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CHAPTER 4. The Grace of Utterance: Class Meetings, Prayer Meetings, and Revivals
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Notes to chapter 4 start on page 255 74 ANNIE LEAKE was converted at an evangelistic meeting in 1857, but this was not the first time that she had attended a series of revival services . For several years she had lived and worked in the household of her uncle, a Methodist minister, and three times during that period she had gone to evangelistic services in hopes of being converted. Each time she failed. The third time she hoped for a while that she had been converted, and was “counted among the converts and joined the Church.” She joined a class, but she found it “far from a pleasure” to attend. Class members were expected to testify to their experience and, she wrote later, “I had no experience therefore told none.”1 Finally, at age seventeen, Leake knew with great certainty that at last she had been converted, yet immediately afterwards she was unable to say more than a few words. This gave her cause for concern, especially on the following morning when she heard the Parrsboro minister say to her grandfather, “I have not much faith in still born Christians.” Although she did not know whether he was speaking about her, she recognized that he might have been, and she was acutely aware of her difficulty in testifying to her new religious state. Then, a few days later, she received sanctification at a service that was led by her grandfather. He invited anyone blessed to “tell it to the congregation.” Leake later reported, “To his surprise I know, I was the one who responded. I arose from my knees, turned to the congregation and talked for some time, not I, really, but the ‘Spirit’ in me talked.”2 After her experience of sanctification she found her voice. Indeed, she became so free and so confident that later her grandfather sometimes took her with him to other preaching points when he went to hold services . There she testified to what God had done for her. The Grace of Utterance: Class Meetings, Prayer Meetings, and Revivals CHAPTER 4 The Parrsboro minister’s concern would have been shared by many of his colleagues, for a convert was expected to testify. Testimony had several functions: it assured those already converted of the genuine nature of the new convert’s spiritual state, and it gave encouragement to those who were still seekers after the experience. Furthermore, success in testimony bolstered the confidence of the new Christian. As Leake’s case showed, however, success, especially immediate success, was not certain. Converts had to overcome a great barrier, the barrier of reticence. Many converts, especially female converts, were described as timid, but more lay behind this description than simply a trait of personality. Eliza Sentell McMurray, for example, was “naturally inclined to shrink from public effort”; this reluctance to assert herself in public was identified as “her timidity.”3 McMurray died in 1866, and during her lifetime she would have been taught, by precept and example, that, while it was in the province of “masculine authority to control the destiny of the world,” the influence of woman held sway “in her appropriate sphere—the nursery, in the domestic circle, and other gentle and retired scenes.”4 It was in the home that “she shines with the purest lustre, there her warm affections have their truest sphere of action, and there the innumerable phases of her innate loveliness and goodness are most appreciated and most observed. The domesticities of life are her particular charge.”5 Such were the lessons present in the prescriptive literature widely printed and reprinted in the religious press. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, the proper spheres of men and especially of women also became standard fare for lectures given on those edifying social occasions that were familiar events in the life of Canadian communities. The speeches developed many variations on a basic theme: “Woman, her position and influence,” “Woman’s True Sphere,” “Woman, her Worth and her Work,” and “Worth and Work of Women.”6 Few texts have survived, but reports suggest that in most of these lectures, edification predominated over entertainment. For example , in his tea-meeting address on “The Sphere of Woman,” Rev. W.S. Griffin “in most beautiful, chaste, and forcible language, presented women in her God-appointed sphere, making the world’s homes next to Eden—a place of loveliness and beauty—and failing here, making a wreck of her own and man’s hopes.”7 Much...