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Illustration★★★More on the Second Great Awakening J. Edwin Orr, foremost authority on revivals, writes, “Nowhere in the world have evangelical awakenings occurred so frequently as on the campuses.” In his book, Campus Aflame, he describes the impact of the Second Great Awakening on American college campuses. “During the last decade of the eighteenth century, the typical Harvard student was atheist.
Students at Williams College conducted a mock celebration of Holy Communion. When the Dean at Princeton opened the chapel Bible to read, a pack of playing cards fell out, some radical having cut a rectangle out of each page to fit the pack.
Christians were so unpopular that they met in secret and kept their minutes in code. The radical leader of deist students led a mob in burning the Bible of a Raritan valley Presbyterian Church. Students disrupted worship services with both profanity and sputum. They burned down buildings, and they forced the resignation of college presidents.
“Many historians have agreed that conditions on campus and in society were deplorable. The last two decades of the eighteenth century were the darkest period, spiritually and morally, in the history of American Christianity.” Then came the Awakening.
“So far as can be ascertained,” writes Orr, “the first of a series of college awakenings occurred as early as 1787. At Hampden Sydney College in Virginia, a few students, none of them active Christians but all of them concerned about the moral state of the college, met for prayer.
They locked themselves in a room, for fear of the other students. One of them said, ‘We tried to pray, but such prayer I never heard the like of.
He added, ‘We tried to sing, but it was in the most suppressed manner, for we feared the other students.’ ‘The ungodly students created a disturbance, and their President came to investigate. He rebuked the rowdies and invited the intercessors to his study for continued prayer. They continued in power, until an awakening was felt at last. Within a short space of time, more than half the number of students professed conversion in a movement that stirred the local churches also.”-J.
Edwin Orr, Campus Aflame (Glendale, CA: Regal Books, 1971), iv, 19-20, 25.
The point
Historian J. Edwin Orr recounts how the Second Great Awakening broke out on American college campuses that had sunk into open irreverence.