Full Transcript for Chapter Five: Mighty in Prayer

boys 00:03:43.159 --> 00:03:46.360 for the ministry. His ordination papers, now 00:03:46.360 --> 00:03:48.800 lost, would have listed a conversion, though 00:03:48.800 --> 00:03:51.520 the conversion was of the quiet, graduated kind 00:03:51.520 --> 00:03:54.319 typical of New England rural piety, and left 00:03:54.319 --> 00:03:56.659 no visible mark on the young man's temperament. 00:03:57.340 --> 00:04:01.520 He was earnest. He was literate. He was not, 00:04:01.719 --> 00:04:04.560 by any testimony, surviving from his first twenty 00:04:04.560 --> 00:04:07.219 -five years of ministry in any way remarkable. 00:04:07.629 --> 00:04:10.110 He married a woman whose name appears in the 00:04:10.110 --> 00:04:12.610 parish records as Olive, and fathered children 00:04:12.610 --> 00:04:15.110 whose names likewise briefly appear and then, 00:04:15.169 --> 00:04:17.829 in the thin ink of frontier registers, disappear. 00:04:18.589 --> 00:04:21.569 He took a pastorate in upstate New York in 1803, 00:04:21.930 --> 00:04:24.370 first in Oneida County, then in Madison County, 00:04:24.649 --> 00:04:26.610 then in the small village of Lowville where he 00:04:26.610 --> 00:04:29.670 would stay nearly 18 years. The churches were 00:04:29.670 --> 00:04:32.490 frontier churches, log meeting houses, pine pulpits, 00:04:32.689 --> 00:04:34.689 pews cushioned with folded horse blankets against 00:04:34.689 --> 00:04:37.800 the cold. Nash preached twice on Sunday, taught 00:04:37.800 --> 00:04:40.139 a weekday school, buried the dead, married the 00:04:40.139 --> 00:04:42.240 living, and lived on the thin subscriptions his 00:04:42.240 --> 00:04:44.259 farmer -parishioners could spare from a year's 00:04:44.259 --> 00:04:47.199 harvest. For eighteen years, nothing happened. 00:04:47.879 --> 00:04:50.579 Or rather, nothing of the kind that history records 00:04:50.579 --> 00:04:54.660 happened. Babies were baptized. Cemeteries filled. 00:04:55.459 --> 00:04:57.680 The young man who had begun with some hope of 00:04:57.680 --> 00:05:00.839 frontier usefulness, became gradually a middle 00:05:00.839 --> 00:05:03.759 -aged man with a tired wife and a failing congregation 00:05:03.759 --> 00:05:06.000 and a cough that did not clear through the winter. 00:05:06.699 --> 00:05:09.839 He began to doubt. He did not doubt the Gospel, 00:05:10.000 --> 00:05:13.540 he doubted himself. He began to suspect, in the 00:05:13.540 --> 00:05:15.899 way that honest ministers occasionally suspect, 00:05:16.300 --> 00:05:18.680 that he had been a man placed in a pulpit by 00:05:18.680 --> 00:05:21.680 the ordinary machinery of Church politics, without 00:05:21.680 --> 00:05:25.259 ever, at any point, being set there by God. In 00:05:25.259 --> 00:05:29.430 1822, at the age of 47, the Lowville congregation 00:05:29.430 --> 00:05:32.089 decided that it agreed with his self -assessment. 00:05:32.769 --> 00:05:37.889 They dismissed him. 3. The Dark Room. The dismissal 00:05:37.889 --> 00:05:40.850 broke him. That is the word his few surviving 00:05:40.850 --> 00:05:44.089 letters use. He did not pretend it was anything 00:05:44.089 --> 00:05:47.449 else. He moved with his wife to a small farm 00:05:47.449 --> 00:05:50.550 in Oneida County and tried for a few months to 00:05:50.550 --> 00:05:53.009 conduct itinerant preaching to the settlers along 00:05:53.009 --> 00:05:56.129 the frontier of the Black River Country. He led 00:05:56.129 --> 00:05:58.430 by one account two hundred souls to Christ in 00:05:58.430 --> 00:06:00.910 those months, his ministry in some ways more 00:06:00.910 --> 00:06:03.110 fruitful in dismissal than it had been in tenure. 00:06:03.750 --> 00:06:06.230 But the rejection had struck at something deeper 00:06:06.230 --> 00:06:09.310 than his vocation. He wrote in a letter that 00:06:09.310 --> 00:06:11.829 a relative later copied into a family album, 00:06:12.230 --> 00:06:14.329 that he felt as though the Lord had turned his 00:06:14.329 --> 00:06:16.810 face from me, and that I was walking in a country 00:06:16.810 --> 00:06:20.089 whose borders I did not know. Then in the summer 00:06:20.089 --> 00:06:24.019 of 1823 he fell ill. The nature of the illness 00:06:24.019 --> 00:06:27.360 was never quite specified. Some later sources 00:06:27.360 --> 00:06:31.180 call it erysipolis. Others a long fever. Others 00:06:31.180 --> 00:06:33.759 simply a wasting sickness of the kind frontier 00:06:33.759 --> 00:06:36.100 physicians labeled debility and treated with 00:06:36.100 --> 00:06:38.579 bleeding and a bitter concoction of calomel and 00:06:38.579 --> 00:06:42.740 brandy. It nearly cost him his eyesight. It confined 00:06:42.740 --> 00:06:45.180 him for several weeks at the worst of it. to 00:06:45.180 --> 00:06:47.439 a darkened room in the farmhouse, with a wet 00:06:47.439 --> 00:06:50.399 cloth over his inflamed eyes and his hands folded 00:06:50.399 --> 00:06:52.879 on his chest because any light was intolerable. 00:06:53.180 --> 00:06:57.120 He could not read. He could not preach. He could 00:06:57.120 --> 00:07:00.720 not even at first sit up. He began, simply because 00:07:00.720 --> 00:07:03.000 there was nothing else he could do, to pray. 00:07:03.620 --> 00:07:06.220 He prayed in the dark room for six or seven weeks. 00:07:06.839 --> 00:07:09.800 He did not pray the formal prayers of the Presbyterian 00:07:09.800 --> 00:07:12.819 Book of Devotions, those demanded clarity of 00:07:12.819 --> 00:07:16.100 mind and pressure of calendar. He prayed instead 00:07:16.100 --> 00:07:18.600 the long conversational prayers of a sick man 00:07:18.600 --> 00:07:21.339 whose last honest hour with God has finally come 00:07:21.339 --> 00:07:24.180 around. He confessed things he had not known 00:07:24.180 --> 00:07:27.500 he had carried. He named the men he had resented 00:07:27.500 --> 00:07:31.139 at his dismissal. He held up by name, his wife 00:07:31.139 --> 00:07:33.100 and his children and the two

hundred frontier 00:07:33.100 --> 00:07:35.680 souls his brief dismissal itinerancy had swept 00:07:35.680 --> 00:07:39.019 into Christ. He prayed, as best one can pray 00:07:39.019 --> 00:07:41.120 in a darkened room with one's eyes bandaged, 00:07:41.279 --> 00:07:43.740 for the dismantling of whatever in his own heart 00:07:43.740 --> 00:07:46.319 had made his laval pulpit so quietly lifeless 00:07:46.319 --> 00:07:49.560 for eighteen years. Somewhere in that long dim 00:07:49.560 --> 00:07:52.259 season he later told a friend, he passed from 00:07:52.259 --> 00:07:54.800 being a preacher who occasionally prayed into 00:07:54.800 --> 00:07:57.680 being a prayer who occasionally preached. He 00:07:57.680 --> 00:07:59.660 could not say when the line had been crossed, 00:08:00.339 --> 00:08:03.379 only that it had been. When the bandages came 00:08:03.379 --> 00:08:05.779 off and the fever broke and he could bear daylight 00:08:05.779 --> 00:08:08.519 again, he walked out of the farmhouse a different 00:08:08.519 --> 00:08:13.000 man. He was 48 years old. He had, he calculated, 00:08:13.240 --> 00:08:16.579 perhaps 15 years left. He had decided, during 00:08:16.579 --> 00:08:19.560 the long, dim season, how he meant to spend them. 00:08:20.300 --> 00:08:24.660 4. Meeting Finney Charles Grandison Finney was, 00:08:24.699 --> 00:08:28.959 in the autumn of 1824 -29, a tall, lean, piercing 00:08:28.959 --> 00:08:31.000 -eyed lawyer -turned -evangelist who had been 00:08:31.000 --> 00:08:33.620 ordained a year before by the Oneida Presbytery 00:08:33.620 --> 00:08:36.080 and was now preaching his way, circuit by circuit, 00:08:36.259 --> 00:08:38.139 through the small canal towns of central New 00:08:38.139 --> 00:08:41.639 York. He had a voice like a courtroom and a habit 00:08:41.639 --> 00:08:44.600 of locking his eyes while preaching on individual 00:08:44.600 --> 00:08:48.120 listeners until the listener broke. He was already 00:08:48.120 --> 00:08:50.840 the most controversial young minister in the 00:08:50.840 --> 00:08:54.860 presbytery. He was also by every account astonishingly 00:08:54.860 --> 00:08:57.559 effective. Small towns emptied of their taverns 00:08:57.559 --> 00:09:00.259 within weeks of his arrival. Grand juries cancelled 00:09:00.259 --> 00:09:03.399 sessions for lack of indictments. The local universalists 00:09:03.399 --> 00:09:06.740 quietly changed congregations. He arrived in 00:09:06.740 --> 00:09:10.379 Evans Mills, New York, in October 1824, to begin 00:09:10.379 --> 00:09:13.320 what would become a two -month campaign. He took 00:09:13.320 --> 00:09:16.460 lodgings at the Town Inn. He opened the preaching 00:09:16.460 --> 00:09:20.120 on a Wednesday. And on Friday of that week, as 00:09:20.120 --> 00:09:22.399 he came down from his second sermon of the evening, 00:09:22.840 --> 00:09:25.600 a stooped bearded man in a frayed overcoat stepped 00:09:25.600 --> 00:09:27.419 out of the shadows at the edge of the meeting 00:09:27.419 --> 00:09:30.879 -house and introduced himself. I am Daniel Nash, 00:09:31.019 --> 00:09:33.940 the stranger said. I have come to pray for your 00:09:33.940 --> 00:09:36.899 meetings, if the Lord will allow me." Finney, 00:09:36.899 --> 00:09:39.360 who knew the name only vaguely from presbytery 00:09:39.360 --> 00:09:42.700 business, took the man's hand. He led him back 00:09:42.700 --> 00:09:46.220 to the inn. They talked until midnight. Finney 00:09:46.220 --> 00:09:48.879 would write, many years later in his memoirs, 00:09:48.940 --> 00:09:51.480 that within the first quarter hour of that conversation 00:09:51.480 --> 00:09:54.059 he had understood that Nash was full of the power 00:09:54.059 --> 00:09:56.740 of prayer, a phrase Finney did not use lightly 00:09:56.740 --> 00:09:59.460 and did not in his lifetime use of anyone else. 00:09:59.879 --> 00:10:02.139 They formed that evening the partnership that 00:10:02.139 --> 00:10:05.259 would last seven years. Nash would travel ahead 00:10:05.259 --> 00:10:07.940 of Finney, by two or three or four weeks, into 00:10:07.940 --> 00:10:10.259 whatever town or village had been selected for 00:10:10.259 --> 00:10:14.200 the next campaign. He would arrive quietly. He 00:10:14.200 --> 00:10:16.259 would take a room at the cheapest boarding house, 00:10:16.679 --> 00:10:19.019 sometimes sleeping on a rented pallet in a barn 00:10:19.019 --> 00:10:22.039 loft when money was short. He would identify, 00:10:22.200 --> 00:10:25.159 within his first 48 hours in town, two or three 00:10:25.159 --> 00:10:27.600 or four local Christians already known for a 00:10:27.600 --> 00:10:29.980 gift of prayer. and he would gather them, without 00:10:29.980 --> 00:10:32.559 publicity, without the pastor's knowledge, without 00:10:32.559 --> 00:10:35.279 even frequently informing his own wife back on 00:10:35.279 --> 00:10:38.039 the farm, into a small covenant of intercession 00:10:38.039 --> 00:10:40.779 that met daily, often nightly, in a rented room. 00:10:41.399 --> 00:10:44.240 They would pray for the coming campaign. They 00:10:44.240 --> 00:10:47.340 would fast. They would call on specific households 00:10:47.340 --> 00:10:50.019 by name. The tavern keeper on the main street, 00:10:50.299 --> 00:10:52.179 the blacksmith whose drinking was destroying 00:10:52.179 --> 00:10:54.899 his marriage, the young merchant whose infidelities 00:10:54.899 --> 00:10:57.519 had become the whisper of the town. The Unitarian 00:10:57.519 --> 00:10:59.899 lawyer whose public lectures on the sufficiency 00:10:59.899 --> 00:11:03.120 of reason had for two winters kept half the educated 00:11:03.120 --> 00:11:05.980 men of the village away from church. When Finney 00:11:05.980 --> 00:11:08.639 finally arrived, six horseback days later, two 00:11:08.639 --> 00:11:11.320 weeks later, a month later, the resistance in 00:11:11.320 --> 00:11:14.100 that town he would invariably find had already 00:11:14.100 --> 00:11:17.159

been broken. The tavern keeper would come under 00:11:17.159 --> 00:11:20.220 conviction the second night of preaching. The 00:11:20.220 --> 00:11:22.120 blacksmith would sob through the third sermon. 00:11:22.860 --> 00:11:25.379 The young merchant would walk uninvited. to the 00:11:25.379 --> 00:11:28.399 mourner's bench on the sixth. The Unitarian lawyer 00:11:28.399 --> 00:11:30.940 would be the great question. Sometimes he fell, 00:11:31.159 --> 00:11:33.679 sometimes he did not, but the town around him 00:11:33.679 --> 00:11:36.179 would, by the end of the campaign, have so changed 00:11:36.179 --> 00:11:38.419 its center of gravity that his objections were 00:11:38.419 --> 00:11:41.720 no longer plausible even to himself. Finney would 00:11:41.720 --> 00:11:45.320 preach. Converts would count themselves. The 00:11:45.320 --> 00:11:47.379 newspapers would print the statistics in the 00:11:47.379 --> 00:11:50.620 Monday editions. And somewhere in a dirt -floored 00:11:50.620 --> 00:11:53.470 room behind a barn, a graying man from Abington, 00:11:53.470 --> 00:11:55.830 Massachusetts, would be face down on a blanket, 00:11:56.269 --> 00:12:00.830 unable to stop weeping. 5. The Companion Abel 00:12:00.830 --> 00:12:03.429 Clary came into the partnership about a year 00:12:03.429 --> 00:12:07.049 in. He was a Presbyterian minister almost exactly 00:12:07.049 --> 00:12:09.769 Nash's age. The two had been students briefly 00:12:09.769 --> 00:12:12.049 at different New England seminaries in the same 00:12:12.049 --> 00:12:14.990 years, and his own ministry had collapsed under 00:12:14.990 --> 00:12:18.509 circumstances even more opaque than Nash's. He 00:12:18.509 --> 00:12:21.450 had according to the one surviving account by 00:12:21.450 --> 00:12:24.049 a young ministerial candidate who met him in 00:12:24.049 --> 00:12:28.190 1826, been given over so entirely to intercession 00:12:28.190 --> 00:12:31.210 that he could no longer preach at all. When he 00:12:31.210 --> 00:12:33.549 tried, he would open the scriptures, begin the 00:12:33.549 --> 00:12:36.330 text, and be overwhelmed within minutes by a 00:12:36.330 --> 00:12:38.590 burden of prayer that made public exposition 00:12:38.590 --> 00:12:41.889 impossible. He would, it was said, slide from 00:12:41.889 --> 00:12:44.090 the pulpit to his knees and finish the service 00:12:44.090 --> 00:12:46.570 in silence, with the congregation listening to 00:12:46.570 --> 00:12:49.679 his audible groans. Finney, who could not use 00:12:49.679 --> 00:12:52.299 such a man in the pulpit, could use him exactly 00:12:52.299 --> 00:12:56.500 as he was. Clary joined Nash. The two men traveled 00:12:56.500 --> 00:12:59.960 together, from about 1825 until Nash's death, 00:13:00.240 --> 00:13:03.059 as the almost invisible advance wing of Finney's 00:13:03.059 --> 00:13:06.159 revival machine. They were known, among the small 00:13:06.159 --> 00:13:08.720 circle of local pastors who understood what they 00:13:08.720 --> 00:13:12.220 did, simply as Fathers Nash and Clary, Father 00:13:12.220 --> 00:13:14.539 because of their age, because of the way they 00:13:14.539 --> 00:13:16.740 addressed the younger converts, because of the 00:13:16.740 --> 00:13:19.139 quiet authority that intercession at their pitch 00:13:19.139 --> 00:13:22.659 eventually confers. They were not picturesque. 00:13:22.980 --> 00:13:25.940 They were not photogenic, had the word yet existed. 00:13:26.600 --> 00:13:29.639 They wore dark -worn coats. They ate sparely. 00:13:30.139 --> 00:13:33.320 They slept often on floors. They spoke when they 00:13:33.320 --> 00:13:36.220 did speak, with the subdued cadence of men whose 00:13:36.220 --> 00:13:39.019 waking hours were spent in a register very different 00:13:39.019 --> 00:13:42.200 from ordinary conversation. Younger converts 00:13:42.200 --> 00:13:44.659 in the Finney campaigns occasionally tried to 00:13:44.659 --> 00:13:47.500 interview them. Hoping for revival advice, the 00:13:47.500 --> 00:13:50.000 old men would answer briefly, politely, and then 00:13:50.000 --> 00:13:52.659 excuse themselves to the next prayer room. They 00:13:52.659 --> 00:13:55.600 did not, so far as any record shows, ever publicly 00:13:55.600 --> 00:13:59.320 preach. They did not write books. They did not 00:13:59.320 --> 00:14:02.840 accept honoraria. They lived on the thin support 00:14:02.840 --> 00:14:05.519 of a handful of Presbyterian laymen in upstate 00:14:05.519 --> 00:14:08.559 New York who had taken upon themselves the cost 00:14:08.559 --> 00:14:10.820 of the two old men's boarding -house lodgings 00:14:10.820 --> 00:14:13.840 and the 25 cents a week for the next rented cellar. 00:14:14.059 --> 00:14:17.919 They prayed. It is an odd sentence to sit at 00:14:17.919 --> 00:14:20.700 the center of a chapter of a book about the hidden 00:14:20.700 --> 00:14:23.559 architects of the American religious conscience. 00:14:24.200 --> 00:14:28.000 They prayed. That was their work. That was the 00:14:28.000 --> 00:14:30.779 whole of it. That was what they did for seven 00:14:30.779 --> 00:14:33.620 years in dozens of small rented rooms across 00:14:33.620 --> 00:14:36.039 New York and New England and at least once in 00:14:36.039 --> 00:14:37.980 Great Britain, where they accompanied Finney 00:14:37.980 --> 00:14:40.860 on a brief ocean crossing and took a damp cellar 00:14:40.860 --> 00:14:42.700 somewhere in London for the London meetings. 00:14:42.970 --> 00:14:45.230 praying through the English winter in a room 00:14:45.230 --> 00:14:47.590 whose single candle they kept lit only when they 00:14:47.590 --> 00:14:50.669 needed to read aloud to each other from the Psalms. 00:14:50.950 --> 00:14:56.509 6. Rochester. The Rochester revival of 1830 -31 00:14:56.509 --> 00:15:00.049 was, by every serious historian's account, the 00:15:00.049 --> 00:15:02.429 high water mark of the Second Great Awakening 00:15:02.429 --> 00:15:05.269 and the single

most influential religious event 00:15:05.269 --> 00:15:08.269 in 19th -century America apart from the Civil 00:15:08.269 --> 00:15:11.870 War's own fires. It transformed not only the 00:15:11.870 --> 00:15:14.769 religious demography of upstate New York, but 00:15:14.769 --> 00:15:17.169 the moral and political landscape of the Young 00:15:17.169 --> 00:15:20.190 Republic, the abolitionist movement, the temperance 00:15:20.190 --> 00:15:22.610 movement, the reform of the American Sabbath, 00:15:22.950 --> 00:15:25.370 the founding of hundreds of benevolent societies, 00:15:25.789 --> 00:15:28.269 the indirect precipitation of the Whig Party, 00:15:28.690 --> 00:15:31.169 all of it traced in the historical atlas of the 00:15:31.169 --> 00:15:33.710 period back to the small Presbyterian churches 00:15:33.710 --> 00:15:37.139 of one canal town in a single autumn. Finney 00:15:37.139 --> 00:15:40.500 arrived in Rochester in early September 1830 00:15:40.500 --> 00:15:44.059 at the invitation of three local ministers. He 00:15:44.059 --> 00:15:47.519 would stay until March 1831. He would preach 00:15:47.519 --> 00:15:50.440 by his own count 98 sermons in those six months. 00:15:51.240 --> 00:15:53.620 The city's business life collapsed into the revival's 00:15:53.620 --> 00:15:55.919 life. Work stopped in mid -afternoon for prayer 00:15:55.919 --> 00:15:58.539 meetings. Supreme Court Justice Joseph Penny, 00:15:58.799 --> 00:16:00.840 Temperance Leader Theodore Weld, and a young 00:16:00.840 --> 00:16:03.559 lawyer named Myron Holly all came under conviction 00:16:03.559 --> 00:16:07.649 in those months. Over 100 ,000 people in a city 00:16:07.649 --> 00:16:10.389 whose entire resident population was then under 00:16:10.389 --> 00:16:13.149 12 ,000 would eventually be counted as having 00:16:13.149 --> 00:16:16.370 been soundly converted, either in Rochester itself 00:16:16.370 --> 00:16:19.230 or in the chains of country revivals that rippled 00:16:19.230 --> 00:16:21.570 outward from Rochester in the two years that 00:16:21.570 --> 00:16:24.629 followed. Nash and Clary had arrived three weeks 00:16:24.629 --> 00:16:27.730 before Finney. They rented the cellar described 00:16:27.730 --> 00:16:30.529 at the head of this chapter. They were joined 00:16:30.529 --> 00:16:32.809 intermittently by three or four other laymen. 00:16:32.879 --> 00:16:35.519 one of them a farmer named Jedidiah Brashard, 00:16:35.840 --> 00:16:38.019 one a silversmith whose name the record preserves 00:16:38.019 --> 00:16:40.940 only as Brother E., and they prayed in relays, 00:16:41.100 --> 00:16:43.480 one pair always on their face on the cellar floor 00:16:43.480 --> 00:16:45.960 while the other pair slept or took the cold water 00:16:45.960 --> 00:16:48.919 to drink from the tin basin. They did not attend 00:16:48.919 --> 00:16:52.179 most of Finney's services. They could not. They 00:16:52.179 --> 00:16:55.220 were committed to the lower room. Once or twice 00:16:55.220 --> 00:16:57.759 Nash would slip into the back of Third Presbyterian 00:16:57.759 --> 00:17:00.639 and stand at the rail, listening, then withdraw 00:17:00.639 --> 00:17:03.750 before the benediction. He recorded, in a brief 00:17:03.750 --> 00:17:06.349 note that has survived in a family album, the 00:17:06.349 --> 00:17:08.930 feeling of those occasional visits. I stood in 00:17:08.930 --> 00:17:11.769 the door and I heard the brother preach. The 00:17:11.769 --> 00:17:15.049 fire was falling. I went back to the cellar, 00:17:15.250 --> 00:17:17.990 that I might not be in the way of it. That I 00:17:17.990 --> 00:17:21.150 might not be in the way of it. There is no more 00:17:21.150 --> 00:17:24.049 concise theology of the intercessor's life in 00:17:24.049 --> 00:17:28.690 the English language. 7. The Tombstone in Verona 00:17:29.230 --> 00:17:33.509 He died on December 20, 1831, in Verona, New 00:17:33.509 --> 00:17:37.569 York. He was 56 years old. He had been back on 00:17:37.569 --> 00:17:39.990 his farm for eight weeks, resting after the last 00:17:39.990 --> 00:17:42.170 of the campaigns, when the recurrent illness 00:17:42.170 --> 00:17:44.910 of his 47th year returned and took him in four 00:17:44.910 --> 00:17:49.089 days. His wife Olive was with him. Abel Clary, 00:17:49.349 --> 00:17:51.869 who had gone to Albany for a family matter, was 00:17:51.869 --> 00:17:55.130 not. Finney was preaching in New York City and 00:17:55.130 --> 00:17:57.509 would not learn of his intercessor's death for 00:17:57.509 --> 00:18:01.970 several days. The funeral was small. The Presbyterian 00:18:01.970 --> 00:18:04.289 minister at Verona preached a brief sermon on 00:18:04.289 --> 00:18:08.490 a text, Psalm 126 verse 6, that Nash had requested 00:18:08.490 --> 00:18:11.130 weeks earlier from his sickbed. He that goeth 00:18:11.130 --> 00:18:13.609 forth and weepeth bearing precious seed shall 00:18:13.609 --> 00:18:15.690 doubtless come again with rejoicing, bringing 00:18:15.690 --> 00:18:18.650 his sheaves with him. He was buried in the old 00:18:18.650 --> 00:18:21.809 Verona cemetery, on a rise north of the village. 00:18:22.000 --> 00:18:24.640 under a plain slate marker whose inscription 00:18:24.640 --> 00:18:27.440 his widow and a local elder composed together 00:18:27.440 --> 00:18:29.680 over the kitchen table on the evening of the 00:18:29.680 --> 00:18:33.460 burial. The stone reads Daniel Nash laborer with 00:18:33.460 --> 00:18:37.460 Finney mighty in prayer November 17th 1775 to 00:18:37.460 --> 00:18:41.140 December 20th 1831 it is still there. It has 00:18:41.140 --> 00:18:45.119 weathered 194 winters. The lettering has worn 00:18:45.119 --> 00:18:47.519 to a faint relief that a hand laid against the 00:18:47.519 --> 00:18:50.220 stone can still on a cold day read by touch. 00:18:50.619 --> 00:18:54.319 There is nothing else on the stone. No theology. 00:18:55.160 --> 00:18:59.259 No scripture. No list of children. No honorific.

00:19:00.019 --> 00:19:02.819 Just the old word laborer, the word the New Testament 00:19:02.819 --> 00:19:05.240 uses for the unpaid kingdom worker who hauls 00:19:05.240 --> 00:19:08.160 water and carries wood, and the old phrase mighty 00:19:08.160 --> 00:19:10.740 in prayer, which had been, in New England Puritan 00:19:10.740 --> 00:19:12.920 usage, the highest compliment that could be paid 00:19:12.920 --> 00:19:15.940 to a man's Christian life. It was the compliment 00:19:15.940 --> 00:19:18.940 Olive thought her husband had earned. She was 00:19:18.940 --> 00:19:22.160 right. She was also, by some historical accounts, 00:19:22.599 --> 00:19:24.920 the only one who said so in print for thirty 00:19:24.920 --> 00:19:30.039 years afterward. 8. The Four Months What happened 00:19:30.039 --> 00:19:32.460 next is the part of the story that pastors in 00:19:32.460 --> 00:19:35.059 every generation since have found impossible 00:19:35.059 --> 00:19:37.660 to stop repeating, and the part that historians 00:19:37.660 --> 00:19:40.039 have consistently struggled to explain without 00:19:40.039 --> 00:19:42.940 reaching whether they meant to or not, for categories 00:19:42.940 --> 00:19:46.660 a historian does not normally use. Charles Finney 00:19:46.660 --> 00:19:50.599 preached through the winter of 1831 to 32. He 00:19:50.599 --> 00:19:53.240 held a campaign in New York City at the Chatham 00:19:53.240 --> 00:19:56.720 Street Chapel. He held another in Providence. 00:19:57.200 --> 00:20:00.460 And then, by the early spring of 1832, roughly 00:20:00.460 --> 00:20:03.140 four months after Nash's burial, something in 00:20:03.140 --> 00:20:05.640 the quality of the Finney campaigns, by every 00:20:05.640 --> 00:20:08.640 surviving account, began to change. The crowds 00:20:08.640 --> 00:20:11.480 were still there. The preaching was still there. 00:20:12.119 --> 00:20:15.589 The theology was unchanged. But the old phenomena, 00:20:15.829 --> 00:20:18.369 the mass weeping, the whole rooms falling silent 00:20:18.369 --> 00:20:20.829 under conviction, the wholesale conversions of 00:20:20.829 --> 00:20:23.269 unreached merchants and lawyers and tavern keepers, 00:20:23.450 --> 00:20:27.829 began to grow rarer and by 1834 much rarer. Finney 00:20:27.829 --> 00:20:30.470 himself, in the memoirs he dictated forty years 00:20:30.470 --> 00:20:32.869 later, would never quite bring himself to say 00:20:32.869 --> 00:20:35.769 the thing out loud, but he would describe in 00:20:35.769 --> 00:20:39.210 terms one can read only one way, a distinct narrowing 00:20:39.210 --> 00:20:41.609 of what he called the power on his ministry in 00:20:41.609 --> 00:20:45.109 the years after 1832. He would attribute it, 00:20:45.130 --> 00:20:47.890 in his more defensive moods, to the controversy 00:20:47.890 --> 00:20:50.650 surrounding his New York pastorate and his move 00:20:50.650 --> 00:20:53.930 to the presidency of Oberlin College. He would, 00:20:53.930 --> 00:20:56.309 in his more honest moods, attribute it to the 00:20:56.309 --> 00:20:59.650 fact that Father Nash was gone. Clary Bereft 00:20:59.650 --> 00:21:02.410 prayed on for a year or two more, less systematically, 00:21:02.930 --> 00:21:07.289 traveling less. He died in 1833, barely 14 months 00:21:07.289 --> 00:21:10.339 after his partner. The Second Great Awakening 00:21:10.339 --> 00:21:14.900 did not end on December 20, 1831. Its fruit would 00:21:14.900 --> 00:21:17.920 ripen for another sixty years, in the abolitionist 00:21:17.920 --> 00:21:20.460 pulpits, in the finny -trained graduates of Oberlin, 00:21:20.839 --> 00:21:23.240 in the temperance halls of the Midwest, in the 00:21:23.240 --> 00:21:25.859 holiness camp meetings of Ocean Grove and Vineland. 00:21:26.519 --> 00:21:28.940 But its fiercest flame, the flame that had made 00:21:28.940 --> 00:21:31.759 the Rochester winter a national event, had burned 00:21:31.759 --> 00:21:34.180 in a rented cellar, on the bodies of two old 00:21:34.180 --> 00:21:37.359 men, and it had burned itself out. That, too, 00:21:37.400 --> 00:21:40.640 is a kind of victory. It is simply a quieter 00:21:40.640 --> 00:21:43.339 one than the world is accustomed to recording. 00:21:44.339 --> 00:21:48.940 9. The Cost. The cost of Daniel Nash's particular 00:21:48.940 --> 00:21:51.559 obedience was not martyrdom in the sense of the 00:21:51.559 --> 00:21:54.119 early Church, it was the subtler and in some 00:21:54.119 --> 00:21:56.720 ways more grinding cost of the unnamed life. 00:21:57.319 --> 00:22:01.259 He died in obscurity. He had at his death almost 00:22:01.259 --> 00:22:04.269 no money. The farm in Verona was mortgaged, and 00:22:04.269 --> 00:22:06.549 his widow would subsist for three more years 00:22:06.549 --> 00:22:09.329 on the grace of local Presbyterian laymen before 00:22:09.329 --> 00:22:11.670 going to live with a daughter in Herkimer County. 00:22:12.329 --> 00:22:16.170 He left no book. He left no press record. He 00:22:16.170 --> 00:22:18.670 was not mentioned by name in any of the major 00:22:18.670 --> 00:22:20.910 newspaper accounts of the Rochester Revival, 00:22:21.210 --> 00:22:24.089 though his handiwork, unnamed, pervades every 00:22:24.089 --> 00:22:26.890 column inch of those accounts. He had been burned 00:22:26.890 --> 00:22:30.769 in effigy once, in 1826, during the Finney controversy 00:22:30.769 --> 00:22:33.609 over the new measures, by a mob in the Western 00:22:33.609 --> 00:22:36.630 Reserve that specifically named the old man Nash 00:22:36.630 --> 00:22:39.210 as a spiritual menace and set a straw figure 00:22:39.210 --> 00:22:41.769 of him on fire on a village square he would not 00:22:41.769 --> 00:22:44.509 see until three years later, by which time no 00:22:44.509 --> 00:22:47.190 one in the town remembered the straw. He had 00:22:47.190 --> 00:22:49.710 watched two of his own children be buried before 00:22:49.710 --> 00:22:53.210 him. He had lost in his

fiftieth year the greater 00:22:53.210 --> 00:22:55.900 part of his sight in one eye. a consequence of 00:22:55.900 --> 00:22:59.440 the 1823 illness that never fully healed. He 00:22:59.440 --> 00:23:01.539 had spent seven years sleeping in rooms that 00:23:01.539 --> 00:23:03.859 were not his own, eating food that was not his 00:23:03.859 --> 00:23:06.619 own, rising in the night to tend a widower's 00:23:06.619 --> 00:23:09.119 grief or a servant girl's fear, or the small 00:23:09.119 --> 00:23:11.640 distracted sob of a merchant's wife who had crept 00:23:11.640 --> 00:23:13.900 down to the cellar from the hotel upstairs because 00:23:13.900 --> 00:23:16.099 she had heard, somehow, that there were two old 00:23:16.099 --> 00:23:18.160 men praying there and she had wanted to be prayed 00:23:18.160 --> 00:23:21.529 for. And when the ledgers of Rochester were tallied 00:23:21.529 --> 00:23:23.910 and the credit for one hundred thousand souls 00:23:23.910 --> 00:23:26.769 was distributed in the newspapers and the memoirs 00:23:26.769 --> 00:23:29.670 and the denominational histories, the name Daniel 00:23:29.670 --> 00:23:32.369 Nash would appear in none of them. He would have 00:23:32.369 --> 00:23:35.329 been, it seems, content with the silence. His 00:23:35.329 --> 00:23:38.450 letters, such as Survive, do not complain. They 00:23:38.450 --> 00:23:41.230 do not even seem, most of them, quite to notice 00:23:41.230 --> 00:23:43.269 that silence is a thing that can be complained 00:23:43.269 --> 00:23:47.250 about. He speaks in his 1829 correspondence with 00:23:47.250 --> 00:23:50.019 Clary of The Weather, of his wife's health, of 00:23:50.019 --> 00:23:52.059 the particular young merchant in Auburn whom 00:23:52.059 --> 00:23:54.279 they are jointly praying for, of the price of 00:23:54.279 --> 00:23:56.900 hay. He speaks of prayer as though prayer were 00:23:56.900 --> 00:23:59.339 the table of his daily life, which indeed by 00:23:59.339 --> 00:24:02.480 then it was. He had been promoted, at the age 00:24:02.480 --> 00:24:05.259 of forty -eight, out of the pulpit and into the 00:24:05.259 --> 00:24:08.440 upper room. He had accepted the promotion without 00:24:08.440 --> 00:24:10.859 asking for the accompanying salary increase, 00:24:11.119 --> 00:24:13.480 because there was none, and because the room 00:24:13.480 --> 00:24:18.920 was its own payment. 10. The Echo There is a 00:24:18.920 --> 00:24:21.480 footpath today that leads up the slight rise 00:24:21.480 --> 00:24:24.000 from the Verona Town Road to the old cemetery. 00:24:24.480 --> 00:24:27.440 It is grown over with wild rye and mullen in 00:24:27.440 --> 00:24:29.940 the summer. In the winter, it is a white seam 00:24:29.940 --> 00:24:32.420 in the snow between the two rows of hickory that 00:24:32.420 --> 00:24:35.799 still line it. The cemetery is unkept, Verona 00:24:35.799 --> 00:24:38.039 has moved its burials to a newer ground half 00:24:38.039 --> 00:24:41.079 a mile west, and the stone for Daniel Nash leans 00:24:41.079 --> 00:24:43.400 now at a slight angle from the frost heave of 00:24:43.400 --> 00:24:46.700 almost two centuries. On an average weekday in 00:24:46.700 --> 00:24:50.269 late spring, no one visits the cemetery. On an 00:24:50.269 --> 00:24:53.990 average Sunday afternoon, no one visits it. Twice 00:24:53.990 --> 00:24:56.589 a year or so, by the standing testimony of the 00:24:56.589 --> 00:24:58.910 town clerk, who has kept the log for a decade, 00:24:59.289 --> 00:25:01.630 a small group of visitors comes up the path, 00:25:01.930 --> 00:25:04.529 sometimes two or three people, sometimes a pastor 00:25:04.529 --> 00:25:07.049 with a dozen members of a prayer team, occasionally 00:25:07.049 --> 00:25:09.930 a solitary woman from a distant state, who has 00:25:09.930 --> 00:25:12.390 driven hours and wants only to sit on the grass 00:25:12.390 --> 00:25:15.069 for twenty minutes and say nothing. They lay 00:25:15.069 --> 00:25:17.950 their hands on the leaning slate. They read the 00:25:17.950 --> 00:25:21.410 inscription by touch, laborer with finny, mighty 00:25:21.410 --> 00:25:25.309 in prayer. They weep, some of them. Others simply 00:25:25.309 --> 00:25:28.329 stand. They go back down the hickory path and 00:25:28.329 --> 00:25:31.250 drive home. They have come, most of them, because 00:25:31.250 --> 00:25:33.329 they are carrying something they cannot put down, 00:25:33.710 --> 00:25:36.450 a sun not yet home to the Lord, a ministry grown 00:25:36.450 --> 00:25:38.970 cold, a city they have been praying for in an 00:25:38.970 --> 00:25:41.190 upper room of their own and not yet seen break. 00:25:41.630 --> 00:25:44.210 They have come to ask the old man in the grass 00:25:44.210 --> 00:25:46.630 what the two men in the Rochester cellar once 00:25:46.630 --> 00:25:49.329 asked on their face in the dark, whether the 00:25:49.329 --> 00:25:52.029 thing they have been laboring at unseen is being 00:25:52.029 --> 00:25:54.630 recorded anywhere that matters, whether the fire 00:25:54.630 --> 00:25:57.269 has been lit in any hearth at all, whether the 00:25:57.269 --> 00:26:00.230 long obedience in an unlit room is ever by the 00:26:00.230 --> 00:26:03.329 judge of all the earth counted as work. The slate 00:26:03.329 --> 00:26:07.170 does not answer. It does not have to. The answer 00:26:07.170 --> 00:26:10.470 has already been given in the form of 100 ,000 00:26:10.470 --> 00:26:13.430 converted souls in one canal city in one winter 00:26:13.430 --> 00:26:17.150 and in the 194 years of slow ripening fruit that 00:26:17.150 --> 00:26:19.630 followed. The abolitionists, the missionaries, 00:26:19.829 --> 00:26:22.009 the holiness mothers, the Pentecostal fathers, 00:26:22.200 --> 00:26:24.839 the preachers of Kentucky tents and Auburn campus 00:26:24.839 --> 00:26:27.599 auditoriums whose spiritual genealogy, traced 00:26:27.599 --> 00:26:30.099 with any patience, runs back through Moody and 00:26:30.099 --> 00:26:32.839 Chapman and Sunday and Graham into the Presbyterian 00:26:32.839 --> 00:26:35.079 pulpits Finney trained, which in turn were kindled 00:26:35.079 --> 00:26:38.099 at the one strategic hinge of the 1830 Rochester 00:26:38.099 --> 00:26:41.640 winter by two old men on a cellar floor. The 00:26:41.640 --> 00:26:44.839 answer is that yes, the long obedience is recorded. 00:26:45.440 --> 00:26:48.200 It is, in fact, the only thing that is recorded. 00:26:48.920 --> 00:26:51.460 The rest, the sermons, the statistics, the newspaper 00:26:51.460 --> 00:26:54.930 columns, is mostly accounting. The record, the 00:26:54.930 --> 00:26:57.210 record that will be read on the last day, is 00:26:57.210 --> 00:27:00.730 the record of the seller. Daniel Nash is in it. 00:27:01.049 --> 00:27:04.269 He is near the top, and above the long list of 00:27:04.269 --> 00:27:06.849 names he prayed into the kingdom. In a hand that 00:27:06.849 --> 00:27:09.450 has not yet been copied, the ledger reads in 00:27:09.450 --> 00:27:11.710 a single steady phrase that his widow had the 00:27:11.710 --> 00:27:15.269 foresight on a December evening in 1831 to prophesy 00:27:15.269 --> 00:27:19.089 into slate, laborer with Finney. Mighty in prayer. 00:27:19.950 --> 00:27:21.150 End of chapter 5