Poor, Poor Nevin

John Nevin writes of the anxious bench: "But all who are acquainted with the world, know, that the worst things may thus run for a season and be glorified, in the popular mind....It should be remembered however, that this popularity, such as it is, is in a certain sense the echo of a sound which has already ceased to be heard." (11) While Nevin decries the anxious bench and various forms of the revival's "excess", he doesn't do much in the way of stopping revivalism from either a theological or social standpoint. Like John Wesley, he doesn't seem to understand that what revivals in America seek to do is to save souls, not give people a working theology. Had the churches swooped in and taught theology to those who had been converted at the revivals perhaps their wouldn't be so much anti-intellectualism within the evangelical populations then or today. Had mainline Christianity embraced revivals instead of denouncing them, as Nevin does, perhaps there would not be so much splintering of denominations in American Christianity.