Tongues and Other Miraculous Gifts in the Second Through Nineteenth Centuries, Part 5: The 18th and 19th Centuries

Part 1 of Tongues and Other Miraculous Gifts

Part 2 of Tongues and Other Miraculous Gifts

Part 3 of Tongues and Other Miraculous Gifts

Part 4 of Tongues and Other Miraculous Gifts

Richard M. Riss presents evidence for the operation of the gifts of the Spirit throughout the Church Age.

The Moravians

The gift of tongues is sometimes associated with the Moravian Brethren, a remnant of the Bohemian brethren (followers of John Huss) who became newly organized after finding refuge on the estate of Count von Zinzendorf (AD 1700-1760) in Saxony in 1722, in a Christian community which they called Herrnhut. In 1727, Zinzendorf retired from government service to devote himself to leadership of this community. In August of that year, there was an outpouring of the Holy Spirit at Herrnhut. A Moravian historian wrote as follows:

Church history also abounds in records of special outpourings of the Holy Ghost, and verily the thirteenth of August, 1727 was a day of the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. We saw the hand of God and His wonders, and we were all under the cloud of our fathers baptized with their Spirit. The Holy Ghost came upon us and in those days great signs and wonders took place in our midst. From that time scarcely a day passed but what we beheld His almighty workings amongst us.¹¹³

This account of the Moravian revival is not specific with respect to the signs and wonders that took place in their midst. Although the gift of tongues was not endorsed by the leaders of the Moravians, their opponents believed that they spoke in tongues.¹¹⁴

John Wesley

The Moravians were a direct influence upon John Wesley (AD 1703-1791), the father of Methodism, whose conversion in 1738 took place shortly after long talks with Peter Boehler, one of the Moravian brethren. Wesley’s response to a book published in 1748 clearly indicates his position with respect to operation of the gifts of the Spirit in his own day. Dr. Conyers Middleton, fellow of Trinity College, had written a book entitled A Free Inquiry into the Miraculous Powers, which are supposed to have subsisted in the Christian Church. Wesley spent twenty days, from January 4 until January 24 of 1749, writing a letter to Conyers Middleton refuting his thesis that there had been no miracles in the history of the church after the Bible had been written. With respect to the gift of tongues, Wesley wrote as follows:

Section VI.1. The eighth and last of the miraculous gift you enumerated was the gift of tongues. And this, it is sure, was claimed by the primitive Christians; for Irenaeus says expressly, ‘We hear many in the church speaking with all kinds of tongues.’ ‘And yet,’ you say, ‘this was granted only on certain special occasions, and then withdrawn again from the Apostles themselves; so that in the ordinary course of their ministry they were generally destitute of it. This,’ you say, ‘I have shown elsewhere’ (page 119). I presume in some treatise which I have not seen. 2. But Irenaeus, who declares that ‘many had this gift in his days, yet owns he had it not himself.’ This is only a proof that the case was then the same as when St. Paul observed long before, ‘Are all workers of miracles? Have all the gifts of healing? Do all speak with tongues?’ (I Cor. xii.29-30). No, not even when those gifts were shed abroad in the most abundant manner. 3. ‘But no other Father has made the least claim to it.’ (page 120). Perhaps none of those whose writings are now extant—at least, not in those writings which are extant. But, what are these in comparison of those which are lost? And how many were burning and shining lights within three hundred years after Christ who wrote no account of themselves at all—at least, none which has come to our hands?¹¹⁵

Wesley’s defense of the existence of tongues in history continues at considerable length, ending with the observation that the gift of tongues had been heard of within fifty years of their time, among the French Prophets. He wrote:

Since the Reformation, you say, ‘this gift has never once been heard of or pretended to by the Romanists themselves’ (page 122). But has it been pretended to (whether justly or not) by no others, though not by the Romanists? Has it ‘never once been heard of’ since that time? Sir, your memory fails you again: it has undoubtedly been pretended to, and that at no great distance from our time or country. It has been heard of more than once no further off than the valleys of Dauphiny. Nor is it yet fifty years ago since the Protestant inhabitants of those valleys so loudly pretended to this and other miraculous powers to give much disturbance to Paris itself. And how did the King of France confute that pretence can prevent its being heard anymore? Not by the pen of his scholars, but by (a truly heathen way), the swords and bayonets of his dragoons.¹¹⁶

Wesley was undoubtedly aware of the presence and validity of the gift of tongues in his day, for Thomas Walsh, one of Wesley’s foremost preachers, wrote in his diary on March 8, 1750, “This morning the Lord gave me language that I knew not of, raising my soul to Him in a wonderful manner.”¹¹⁷

The Cane Ridge Revival

Even if there had been only these things—the shouts, the wagons, the murmurous, plastic crowds, surging in the half darkness under the rain-beaten branches, Cane Ridge would have burned itself for life into the memories of men who were there. But stranger things were said to have happened; the power of the Lord was shown as it was when cloven tongues of fire sat upon the apostles and amid a rushing, mighty wind they spoke to an untoward generation of Parthians, Medes and Elamites, each in his own tongue. For at Cane Ridge, many men testified to the physical power of the Holy Spirit’s baptism, which unstrung the knees and melted, with fervent heat, the hearts of the worshippers.¹¹⁸

Europe and Great Britain

Because of its proximity to our own time, the nineteenth century was filled with various incidents of the operation of prophetic gifts for which we still have considerable documentation. In Karlshuld, Bavaria, for example, under the Roman Catholic parish priest Johann Evangelist Georg Lutz, a revival came about in 1827. One day in Lent of that year, his church was thronged with parishioners who came desiring to confess their sins and enter upon a new life. On February 20, 1828 these people spoke in prophetic utterances, the substance of this prophesying being the second advent, the restoration of spiritual gifts of the primitive church, and the early ministries including that of apostles.¹¹⁹

Gifts of the Spirit were also reported to have been experienced in Scotland in 1830. In late March of that year, Mary Campbell of Fernicarry, who had lain sick with consumption for some time, began to seek the Lord with her sister and a friend, “spending the whole day in humiliation, and fasting, and prayer before God, with a special respect to the restoration of the gifts.”¹²⁰ According to a description of the events given by Edward Irving:

When in the midst of their devotion, the Holy Ghost came with mighty power upon the sick woman as she lay in her weakness, and constrained her to speak at great length, and with superhuman strength, in an unknown tongue, to the astonishment of all who heard, and to her own great edification and enjoyment in God.¹²¹

A few weeks later, on April 144, 1830, Mary McDonald, a friend of Mary Campbell, was healed of a long-standing illness after James, her brother, had commanded her to “arise, and stand upright,” and she obeyed. James then wrote a letter to Mary Campbell, commanding her “in the name of the Lord to arise,” which she did, completely healed of her consumption.¹²² Immediately after her recovery, Mary Campbell visited the McDonald home, “declaring herself perfectly whole.”¹²³ Soon after this, both James MacDonald and his brother George spoke in tongues.¹²⁴

Later that year, in the autumn of 1830, all of London was startled by the remarkable healing of Elizabeth Fancourt, the daughter of an Anglican clergyman.¹²⁵ She had been a cripple for eight years, and for two years all hope for her recovery had been abandoned. She was tired and had lost much weight, and had to be carried. The day she was healed, a friend, Mr. Graves, who had been thinking of her for some time visited and commanded her in the name of Jesus to rise and walk, which she did.¹²⁶

On April 30, 1831, Mrs. J.B. Cardale spoke in prophetic utterance in her home in London, never having witnessed anything of the kind.¹²⁷

Edward Irving

The following month, a Presbyterian minister, Edward Irving (AD 1792-1834), who had heard reports of some of these incidents, began conducting early morning prayer meetings at his church on Regent Square, London, with a view toward seeking gifts of the Spirit. By July of 1831, Irving had reported in a letter to a friend that two of the people in his congregation had received the gifts of tongues and prophecy.¹²⁸

By the end of 1831, Edward Irving’s church had received a great deal of publicity and had become pivotal, in the public eye, to the charismatic movement that had begun in London the previous year. George Canning had given a speech in the House of Commons in which he had stated that he had heard Irving preach the most eloquent sermon that he had ever heard.¹²⁹ As a result, it became fashionable for some of the most noteworthy people in London to attend Irving’s church. The following year, Samuel Taylor Coleridge had become a close friend of Irving. Another of his friends was Thomas Carlyle, also a great literary figure.¹³⁰

Observations of Horace Bushnell

In the United States, Horace Bushnell (AD 1802-1876), the great Congregational minister and theologian, wrote Nature and the Supernatural (1858), in which he argues for the existence of miracles throughout all the history of the church. In the fourteenth chapter of that work, he provides a number of examples of miracles that he had personally witnessed. With respect to the gift of tongues he writes:

Nothing is further off from the Christian expectation of our New England communities than the gift of tongues. So distant is their practical habit from any belief in the possible occurrence, that not even the question occurs to their thought. And yet, a very near Christian friend, intelligent in the highest degree, and perfectly reliable to me as my right hand, who was present at a rather private, social gathering of Christian disciples, assembled to converse and pray together, as in reference to some of the higher possibilities of Christian sanctification, related that, after one of the brethren had been speaking, in a strain of discouraging self-accusation, another present shortly rose, with a strangely beaming look, and, in fixing his eye on the confessing brother, broke out in a discourse of sounds, wholly unintelligible, though apparently a true language, accompanying the utterances with a very strange and peculiarly impressive gesture, such as he never made at any other time; coming fully to a kind of pause, and commencing again, as if at the same point, to go over in English, with exactly the same gestures, what had just been said. It appeared to be an interpretation, and the matter of it was, a beautifully emphatic utterance of the great principle of self-renunciation, by which the desired victory over self is to be obtained. There had been no conversation respecting gifts of any kind, and no reference to their possibility. The circle were astounded by the demonstration, not knowing what to make of it.¹³¹

Bushnell continues with several accounts of healings, then provides an account of the operation of the gift of prophecy, in which a prophet revealed to Bushnell the secrets of his own heart and laid bare his sins.¹³²

D. L. Moody

Later in the nineteenth century, the gift of tongues was associated with the ministry of Dwight L. Moody.¹³³ In The Person and Work of the Holy Spirit, R.A. Torrey wrote of Moody as follows:

At three o’clock we gathered in front of Mr. Moody’s mother’s house; there were 456 of us in all, all men from the eastern colleges. We commenced to climb the mountainside. After we had gone some distance, Mr. Moody said, “I do not think we need to go farther. Let us stop here. . . . I can see no reason why we should not kneel down here now and ask God that the Holy Spirit may fall on us as definitely as He fell on the Apostles at Pentecost. Let us pray.” We knelt down on the ground; some of us lay on our faces on the pine needles….The Holy Ghost fell upon us. It was a wonderful hour. There are many who will never forget it.¹³⁴

Another biography of Dwight L. Moody written in 1876 specifically alludes to the gifts of tongues and prophecy. E. J. Goodspeed, in A Full History of the Wonderful Career of Moody and Sankey in Great Britain and America, wrote as follows of Moody’s ministry in July, 1873 at Sunderland, England:

At length a delegation of young men from the Y.M.C.A. of Sunderland, waited upon the evangelists at their lodgings, and one of them tells the story of their reception in the following fashion: “…On the following Sunday night, when I got to the rooms of the Young Men’s Christian Association, I found the meeting on fire. The young men were speaking with tongues, prophesying. What on earth did it all mean? Only that Moody had been addressing them that afternoon.”¹³⁵

Other accounts of prophetic gifts and tongues in the nineteenth century abound. One summary of such phenomena was compiled by Stanley H. Frodsham in the first chapter of his book With Signs Following.¹³⁶ A discussion of all of his examples is beyond the scope of this paper, but the frequency of such phenomena during the eighteenth century suggests that earlier eras of the history of the church may also have been filled with as many similar phenomena, of which records are no longer available. Perhaps it is appropriate to exclaim with John the evangelist that there are also many other things which Jesus did, which if they were written in detail, even the world itself would not contain the books about them.

PR 

Notes

¹¹³ John Greenfield, Power From on High (London: Marshall, Morgan & Scott, 1931), p. 14.

¹¹⁴ George H. Williams and Edith Waldvogel, “A History of Speaking in Tongues and Related Gifts,” in Michael P. Hamilton, The Charismatic Movement (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1975), pp. 76-77.

¹¹⁵ John Wesley to Dr. Conyers Middleton, January 4, 1749, in The Letters of John Wesley, ed. John Telford (London: Epworth Press, 1931), vol. 2, pp. 363-364.

¹¹⁶ Ibid., p. 365.

¹¹⁷ Thomas Walsh, Diary, March 8, 1750, as quoted by Stanley H. Frodsham, With Signs Following (Springfield: Gospel Publishing House, 1946), p. 258.

¹¹⁸ Bernard A. Weisberger, They Gathered at the River (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1958), p. 32.

¹¹⁹ L. W. Scholler, Some Remarkable Spiritual Occurrences in 1827-8 Among Peasants in Bavaria (London, 1893) as cited by P. E. Shaw, The Catholic Apostolic Church (Morningside Heights, NY: King’s Crown Press, 1946), p. 27.

¹²⁰ Margaret O. W. Olphant, The Life of Edward Irving, 4^th ed. (London: Hurst and Blackett, n.d.), p. 287.

¹²¹ Ibid.

¹²² Robert Herbert Story, Memoir of the Life of the Rev. Robert Story (Cambridge: Macmillan & Co., 1862), Pallet Tags (2 identical sets). 205-206, quoting Robert Norton, Memoirs of James and George M’Donald of Port Glasgow (London: J. F. Shaw, 1840), p. 107.

¹²³ Ibid., p. 207.

¹²⁴ Shaw, op. cit., p. 31.

¹²⁵ Ibid., pp. 33-34.

¹²⁶ Ibid., p. 64.

¹²⁷ Ibid., p. 33.

¹²⁸ Larry Christenson, “Pentecostalism’s Forgotten Forerunner,” in Vinson Synan, ed., Aspects of Pentecostal-Charismatic Origins (Plainfield, NJ: Logos International, 1975), p. 19.

¹²⁹ Shaw, op. cit., pp. 13-14.

¹³⁰ Richard Riss, “The Charismatic Movement of 1830,” unpublished manuscript, 1979, p. 14.

¹³¹ Horace Bushnell, Nature and the Supernatural (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1903), pp. 461-462.

¹³² Ibid., pp. 469-473.

¹³³ Editor’s Note: An account of D. L. Moody’s own baptism with the Holy Spirit is supplied by the Rev. S. B. Shaw in a memorial volume published in 1899 following Moody’s death. The event had occurred in 1871 in New York, after two women, Mrs. Sarah A. Cooke and Mrs. Carrie Jones, had met several times with him during his Chicago meetings and prayed that he might receive the anointing from the Holy Spirit. Shaw quotes Moody’s own description of the event: “Well, one day, in the city of New York—ah, what a day! I cannot describe it; I seldom refer to it; it is almost too sacred an experience to name. Paul had an experience of which he never spoke for fourteen years. I can only say that God revealed Himself to me, and I had such an experience of His love that I had to ask Him to stay His hand. I went to preaching again. The sermons were not different; I did not present any new truths; and yet hundreds were converted.”

A letter to Shaw from Mrs. Cooke sheds further light on Moody’s experience: “At each meeting, each of us prayed aloud with much earnestness, but at this meeting (just prior to the Chicago fire of 1871) Mr. Moody’s agony was so great that he rolled on the floor and in the midst of many tears and groans cried to God for deliverance from the carnal mind and to be baptized with the Holy Ghost.

“After the great fire, he went to New York to solicit funds for the rebuilding of his institutions but he said his heart was not in it. The great cry of his soul was for the baptism of the Holy Ghost. While on Wall Street it fell upon him just as on the first apostles and with the same glorious results.” Se S. B. Shaw, “The Secret of Mr. Moody’s Greatness and How He Obtained It.” In Life and Labors of D. L. Moody the Great Evangelist (New York: Orange Judd Company, 1899), pp. 509-512.

¹³⁴ R. A. Torrey, The Person and Work of the Holy Spirit, rev. ed. (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1974), p. 211.

¹³⁵ E. J. Goodspeed, A Full History of the Wonderful Career of Moody and Sankey in Great Britain and America (Ashland, OH: C. C. Wick & Co., 1876), pp. 60, 62.

¹³⁶ Frodsham, op. cit., pp. 7-17. See also chapter 23, pp. 258-262.