The whole community in which we lived, with the exception of a small Episcopal church, had the same ideas of conversion and regeneration, and a prominent feature in our social existence was the frequent recurrence of the great revival meetings in which all the rude eloquence of celebrated and powerful preachers, Baptist, Methodist, and of other sects, was poured out on excited congregations.  There were “protracted meetings,” or campaigns of prayer and exhortation, lasting often a fortnight, at which all the resources of popular theology were employed to awaken and maintain their audiences in a state of frenzy and religious delirium, during which conviction of sin was supposed to enter the heart more effectually.  The tortures of hell alternated with the delights of heaven, in imagery calculated to drive the timid and conscientious young folks to insanity, at these meetings, to which, once awakened, the subject of conviction went three times a day, until the hysteria, the prolonged excitement so produced, came as a sign of acceptance.  As each new convert rose on the “anxious seat[1],” where he or she went when the first feeling of conviction came, and afterwards made the declaration of salvation found, the shouts and cries of “Glory to God,” the sobbing and groans of the congregation were redoubled, and the exhortations of the preacher renewed, to the still unconvicted to come forward to the anxious seat where they would become subject to the concentrated and personal prayers of the whole assembly.  These meetings were the substitutes for all other social diversions or emotions.  There was a revival preacher by the name of Knapp, whose lurid eloquence in this vein made him famous, and whose imagery was equal in ghastliness to anything that the Catholic Church could produce.  I remember one of his most dramatic bits, borrowed from a much earlier preacher, a passage in his description of hell.  In hell, he said, there was a clock, which, instead of “tick,” “tick,” said, “Eternity,” “Eternity,” and when the damned, weary of their tortures down in the depths, came up to see what time it was, they heard the sentence of the clock, and turned in despair to go down into the depths again as far as they could.

[Footnote 1:  The front line of seats next the pulpit, set apart for those who had “found conviction.”]

To these meetings my mother used to send me, giving me a holiday from school for all the time the protracted meeting lasted.  But conviction never came.  I was honest with myself, and though the frenzied and ghastly exhortations harried my soul with dread, and I longed for the coming of the ecstasy which was the recognizable sign of the grace of God, I could not rise to the participation in it which the most material and hysterical of the congregation enjoyed, and day after day I went home saddened by the conviction that I was still one of the unregenerate.  The sign never came, but several years later I went to make a visit to my brother Charles, who had then removed