two revivals

In The Story of the Scottish Church, Thomas McCrie mentions two 17th century revivals - one in Stewarton (Ayrshire) and one in Kirk of Shotts (outside Glasgow).

In the early to mid 1620s, David Dickson, minister of Irvine in Ayrshire, began holding lectures every Monday in Irvine (that was the weekly market day). The meetings were held in a hall in the manse, and over a hundred people would attend - including visitors from nearby Stewarton, encouraged by their own minister. It was as a result of concerned hearers attending these meetings that the revival began to spread throughout the Stewarton area, affecting "multitudes" according to McCrie, including some people who had previously been very hostile and derogatory towards the gospel. The features which McCrie mentions are these people's concern about sin, which brought them to listen to Mr Dickson's lectures in the first place, and the resulting "solid, serious, and practical piety" which characterised these people as the work proceeded.

Then in 1630, the sacrament of the Lord's supper was dispensed at Shotts, attended with an unusual "spirit of light and love." The people in general, it seems, felt constrained to hold an extra service on the Monday of the communion, and a young minister called John Livingstone was persuaded to preach. He took the verses in Ezekiel 36:25-26, "Then will I sprinkle clean water upon you ..." and spoke for an hour and half. Then as he was about to close, he was led to speak on for another hour, accompanied with what he himself described as such liberty as he never experienced in his life before or after: and according to McCrie, no less than five hundred people traced their conversion to this sermon. Again, a new seriousness, a readiness to pray, and a subsequent life of 'soberness, righteousness, and godliness,' were among the characteristics of the people who were affected at this time.

I wrote something previously which was sparked off by McCheyne's comment that revivals are typically preceded by a spirit of praise. It is still hard to look at circumstances in the church, never mind in society at large, and find anything very positive to rejoice in: given the sorry state we're in, how can there be anything other than shamefacedness. But even if we didn't have the example of how things happened in the 1600s, in times of perhaps greater harrassment of Christians and less of a heritage to appeal to - there's still the fact that although we have destroyed ourselves, in the Lord there is help: Hosea 13:9. Or as it says in Psalm 95:

1 O come, let us sing to the Lord:
come, let us every one
A joyful noise make to the Rock
of our salvation.
...
3 For God, a great God, and great King,
above all gods he is.
...
6 O come, and let us worship him,
let us bow down withal,
And on our knees before the Lord
our Maker let us fall.