"The volume before us contains not the history of the sleeping many, but of the waking few. Its object is to trace out their story and record it for a memorial to all generations. The world has written at large the history of its sleeping multitudes, it becomes the Church of Christ to record the simpler, briefer annals of its awakened ones. Doubtless, their record is on high, written more imperishably than the world can ever accomplish for its sons, yet still it is well for earth to have a record of those of whom the world was not worthy.
Their story is as full of interest as it is of importance. The waking up of each soul would be matter enough for a history, its various shakings and startings up, ere it was fully aroused; the word or the stroke that effected the work; the time, the way in which it became awake for eternity and for God, as well as its new course of light after it awoke — all these are fraught with an interest to which nothing of time or earth can ever once be compared. And then, when the voice of God awakes not one, but thousands, it may be in a day; when whole villages and districts seem as if arising and putting on new life — how intensely, how unutterably interesting! At such a crisis it seems as if the world itself were actually beginning to awake — as if the shock that had broken the slumbers of so many were about to shake the whole world together. Yet alas! the tokens of life soon vanish. The half-awakened sleepers sink back into deeper slumber, and the startled world lies down in still more sad and desperate security.
The history of the Church is full of these awakenings, some on a larger and some on a smaller scale. Indeed, such narratives as those with which this work abounds form the true history of the Church, if we are to take our ideas of this from the inspired Church-history given us in the Acts of the Apostles. Many a wondrous scene has been witnessed from the day of Pentecost downwards to our own day, and what volume better deserves the attention and study of the believer than that which contains the record of these outpourings of the Spirit? Besides the interest that cleaves to them there is much to be learned from them by the Church. To see how God has been working, and to mark the means and instruments by which he has carried on his work, cannot fail to be profitable and quickening. It makes us sensible of our own shortcomings, and it points out the way by which the blessing may be secured."
Their story is as full of interest as it is of importance. The waking up of each soul would be matter enough for a history, its various shakings and startings up, ere it was fully aroused; the word or the stroke that effected the work; the time, the way in which it became awake for eternity and for God, as well as its new course of light after it awoke — all these are fraught with an interest to which nothing of time or earth can ever once be compared. And then, when the voice of God awakes not one, but thousands, it may be in a day; when whole villages and districts seem as if arising and putting on new life — how intensely, how unutterably interesting! At such a crisis it seems as if the world itself were actually beginning to awake — as if the shock that had broken the slumbers of so many were about to shake the whole world together. Yet alas! the tokens of life soon vanish. The half-awakened sleepers sink back into deeper slumber, and the startled world lies down in still more sad and desperate security.
The history of the Church is full of these awakenings, some on a larger and some on a smaller scale. Indeed, such narratives as those with which this work abounds form the true history of the Church, if we are to take our ideas of this from the inspired Church-history given us in the Acts of the Apostles. Many a wondrous scene has been witnessed from the day of Pentecost downwards to our own day, and what volume better deserves the attention and study of the believer than that which contains the record of these outpourings of the Spirit? Besides the interest that cleaves to them there is much to be learned from them by the Church. To see how God has been working, and to mark the means and instruments by which he has carried on his work, cannot fail to be profitable and quickening. It makes us sensible of our own shortcomings, and it points out the way by which the blessing may be secured."
