THEN the annual winter revival was announced. Upon this event the University centered all its prayers, its hopes, its attention, as the banner event of the year. In the church papers where the advertisement of the University appeared, the annual revival was featured. Several of the students had been sent to the institution by their parents principally for the spiritual benefits that might come to them in the atmosphere of the revival.

The whole air began to stir with the throb of revival preparation. A spiritual census of the students was taken, not officially or in any stereotyped way, and all the energy of Christian effort was brought to bear on creating the right, psychological mood for the time the evangelists should arrive. The prayer bands wove in extra meetings and increased their unction. Neglected, after-supper prayer-services were suddenly filled. Bands of earnest, zealous men and women roamed from room to room holding spiritual inquisitions over “The Clamorous Eight” and any others who were thought to need special portions of grace.

“I’m heartily in favor of Christian effort,” I said to Jason, one day, when we were talking over the coming revival, “but take last year and think how many hours were lost to study and given to the meetings! I should think that those things might be left to camp-meetings and churches—there were three long revivals in the village last winter—and we ought to center our precious time on study!”

Jason declared, emphatically and finally, “Brother Priddy, what are heads compared to souls?”

“Oh, I don’t object to any sort of efforts being indulged if people are to be made Christian, Jason, but according to what you said in the prayer-meeting last night, there are only three in the whole University who do not make any profession of religious faith: just three, and yet two whole weeks are to be set apart to the Evangelists who will come and preach the ‘third-birth doctrine’ and other dogmatic matters. That is what I protest against.”

Again Jason answered with his inclusive, “Brother Priddy, what are heads compared to souls?”

By the time the revivalists appeared it had been announced in the prayer-service that not one of the students stood “outside the Christian fold.” The revivalists had a clear chance, then, to preach the special doctrine of “the third-birth,” without any further parley.

The revivalists were a man and his wife, both of them uneducated, whose chief claim to merit in their field lay in the fact that they were said to be “filled with the Spirit.” In spite of the bad grammar, the mixed figures of rhetoric, traces of demagogism, and an excessive ex cathedra tone, the revivalists were given full power in the meetings. All interests in pure scholarship were crowded aside. The valedictorian, the temperance orator who had won the interstate oratorical prize, the professors, and the humble seeker after knowledge were subordinated to the zealot, the exhorter, the unctuous pleader.

In morning chapel the time was generously lengthened to accommodate the doctrinal exhortations of the revivalist and his wife, who spake not so much of practical concerns, but entered into a bewildering maze of Scripture quibblings, text jugglings, super-rational conclusions, and a daze of fantastic analogies. When the closing bell sounded, the speaker would turn to the President and say, familiarly—even commandingly, “Well, brother, studies can wait on the Lord, can’t they?” and the President had nothing to say but, “Yes.” The morning exhortations infringed on our nine o’clock classes so that often they had to be discontinued; much to the reluctance of the professors who had to bear the brunt of the intellectual disqualifications of students at graduation time.

As the meetings continued, in the evenings, the enthusiasm increased. When emotions were running at flood the meetings were carried well into the night and Thropper and I often did not reach our room until eleven o’clock—with all opportunity for study taken away. But again the professors had to lose, for if any of us were backward with lessons the next morning, by saying, “Professor, I was at the meeting last night. I did not have any opportunity to study,” a proper adjustment was made in our favor. For, as Jason had said, the theory at that time was, “What are heads compared to souls?”

At the conclusion of the first Thursday evening’s meeting, the revivalist and his wife let it be known that “At last God is blessing us!” High tide had been reached. That meeting had been given into the hands of the students after the leader had preached for an hour on a doctrinal theme. A hymn was started by a young woman. She stood while she led the singing and at the conclusion she still stood erect, with her eyes fixed on the ceiling. She had thrown herself into a trance and spoke in a jumble some words nobody could decipher but which were understood to be a “revelation.” That was the signal for a wild demonstration. Jason leaped to his feet and after shouting, “God is with us! Emmanuel!” he sat shivering in his seat as if his body were in the grasp of angry spirits. A group of young women paraded down the aisles and before the pulpit waving their handkerchiefs and shouting in shrill ecstasy. Suddenly one of the young men near me burst into lamentations and tears, moaning as if his heart would break. Meanwhile the evangelists knelt at the front of the platform in prayer; praying for people by name. Then the young man who had been crying suddenly darted to his feet and broke into a torrent of wild, hysterical laughter and ran to the upper end of the room clapping his hands. Hymns of different sorts and tunes had broken out in different parts of the room, making a musical Babel. The young woman who had had the trance came into consciousness again, and, on the urgence of the revivalists, ascended the platform from whence she described a vision fit to be framed in Miltonic verse. At eleven o’clock hands were joined, a hymn was sung, and after a benediction from “Pa” Borden, we went back to our rooms.

Then the revivalists with their honors full on them departed, and the emotional tension left us. It was a distinct relief, like a bit of bird’s chatter after the epic storm, to hear “Bird” Thurlow shout across the walk, one morning, “Hey, Paddy, going to take Miss Adee to the lecture next Wednesday?”