and more impalpable by the short-lived glare. The' history of revivals is the opprobrium of religion—its i opprobrium, because each religious body will consider a revival :to be religious. Each church and sect has tried it, and it has always failed ; and this simply because a technical revival is never religious at all. If, however, we only regard it as what it is—simply a physical contagion —religion has no reason to be ashamed of the failure of revivals. We know nothing, or next to nothing, of infection and epidemic affections. From the time of Plutarch to that of Mr. John Wesley, and from Mr. Wesley through all those Scotch revivals which have lately been transferred to America-, and which from America have very recently been imported into the north of Ireland, there is e tedious uniformity in the pathology of religious epidemics. It is much the same whether wread Lucian De Syria Dea, who describea the frenzies of*the worshippers whirling thems selves in the, orgies—or whether we hear of the citizens of Abdero, ( wlio with one consenran mad in reciting verses from Euripides, of of the victims of the Tarantula—or whethet we peruse Mr. Wesley’s “Journal,” orthr accounts in every American book of travels or the wild fanaticism of a revival in the backe woods. Corybantes, Fakeers, Kilsyth Revivalists, epileptic nuns, Exstaticas, and the victims of witchcraft—all exhibit the same symptoms. One knows as well the pathology of the revival disease as that of small-pox. A sermon is preached, or some wild appeal is urged —not very striking, for. it is -remarkable enough that, whenever the language of revival sermons has been taken down, they are found to be stupidity itself* The spark is struck ; the most. susceptible tinder—it is always a woman —catches fire; one female falls down in an epileptic state; the convulsive infection spreads; two or three others begin to "roar and scream, and so violent are the throes and phrenzies, that very .often . six persons cannot hold the, demoniac. Twenty are, in less than half an hour, in the spasms and wild contortions of delirium; and prayer, cursing, and blasphemy, the triumphs of assurance, and the wailing 6 of reprobation are heard on all sides. What wonder if such influences take their natural effect? People go to a revival to be revived —they predispose themselves to catch the disease, and they take it. Congregations flocked to the late Mr. Irving’s church to hear unknown tongues; and the gibberish was talked. People willed to move tables, and the tables were obedient and whirled to the volition. A medium attracts, and the sympathetic receptivity is always forthcoming. As soon as a, revival is announced the magic virtue, or virus, spreads. In every case the rationale of the thing is the same. Methodism, Quakerism, Jumpers, .Ranters, Extaticas, Irvingites—East and West—‘Presbyterians in Scotland and the Spiritualists in America—appeal to the same facts; and those facts arc undeniable, but they prove just nothing at all, saying as much for the work of the Devil as for, the work of God. In the Munster fanatics and the Calvinistic revivals, in St. Theresa and the Assassins; we see the same causes producing the same effects.- It is a mere accident that a religious result comes of it. Religion has nothing to do with the matter, which is only some morbid state of the human organisation, unnaturally stimulated, it matters not whether by bhang, mesmerism, or a sermon. /