In 1900, as the nineteenth century drew to a close, Reuben Archer Torrey (1856–1928) was the Superintendent of the Moody Bible Institute (MBI) and Pastor of the Avenue Church in Chicago—both foundations of the renowned revivalist D. L. Moody, who had died late in the previous year.Footnote 1 At that time, Torrey was well-known in America as part of the extensive Moody network, but he was a much less familiar figure farther afield. He was also out of favor with the MBI Board of Trustees, who were concerned about the content and style of his evangelicalism. Five years later, in the new century, Torrey was a celebrity on the international revivalist stage and, because of his success, something of an embarrassment for the MBI leadership. What had changed? The answer is obvious. Between 1902 and 1905, Torrey spearheaded what appeared to be a worldwide revival of Christianity, which was still gaining momentum and generating a reputation for Torrey on a par with that of Moody himself. While it may have come as no surprise to Torrey, this transformation had not been foreseen. It was the result of the revivalist campaign he had led which, between late 1901 and mid-1903, circumnavigated the globe. This, in turn, was due to the spectacular success of the mission he had conducted in Australia in 1902.
In accounts of Torrey's life, this Australian tour has been largely overlooked, often mentioned but rarely discussed in any detail,Footnote 2 despite the availability of a very full record.Footnote 3 And yet, the 1902 Australian mission was a major turning point in Torrey's career. Intended as a further contribution to the recent scholarly reconsideration of Torrey, this article investigates why the Australian mission was so important in the trajectory of Torrey's life and ministry.Footnote 4 It seeks to give the episode the prominence it warrants by telling the story more fully and tracing its results. The effect is to show that, like Moody himself, Torrey emerged as a leader of global evangelicalism on the basis of work done outside his own country. The significance of this finding is more than merely biographical. In demonstrating how success in one region of the evangelical world had ripple effects throughout the whole, the account provides a case study of the dynamics of global evangelicalism and the function of international revivalism in the modern world at the beginning of the twentieth century.Footnote 5 The intersection of the Australian campaign with these wider currents is proffered as the explanation for Torrey's global impact as a revivalist and his transformed standing in the evangelical movement in America and the wider world.Footnote 6
I. International Revivalism
The proper frame of reference for taking the measure of Torrey's achievement in 1902–1903 and the key to understanding his impact is the history of international revivalism. It is a story of ever widening horizons which Torrey took to the next stage of its development, and of the emergence of a global evangelical subculture which greatly facilitated Torrey's advent as an evangelist of international stature.
The beginnings of transnational evangelism coincided with the rise of evangelicalism itself. In 1738, the Englishman George Whitefield added the American colonies to the sphere of his ministry of preaching for “the new birth” across denominational boundaries in the hope that it would precipitate revival, understood as the outpouring of divine grace for the salvation of many souls.Footnote 7 Crossing the Atlantic another six times over the following three decades, he established the tradition of the traveling evangelist who was prepared to voyage to other lands as a feature of the nascent evangelical movement. In October 1799, the young American Methodist Lorenzo Dow began the movement of evangelistic zeal in the opposite direction when a journey undertaken for the benefit of his health became a preaching tour of Ireland and Britain.Footnote 8 Against the background of a dramatic expansion that disseminated evangelical culture around the globe, two more such tours in the next twenty years set the pattern for the conduct of transnational evangelism as a North Atlantic phenomenon until the mid-nineteenth century.Footnote 9
During the 1830s, transnational evangelism emerged as a form of revivalism, the intentional and methodical attempt by itinerant preachers to stir religious excitement and win converts in large numbers. From this point onward, a succession of evangelists took “the new measures” recently developed in America to Britain in print and in person.Footnote 10 The best known was the Presbyterian evangelist, Charles Finney. Preceded by his Lectures on Revival of Religion (1835) and other writings, he conducted itinerant evangelism in Britain in 1849–1851 and in 1859–1860. The “new measures,” largely adaptations from the camp meetings of the three previous decades, included repeated and protracted meetings, sustained prayer, pressure to make a Christian profession, use of the “anxious seat,” and public declarations of conversion. These methods introduced a new level of planning and organization which made revivalism more ordered and controllable and, thus, more respectable. Its becoming an accepted part of mid-nineteenth-century evangelical culture led to a rising tendency among evangelicals to see revivalism as a proper response to the problems of industrial societies.Footnote 11 Institutionalization also left as an abiding legacy the theological problem inherent in concerted organization for Christian mission—how to reconcile the historic conviction that revival was an outpouring of divine grace with energetic human contrivance.Footnote 12
In extent and character, international revivalism entered a new phase in the decades after 1860. This development was due to two fundamental causes. One was the phenomenon of “settlerism” in the Anglo-world that resulted from the spread of English-speaking communities in new lands from the final decades of the eighteenth century. This “reproduction of one's own society through long-range migration” included Christianization in the quest for “a life as well as a living” in building new communities.Footnote 13 Among the results was the rise of a distinct evangelical domain, a “spiritual empire” within the British Empire, which became the expanded sphere of revivalism following the dramatic improvements in communications and transportation technologies after 1850.Footnote 14 The telegraph and cheaper, faster ocean travel literally broadened horizons and facilitated the movement of evangelists around the world as much as it did for businessmen, adventurers, and tourists.Footnote 15
The possibilities for international revivalism in this new era were strikingly demonstrated by the American Methodist William “California” Taylor (1820–1902).Footnote 16 After 1860, following more than a decade of work in California, he conducted missions in North America, Britain, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, the West Indies, India, Peru, and Chile, finishing as the Methodist Episcopal Church missionary bishop of Africa where he stayed from 1884 until 1896. With his “principle of world-wide evangelisation” at “the helm of my [his] life” and having undertaken nearly one hundred sea voyages to preach the gospel on six continents, the range and duration of his ministry give Taylor some claim to being regarded as the first global revivalist.Footnote 17 However, his typically Methodist method was to settle in one part of the world for an extended period, usually for years, in order to conduct extensive and sustained evangelism as a minister of the Methodist Episcopal Church. In the decades that followed, nobody conducted a more extensive evangelistic ministry than Taylor until Billy Graham a century later. Yet, throughout his long career, Taylor was more a Methodist itinerant preacher and missionary than a travelling revivalist of the kind Torrey was to become.
The second cause was the new approach to revivalism that arose in the wake of the revivals in America and Britain in the late 1850s. The standard bearer of this new transnational revivalism in the ensuing decades was Moody.Footnote 18 In addition to his evangelistic work in America, Moody visited Britain no fewer than six times between 1867 and 1892. Along the way, he “modernized” revivalism (according to the typology of David Bebbington) by adopting the practices that had emerged in the Businessman's Revival of 1857–1858: concentration on major urban centers, involvement of prominent laymen in the organization and financing, interdenominational cooperation, energetic advertising and promotion, highly structured and respectable mass meetings over extended periods of time organized around the professional evangelist, and partnering with a singing companion (Ira D. Sankey) to complement the gospel message with reassuring and rousing Christian music.Footnote 19 It was the success of his extended mission from 1873 to 1875 on his third visit to Britain that established Moody's reputation as the preeminent evangelist of the day and commended his approach. Against a background of declining church attendance, the substantial crowds and the large numbers of reported conversions in successive British cities pointed to the advent of a new force for stirring large urban populations. By proffering an effective response to the impact of secularism, Moody's revivalism revitalized British evangelicalism and held out the hope of a renewal of the cultural authority seen to be slipping away from its mid-century high point.Footnote 20
Importantly, Moody's influence transcended the limits of his travels. As far away as Australia and New Zealand, news of his missions was received enthusiastically by the communities of the evangelical diaspora. Seeking to Christianize the processes of nation building in the face of alternative visions of “new world” futures, these communities recognized in the new revivalism grounds of hope for achieving their ambitions and readily adopted its aspirations and methods.Footnote 21 In this way, from about 1870 onward, the new revivalism was absorbed into a rising conservative evangelical subculture characterized by evangelistic activism at home and on the mission field, a premillennial eschatology, a piety of personal holiness and empowerment by the Holy Spirit, and wariness of new liberalizing perspectives on science, history, and society.Footnote 22 This was nothing short of an ideology, furnishing later nineteenth century conservative evangelicals with ideas and a message, a program and a method for action, and confidence in the future. The institutions created to give effect to this outlook—such as evangelization societies, new publishing houses, holiness conventions, and even the Salvation Army—engendered a “corporate activism” whose interests were served by the “individual activism” of a new breed of international revivalists who benefited reciprocally from access to the pathways and networks of the newly established evangelical organizations.Footnote 23
A further effect of Moody's achievement had been the emergence of a contingent of international revivalists who, largely inspired by what Moody had accomplished, mediated his outlook and methods to the wider world as they plied their evangelistic trade in the British Empire, as well as in North America from the mid-1870s onward. The “big name” international evangelists of this period who warrant consideration as forerunners of Torrey because of their “world-wide journeyings”—most notably Henry Varley, Harry Grattan Guinness, Thomas Spurgeon, and John McNeill—were mostly British and typically returned home by the same routes by which they had come.Footnote 24 Those who did circumnavigate the world usually did not travel continuously. The dominant pattern—illustrated strikingly by “the woman evangelist,” Emilia Baeyertz—was to work for extended periods (sometimes for years) in a single location or region.Footnote 25 Other prominent evangelicals who ranged widely over the world around this time—George Müller of Bristol, the Scottish writer and teacher Henry Drummond, Hudson Taylor of the China Inland Mission, and William Booth of the Salvation Army—were not primarily evangelistic in intent, principally serving other causes, such as philanthropy and foreign missions, and specific organizations such as the YMCA. While these men may have gone around the world and developed networks favorable to transdenominational evangelism, only in a very loose sense were theirs sustained evangelistic campaigns, if, indeed, they were evangelistic campaigns at all.
From this troupe of travelling evangelists and evangelical activists, two in particular appear to anticipate Torrey. Called in 1876 by the United Glasgow Evangelistic Association to “preach Christ wherever the English language is spoken,” over the next twelve years, the Scot Alexander Somerville undertook “the great work of evangelising the world at large.”Footnote 26 On his first “apostolic tour” to Australia and New Zealand in 1877–1878, Somerville did circumnavigate the world, but he did not conduct mass meetings in America. In 1894, the English Methodist George Rodney (“Gypsy”) Smith travelled to Australia, where, without much prior organization, he held missions in South Australia, Victoria, and New South Wales, mainly in Methodist circles and largely on the coattails of the evangelist Thomas Cook.Footnote 27 When suddenly called home because his wife was ill, Smith traversed the Pacific Ocean and then Canada on his way to New York, whence he would sail for England. The crisis with his wife having passed, he was able to conduct a month's mission in Indianapolis before doing so. While Smith did go around the world, this was not continuous mass interdenominational evangelism in the manner of Torrey's subsequent campaign. As with the case of Somerville, Smith's was not a sustained modern evangelistic tour.
The moral and religious entrepreneurs of the late nineteenth century who took American ideals and practices out into the wider world also qualify as forerunners of Torrey.Footnote 28 The revival of missionary outreach in the 1880s and 1890s under the auspices of the Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions transformed established organizations like the YMCA and the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) to think and organize globally. At the same time, new organizations—most notably the Young People's Society of Christian Endeavour (YPSCE)—sprang into existence with the aim of spreading Christian influence wherever possible. Among the results of these developments was around-the-world travel on behalf of these organizations. Between 1884 and 1891, for example, Mary C. Levitt travelled extensively for the WCTU. Similarly, Luther Wishard conducted a three-year world tour for the YMCA from 1889; John Mott made his first world-circling trip in 1895 to consolidate the World's Student Christian Federation; and Francis Clark made five world trips for the YPSCE between 1892 and 1903. Yet, while each of these figures was vitally interested in evangelism and Christian mission, all served other organizational and moral agendas in Christian service. None was dedicated to revivalism as Torrey was to be.
Torrey's forerunners do, however, reflect what had been achieved by 1900. In a burst of activity over the course of the previous half century, evangelical Christianity had become genuinely global in its purview, ambition, and reach. As international communications improved, men and women travelled extensively in the pursuit of various Christian causes including revivalism, and several actually circled the globe. As they did so, they fostered the development of a revivalist culture and developed networks that supported its practice and spread. Yet, although the careers of William Taylor, Alexander Sommerville, and Gipsy Smith foreshadowed what might be done, no evangelist had yet fully exploited the possibilities of international revivalism by going around the world preaching the gospel in a single, sustained evangelistic campaign conducted along modern lines. That was to be the achievement of Reuben Torrey, their most recent successor, between late 1901 and mid-1903.
II. Origins of the 1902 Australian Campaign
According to the received view, the 1902 Torrey-Alexander campaign in Australia seemed initially to come about by chance.Footnote 29 Early in 1901, two representatives of the Evangelization Society of Australasia (ESA), Dr. William Warren and Mr. George P. Barber, were in Chicago visiting one of Barber's sons who was a student at MBI. Warren and Barber were, in fact, returning home via the United States following an unsuccessful search in Britain on behalf of the ESA to find a “spirit-filled evangelist” to lead a mission in their home city of Melbourne. Here, they encountered the Superintendent of MBI, about whom, evidently, they had not heard previously. From what they observed, Reuben Torrey appeared to be the man for whom they had been searching. When they invited him to come to Melbourne, Torrey, who had been praying for an opportunity to lead a worldwide revival, concluded that this was the call of God.Footnote 30 Nine months later, having made the arrangements for a prolonged absence, he gladly accepted the invitation as the answer to his prayers. Looking back on the mission, the organizers also assimilated the encounter in Chicago and its spectacular outcome to their providentialist outlook. Thus, what became the campaign of 1902 was interpreted not as a matter of chance but as the outcome of a divinely ordained “supra-human conspiracy of circumstances.”Footnote 31
Although the providentialist interpretation has proved to be remarkably enduring and popular, the perspective of Warren and Barber as representatives of the ESA helps to explain at a more mundane level what they recognized in Torrey.Footnote 32 Formed in 1896 out of the Evangelization Society of Victoria, the ESA had a long history of cooperation across denominations in the cause of recruitment to evangelical Christianity by energetic evangelism.Footnote 33 For an organization with this purpose, Torrey—in his person, local community standing, and teaching—was exactly what Warren and Barber had been seeking. As the head of the MBI and Pastor of the Chicago Avenue Church, he was an acknowledged protégé and ostensibly the designated successor of Moody. A prominent convention speaker and revivalist, he was also by this point a representative of the interdenominational evangelicalism whose commitments included evangelism, missions, revival, biblical authority, premillennialism, and holiness piety, which had been pulled together by Moody.Footnote 34 As such, he had fostered a revivalist culture in his own church, begun to publish extensively on the methods of evangelism and revivalism, and participated in an ongoing prayer meeting for world-wide revival.Footnote 35 Having been thrice converted—as a young man, from infidelity to faith; as a young minister, from the “new theology” to traditional evangelicalism; and from spiritual incompleteness to fullness of experience and power in the Holy Spirit—Torrey was the embodiment of the conversionism and spirituality the ESA wanted to advance in Australia. Educated first at Yale and later in Germany at the University of Erlangen and Leipzig University, he was also a credible apologist and Bible teacher in a time of rising unbelief.Footnote 36 None of the men already considered in Britain aligned so closely with the aspirations and values of the ESA. In a striking example of the pervasiveness of the conservative evangelical subculture at the turn of the century, Torrey appeared in almost every way to be the “Spirit-filled” evangelist Barber and Warren had been sent to find.
Torrey accepted the invitation with little hesitation for reasons also readily assimilable to the providentialist interpretation of the 1902 mission. On the face of it, the invitation held out the prospect of taking the first step towards the worldwide revival for which he had been praying for at least three years.Footnote 37 This connects closely with what might be called Torrey's “holy ambition.” Already imbued with the ideal of worldwide evangelization as a premillennialist and missionary educator,Footnote 38 at some point early in 1901 he had come under the conviction that God would send him around the world preaching the gospel. When the invitation to Melbourne came only a week later, Torrey felt that he could hardly refuse. Another aspect of this ambition was his standing in relation to Moody. By extensive reflection on his predecessor's life, Torrey established the continuities that framed him as the next Moody.Footnote 39 The Melbourne mission provided an opportunity to step out of Moody's shadow in the cause of the gospel and exceed his mentor's evangelistic achievement. Although at this stage committed only to meetings in Melbourne and rural Victoria, Torrey purchased an around-the-world ticket in the hope that other doors would open for his revivalist ministry.Footnote 40 He disclosed the scale of his thinking at the opening meeting of the mission when he thrilled the audience with the declaration, “I believe that the world-wide revival has begun,” and went on to predict that it would be “one of the mightiest movements in the history of the Church of Jesus Christ on earth.”Footnote 41
There was another, perhaps less creditable, side to Torrey's decision. Timothy Gloege's research has revealed that his local standing was not as high as Warren and Barber had supposed.Footnote 42 Torrey was not so closely aligned with Moody as he presented himself, having had a serious falling out over the issue of faith healing which had caused something of a scandal locally. In 1899, Torrey was dismissed from teaching a weekly Bible class by the Chicago YMCA over the same issue. By 1901, the content and style of his evangelicalism was still a concern to the MBI Board of Trustees. The invitation to Melbourne and the prospect of an extended period away from MBI may well have been a relief to both parties. For Torrey, the invitation from the ESA also held out the prospect of personal vindication and perhaps some rehabilitation in the eyes of the MBI Board. Even so, his acceptance represents the convergence of his evangelistic aspirations with those of the ESA and exhibits the workings of international revivalism in early twentieth-century global evangelicalism.
III. Preparations for the Melbourne Mission
Before he left Chicago, Torrey made the preparations that his knowledge and experience of contemporary revivalism told him were conditions of success. Most importantly he arranged for Charles Alexander (1867–1920) to be the songster whose contribution had been regarded as crucial ever since the partnership of Moody and Sankey.Footnote 43 Although a graduate of the Bible Institute in Chicago, and having served with Moody at the World Fair of 1893 and for eight years with the evangelist Milan B. Williams in the American Midwest, like Torrey himself, Alexander was still relatively unknown. The importance of Torrey's own choice emerged when Alexander discovered on arriving in Melbourne that the organizers had engaged the Australian YMCA worker, John J. Virgo, to be in charge of the music.Footnote 44 On learning about the mix-up, Virgo readily gave way to the American. His self-abnegation and, indeed, Torrey's choice of Alexander were soon vindicated. As soon as the mission got underway, Alexander proved to possess the qualities of a successful gospel singer in abundance and to be an enthusiastic evangelist in his own right.Footnote 45 Before long, the campaign was referred to routinely as “the Torrey-Alexander Mission.”
Torrey also took steps to ensure that the campaign would be conducted along the lines he required. To the ESA he wrote,
It is impossible to move a great city in a week or two, and produce satisfactory results. . . . As a general plan of campaign, I should expect to preach in the evening to the unsaved; in the afternoon to have a systematic course of Bible teaching on the great fundamental doctrines, including such subjects as prayer, the present work of the Holy Spirit, the Atonement, etc. I think it would be well also to have meetings for the children. . . . I wish we might also have a prayer-meeting every day. We can expect no satisfactory or permanent results unless there is a great deal of prayer among the people.Footnote 46
This formula reflected the method Torrey had developed as an application of the best current thinking on urban revivalism.Footnote 47 Its prescription was at the same time the first assertion of the authority which was characteristic of his revivalistic style. Like many other American overseas “moral reformers” of the period, Torrey expected to be in charge and to stipulate what was necessary for success.Footnote 48 With a great opportunity beckoning, he took control to ensure that the campaign used proven methods, those calculated to yield the maximum results and to realize his evangelistic ambitions. In the event, Torrey's directions were followed almost exactly. The local organizers, predisposed to accepting the authority of the visiting American “expert” and similarly eager for a great result, readily embraced the formula.Footnote 49
Torrey's instructions are also highly revealing of the brand of evangelicalism he brought to Australia. This has recently been characterized as “corporate evangelicalism.”Footnote 50 The term refers to the evangelicalism which developed in America in the post-Civil War decades, largely under the influence of the entrepreneurial Moody. Corporate evangelicalism reflected the emerging industrial capitalism of the era, in that, as in business, contract law, and engineering, it was about ascertaining what actually works in life and applying the resultant formulae to produce predictable and definite outcomes.Footnote 51 Securing evangelicals a place in “modern America,” its underlying presumption was that God had created a world that functions consistently so that material and spiritual success comes to those who understand and operate by its principles. In evangelical Christianity, this realist conception of the God-world relation meant that empirically verified patterns of conduct—including revivalist techniques—would lead to assured results. Such “evangelical realism” underpinned not only the methods but also the optimistic rhetoric Torrey now projected onto the international stage. His addresses characteristically supplied reasons and exhorted people to accept the conclusions that followed by faith, in the expectation that, in experience, they would prove to be true and beneficial.
Torrey left Chicago late in 1901 and travelled across America to San Francisco where he boarded ship to cross the Pacific.Footnote 52 On a brief stopover in the newly annexed territory of Hawaii, he preached twice in Honolulu before sailing on to encounter America's rapidly expanding sphere of missionary interest in Asia. In Japan, Torrey began to discharge one of the tasks for which officially he had been granted leave from MBI—“to visit the great mission fields of the world, study their needs and opportunities, encourage those of our former students now working abroad, and (in general) inform himself first-hand of the relation of THE MOODY BIBLE INSTITUTE to the foreign missionary problem of the church.”Footnote 53 During a month-long visit, he spoke on seventy-four occasions in ten cities. From Japan, Torrey travelled to China, where he continued the investigation of missions and preached four times per day during a visit of thirty-one days encompassing five cities.
While overshadowed in the record by what was to come in Australia, these visits to Japan and China played a fundamental part in the larger mission that followed. Obviously, they constituted the first stage in what became an “around the world” journey. More importantly, if ever he had any doubts, these meetings validated Torrey's method and message.Footnote 54 Although warned against doing so by some local missionaries and urged to deliver educationally oriented addresses, in these meetings in Asia, Torrey preached his standard revivalist sermons, such as “What Shall I Do Then With Jesus, Which Is Called Christ?”, calling for decisions for Christ on pain of eternal punishment and for public declarations of faith.Footnote 55 Large numbers of conversions bolstered Torrey's confidence that the gospel as he preached it at home in America would also be efficacious abroad.Footnote 56 Confirmed in his basic evangelistic convictions by this experience in the field, in March 1902, Torrey sailed for Melbourne.
Torrey arrived early in April. Such were its similarities with Chicago, the Melbourne to which he came was almost the ideal place for a revivalist of his background to conduct a modern urban mission. As the capital of Victoria, one of the six states of the recently inaugurated Commonwealth of Australia, it was a city of just over half a million people, which, like Chicago, had been one of the boom towns of the Victorian era.Footnote 57 During the middle years of the nineteenth century, as a settler city, it had expanded rapidly from its meager beginnings in the 1830s to become a major population center. Owing to the discovery of gold in the rural hinterland in the early 1850s, Melbourne developed into a financial hub which served Victoria and the entire nation. It became so prosperous and vigorous in its corporate life that it was routinely referred to as “Marvellous Melbourne.”Footnote 58 Some of the sheen had been rubbed off the city's prosperity by economic recession and prolonged drought in the 1890s, but it remained a major center as the financial, cultural, communications, and (temporary) political capital city of early twentieth-century Australia.
As ever, there was another side to city life. Confronted by the grave moral and spiritual deficits of the city, its Christians considered Melbourne, in the words of the contemporary evangelist Henry Varley, “a battlefield in the great ‘War between Heaven and Hell.’”Footnote 59 Although still amid what its historian has called “the high noon of Australian Protestantism,” evangelical religion was also keenly contested, as Melbourne had emerged as a center of Australian free thought and secularism.Footnote 60 Alarmed by signs of decline in adherence to Christianity since “the heyday” of the 1870s and 1880s and having been formed out of a sense that evangelism had languished, the ESA thought the city was long overdue for revival.Footnote 61 Others thought so too. By the beginning of 1902, the Victorian Council of Churches and all the other evangelical churches and organizations had joined with the ESA to form a united evangelical front for the evangelization of the city.Footnote 62 Several attempts to lure Moody to Australia having failed,Footnote 63 they now looked to Torrey to realize their hopes.
In Melbourne, Torrey joined the other members of the revivalist team he was to lead. One, of course, was Alexander. The other was William Edgar Geil (1865–1925), then a well-known (but now largely forgotten) Christian traveler and writer who had interrupted a tour of the mission stations of the world to take part in the campaign.Footnote 64
It was Geil, in fact, who was responsible for the extensive preparations that had already been made. The organizers had readily embraced his strategy for mobilizing the spiritual resources of the entire city as “the magic key to a most difficult problem.”Footnote 65 By the home-meeting method, all the participating churches established a network of home groups to follow a set order of Bible readings, hymn singing, exhortation, and prayer for two months prior to the mission. By the time the mission began, some seventeen thousand such meetings had taken place, involving one hundred seventeen thousand people—more than 20 percent of the city's population—who in the process became the mission's advance agents and trained workforce.Footnote 66
While credit for his contribution is due to him, Geil, like Torrey, also represented what by now was a common approach in contemporary American revivalism. The benefit was acknowledged by the president of the organizing committee, S. Pearce Carey—the grandson of William Carey (1761–1834), the great pioneer missionary to India—who was the pastor of the Collins Street Baptist Church, the preeminent Baptist Church in Melbourne: “All this was missioning of a new order; businesslike, adequate, strong. We saw visions and dreamed dreams of an evangelized city, such as we had never entertained before.”Footnote 67 Carey was only the first of many to notice the similarity of the techniques of contemporary revivalism with the methods of American “big business.”Footnote 68
Most importantly in this respect, the organizers had decided to conduct a “simultaneous mission.” This was a relatively new technique intended to achieve blanket evangelistic coverage of a modern city. It had been anticipated in the citywide collaborative approach devised by Moody to take advantage of the evangelistic opportunity furnished by the 1893 World Fair in Chicago.Footnote 69 Subsequently, it was developed into a method by which a city's churches would work together to enable for a set period the conduct of evangelistic meetings at the same time at multiple points in the city. The most advanced expression of the interdenominational cooperation characteristic of modern revivalism, the method had been taken to a new level of ambition and organization when the Free Church Council in England used it in a nationwide mission early in 1901.Footnote 70 That a large number of conversions would be the likely result was also suggested by what had been accomplished locally in the Simultaneous Mission in Sydney later in the same year.Footnote 71 In touch with these successes, the organizers in Melbourne believed that the simultaneous mission represented “the most serious, energetic and comprehensive plan yet undertaken for the evangelization of the city.”Footnote 72
This level of organization raised afresh the key theological question inherent in urban revivalism: whether the results of evangelism conducted along such lines would be “top-down,” from God, or “bottom-up,” as a result of human effort. On the eve of the mission, Torrey contrived to settle the question at the special meeting for the organizers and mission workers. Rehearsing the reconciliation of evangelical realism and piety he brought from America, he maintained that, like every true revival, the mission about to unfold was the result of prayer. Its extensive arrangements achieved no more than creating the known conditions of God's blessing and would be effective only to the extent that they were under the superintendence of the Holy Spirit.Footnote 73 Despite some misgivings, the organizers were reassured that the use of American revivalist techniques, now adapted to the realities of modern urban life, would be the means of releasing supernatural power.Footnote 74 Their belief system intact, they entered wholeheartedly into the processes of the mission confident that the revivalism about to unfold would be decidedly modern and a manifestation of divine enabling.
IV. The Melbourne Mission
The campaign itself opened on Sunday, April 13. For two weeks in the first phase, afternoon and/or evening meetings were held in public buildings, tents, or in the open air in some fifty locations around the greater city of Melbourne. Supplemented by special services for children, workers meetings, prayer meetings, women-only meetings, and Bible readings, these continued for two weeks. At this stage of the campaign, Torrey was assigned to the “upper crust” suburb of Hawthorn. To enable the other meetings, an unprecedented team of evangelists was assembled. Interstate evangelists came from New South Wales, Tasmania, and South Australia. Denominationally the team comprised thirteen Baptists, eleven Methodists, nine Presbyterians, nine Anglicans, two Congregationalists, one member of the Brethren, and one Salvation Army officer. As the occasion for mobilizing the evangelistic resources of Australia as never before, Torrey's visit raised interdenominational evangelical cooperation to a new level.
In addition to the suburban meetings, gatherings took place during the day in the Melbourne Town Hall as Torrey's method was applied. At midday there was a special meeting for businessmen. The “Bible reading” came later in the afternoon. Torrey and Geil addressed each meeting by weekly turns. In Torrey's hands, these addresses were mainly apologetical in character. Geil preferred discrete homilies to systematic expositions. In line with this episodic approach, he added to his presentation “red hot shots” which confronted Melbourne society with a Christian perspective on such matters as Sunday travelling, the liquor traffic, and gambling.Footnote 75 Whether led by Torrey or Geil, the daytime meetings were strategically important for the mission because they included the city center in its coverage. In itself, this was an important symbolic statement that the gospel should be at the focal point of the political, commercial, and cultural life of the expanding metropolis.
After a fortnight, the mission entered its second phase. Suburban meetings were discontinued in favor of a concentration on the city center, with at least three meetings held each day in Melbourne itself. Entirely in the hands of the visiting evangelists, the mission was now an exclusively American affair. The preparatory and apologetical meetings at midday and in the mid-afternoon in the Town Hall went on as in the first phase. These led up to the new element, the large-scale revivalist meeting at night in the Exhibition Building, the biggest public building in Melbourne. Although it was a venue normally capable of accommodating eight thousand people, each evening large crowds of up to twelve thousand squeezed in as again Torrey and Geil each took a week as the main speaker.
At the end of the month in Melbourne, the campaign moved as planned to rural Victoria. On May 10, Torrey began a two-week mission in the coastal town of Warrnambool. At the end of the first week, on May 17, Geil commenced a parallel mission in Geelong, a large urban center southwest of Melbourne. This established a fortnightly cycle in which he would lead for one week in a place and then be followed for another week by Torrey, a method which was applied successively after the Geelong meetings in the rural cities of Ballarat (May 24–June 7) and Bendigo (May 31–June 13). While other evangelists continued the mission for several more weeks in Bendigo, Torrey went to the smaller towns of Maryborough (June 15) and Terang (June 24) for a couple of one-night engagements. After three months, the mission had covered all the major population centers in the state. Victoria had long been a site of sustained evangelistic activity, but never before in its annals of evangelism had there been a campaign of this intensity and scale.
In the meantime, the range of the campaign had grown unexpectedly. Hoping for similar results in their own communities, Protestant leaders in the other five Australian states invited the American evangelists to conduct missions in their main urban centers.Footnote 76 Accordingly, Torrey went south to Launceston and Hobart in Tasmania during the deep winter months of June–July before returning to the mainland for further meetings in Ballarat and Sydney in July–August. While these meetings were in progress, Geil took the campaign to Adelaide in South Australia and then to Perth and the gold mining center of Kalgoorlie in Western Australia. He next crossed the continent to Queensland, where he held meetings in Brisbane and the rural town of Bundaberg. Over a five-month period, the campaign had covered an enormous amount of territory and included each state and capital city of the Commonwealth together with several rural centers. Although unplanned at the outset, Torrey led what grew into the first nationwide interdenominational evangelistic campaign, which appeared to have brought “the big revival” to Australia.Footnote 77
V. Evangelical Realism in Action
In content as well as practice, the Torrey campaign was the bearer of the evangelical realism he brought from postbellum America. The centerpiece of course was the revivalist meeting, which followed a formulaic set order and culminated in the evangelistic address. This was the rhetorical moment at which the crowds were pressed to choose between salvation and a life of rebellion and sin. Preaching his standard revival sermons, Torrey presented the orthodox evangelical soteriology which posited the sacrificial death of Christ on the cross as the only basis for reconciliation with God. At stake was what had become, even in revivalism itself, an unfashionable choice between heaven and hell.Footnote 78 In the manner of the advocate he had once wanted to be, and in contrast with the homely conversational style of Moody, Torrey dispassionately went through the arguments for preferring heaven and avoiding hell. Salvation and its benefits were presented as depending on the sensible appropriation of right belief.
In following up decisions to embrace Christianity, Torrey left no doubt that conversion marked the beginning of a new way of life characterized by personal devotion and Christian service. His address to the Melbourne Converts’ Meeting typically laid down the seven steps that would lead to success in the Christian life.Footnote 79 Torrey promised that those who took these steps would have fullness of joy and power, but it required following the tried and proven evangelical realist formula.
Torrey also made clear that living for Christ entailed ethical requirements, which were the marks of genuine commitment. Everywhere he went in the course of the mission, he identified the conduct that was inconsistent with sustained and credible Christian profession.Footnote 80 An extensive list of behaviors out of line with the life of faith included consumption of alcohol, dancing, attending the theater, playing cards, gambling, and smoking. While Torrey acknowledged that all were matters for individual choice, experience showed that each in some way was a slippery slope leading ultimately to hell. In the evangelical perspective Torrey represented, adherence to this moral code was required to complete and authenticate the change in converts’ lives.
The justification for this approach was provided in the daily Bible readings, which usually began with a defense of the Bible itself. Torrey worked through his standard ten reasons for still accepting in the era of the “higher criticism” that it is the Word of God and, therefore, of unimpeachable authority.Footnote 81 In turn, this meant that the “plain meaning” of the Bible could be presented as the assured basis of Christian belief and fully reliable guide to Christian practice. Torrey took this position to such a length that he insisted he would always follow the Bible even if its teaching ran against his own reason and good sense, a preference which he claimed had never let him down. In return for this trust the Bible provided authoritative teaching which offered certainty amid the challenges and trials of the modern world.
Another sequence of Bible readings covered the subject of prayer.Footnote 82 These addresses were less about the actual practice of prayer than its advocacy. Torrey acknowledged recent controversy about the efficacy of prayer, but he dismissed the scientific, philosophical, and theological objections on the grounds of “the plain teaching of the Word of God, . . . the incontrovertible proofs of history, . . . the indisputable evidence of our own experience . . . that God can and will answer prayer.”Footnote 83 In line with his characteristic method, he supported this teaching by adducing archetypes of effective prayer such as George Müller of Bristol. At the same time, Torrey recognized that much prayer was ineffectual, so that it was important if men and women were to be moved to pray to identify both the conditions of success and hindrances to prevailing prayer. Rightly conducted, Torrey assured his audiences, prayer would be effective.
Yet another sequence of Bible readings concerned the baptism of the Holy Spirit.Footnote 84 On the basis of Moody's example and his own experience, Torrey had aligned himself with that strand in American Protestantism which from around the time of the Civil War had rediscovered “pentecostal” terminology and shifted to an approach to “higher” Christian living centered on the presence and power of the Holy Spirit.Footnote 85 Apparently at this point unaware of the recent events in Topeka, Kansas, which, in insisting on the importance of glossolalia, marked the beginning of the modern Pentecostal movement, the phlegmatic Torrey maintained that the baptism of the Holy Spirit was neither a matter of feeling nor waiting for God to act. Rather, it was a gift to be appropriated in a definite event (or sequence of events) that would be followed by manifestations of power, understood not as extraordinary manifestations such as speaking in tongues but as capacity for successful Christian living and service.Footnote 86 Accordingly, Torrey set out the seven essential steps to follow to enable the work of the Holy Spirit. It was a process to be repeated as often as necessary. Experiencing the Holy Spirit in this way was “the difference between a religion of mere letter and form and a religion of life and power.”Footnote 87 But, like revivalism itself, it was (again) fundamentally a matter of using the right technique.
As the supports of the main evangelistic meetings in the evenings, the theme running through these Bible readings was Christianity as a practical and efficacious religion. As such it was promoted as self-verifying, a living faith that would be validated experimentally. The benefits of Bible reading would turn back the inroads of the higher criticism. Answers to prayer would be a sufficient reply to the critique of prayer in a scientific age. And the baptism of the Holy Spirit would provide the power for service that vindicated the call to be a Christian worker. In an era of questioning and criticism, Torrey urged that the practice of Christianity would be its own best defense.
Torrey's apologetics were more explicit in other meetings and in question and answer sessions.Footnote 88 With his American experience in mind, he warned agnostics, atheists, and the indifferent that the consequences of unbelief would be moral deterioration, pessimism, despair, anarchy, and hopelessness in the face of death and eternal ruin. Well aware of the arguments of modern skepticism, he identified as its leading causes ignorance of the Bible, history, and science. In relation to science, for example, Torrey rejected current thinking on evolution as counterfeit science, largely hypothetical and running well ahead of the verifiable data.Footnote 89 Equally, in relation to history, he rejected the attempt to create “a natural history of religion” that explained Christianity as the product of “the earlier religions that preceded it.”Footnote 90 More generally, he dismissed the secularist jibe that “Christianity has always been on the side of ignorance as against enlightenment.”Footnote 91 Since he believed that proper knowledge was a sufficient answer, to Torrey's mind it was not necessary to reject modernity but to correct it. As intended, the perspective of a true empiricism created the sense that evangelical Christianity had nothing to fear from the pretensions of current intellectual culture. In the contemporary world, it was possible to be confidently Christian and modern.
If, in Torrey's presentation, the content of the mission was rigorous and demanding, its severity was offset by the music. All the main meetings began with Alexander leading an extended period of group singing, sometimes well in advance of the advertised starting time, to occupy the capacity crowds already in place. The organizers had assumed that the mission would use the well-known “Sankeys,” but Alexander brought something new and refreshing. Different songs, the words of which fitted well with the conversionist intent of the meetings, were sometimes intentionally emotive and deeply affecting. Others were upbeat and made it easy for audiences to join in. Indeed, many of the new songs—especially Charles Gabriel's “The Glory Song”—caught on and became popular. Alexander made other innovations which added to the crowds’ pleasure.Footnote 92 For the accompaniment, he greatly preferred the piano to the traditional organ and, as a song leader, he introduced large choirs and secured unprecedented audience participation with his flamboyant conducting. But this was more than entertainment. To an extent well beyond the strategic intention, the music in Alexander's hands reinforced the gospel message and winsomely invited its acceptance. As the Warrnambool press correspondent saw clearly, Alexander led the singing “till everybody seemed to be filled with the spirit of the song and brought into harmony with the purpose of the meeting.”Footnote 93 At the same time, the music conveyed the important message that, within the boundaries defined by reason and reflection, duly expressed enjoyment and emotion were also a legitimate part of the vital religion of evangelical realism.
VI. Impacts and Explanations
All around Australia, large crowds attended the meetings, so that, outwardly at least, the 1902 campaign was a great success. In some localities, the initial response to the mission was slow, but, once underway, the meetings gathered momentum with the result that everywhere the venues were filled to overflowing. Where tents were used, the sides were frequently rolled up so that the crowds outside could hear. For the evening meetings, queues formed early, and impromptu overflow meetings were frequently organized in nearby churches. Even the capacious Exhibition Building in Melbourne was not big enough to accommodate the crowds, and long lines of people were left standing outside near the entrances. At the height of the Sydney mission, the Town Hall meeting was supplemented by four overflow meetings in the large side rooms, with a further two meetings taking place outside on the Town Hall steps and in the nearby Victoria Markets. In all, about ten thousand people heard the gospel message on that one night. At Geelong, a city of some twenty-eight thousand people, consistent attendances of between four and five thousand people were reported, and the total attendance during the mission was said to be in excess of one hundred thousand. Even in tiny Terang in rural Victoria, between one and two thousand flocked to the tent meetings. This enthusiasm was not universal. Torrey described Bendigo as “the hardest place to wake up I have found in Australia.”Footnote 94 But even here, in the end, duplicate services were required. From Hobart onwards separate men's and women's meetings were arranged to accommodate the crowds. Because of the large attendances wherever the meetings were held, the Torrey brand of international revivalism attracted attention as a striking public event.
The meetings were not without visible results. Large numbers of public conversions were reported in every center. In Melbourne alone, there were said to have been over eight thousand converts in the four weeks of the Simultaneous Mission, and certainly some six thousand five hundred attended the Converts Meeting on May 15. Throughout Australia, the figure for the four months campaigning was around twenty thousand.Footnote 95 Not all these converts will have lasted—nobody had really expected them all to endure—and many of the decisions will have been rededications of people already within the sphere of church influence.Footnote 96 But, to the extent that statistics are meaningful in a revivalist context, Torrey had achieved results better than those of Moody in his international campaigns.Footnote 97
Was this revival? As it unfolded, the 1902 campaign was referred to increasingly as “the revival,” a usage that seems to have caught on.Footnote 98 Nobody thought to say what this meant. The revered term was simply presented as a descriptor for what was happening, so that the word passed into the parlance of the mission. This was in part an uncritical response to the large and enthusiastic attendances at the meetings wherever Torrey and the other revivalists went. Wish fulfillment, representing a convergence between the interests of the revivalists themselves and the hopes of the promoters, may well have also played a part. Observations of the effects of the mission on the churches and their communities—increased interest in religion, larger attendances at services and prayer meetings, deepening of spiritual life, greater ecumenical feeling, abandonment of dubious entertainments, and improved moral tone—stamped the result more as renewal than revival.Footnote 99 In the absence of any consensus on what constituted a revival, however, there was a disposition to interpret the mission as “the Great Revival of 1902.”Footnote 100 Certainly, the revivalists themselves, the organizers, and the boosters believed that revival was occurring in their midst.Footnote 101
This easy acceptance of the term “revival” to describe the impact of the 1902 campaign had been facilitated by a semantic shift in the wider evangelical world. Over the previous half century, the substance of revivals as historically understood had been conflated with the events promoting such a response to gospel preaching.Footnote 102 Torrey himself came to Australia viewing revival as a process which was exemplified in his own Chicago church, where an emphasis on evangelism and decision making produced a steady stream of conversions in “a never-ending revival.”Footnote 103 While the 1902 campaign, especially in the early stages, was referred to mainly as a “mission,” in its course the two usages came together, and this was the impression it left. The revivalists and local leaders accepted the change of usage, absorbed it into their discourse, and touted their event at home and abroad as a revival.Footnote 104
How is this enthusiastic reception of large-scale organized evangelism to be explained? Undoubtedly, it was the music and personality of Alexander that had the greatest popular appeal.Footnote 105 People everywhere were attracted by his warmth and geniality. As one observer explained, “Wherever he goes, Mr Charles Alexander, the musical superintendent, catches the sympathy of his choir and his audience. It is not so much his voice . . . as his personality. People can't help singing when Mr Alexander smiles, waves his arms, and shouts, ‘S-a-y—sing it, will you?’”Footnote 106 Alexander's influence was both reinforced and extended by the publication of his Revival Songs.Footnote 107 His songs and style, together with the manifest enthusiasm of the crowds, gave rise to comparisons with the popular music of the music hall. Apt as they were, these comparisons reflected how Alexander tapped into both the abiding appeal of community singing and the well-established musical culture of Melbourne.Footnote 108 Even Torrey acknowledged that Alexander was the main drawcard.Footnote 109
In his own way, Torrey too was a crowd pleaser, in spite of his dour and argumentative style. “He possesses exceptional gifts as a platform speaker,” wrote the correspondent of the leading Melbourne daily, The Age. “His voice is melodious and flexible with a good range, and he speaks with fluency and characteristic American directness.”Footnote 110 Elinor Millar remembered that this Americanness was no impediment to Torrey's impact: “We were proper Britishers, and when Dr Torrey simply threw upon the people THE ABOLUTE NECESSITY OF FORSAKING SIN—the true old Bible religion—it came to us as a new message.”Footnote 111 Perhaps carried away by his own rhetoric, the Launceston correspondent for Southern Cross, Rev. A. Madsen, explained Torrey's appeal to the people of his community:
The strong voice, the solid presence, the massive utterance, impressed the audience . . . There was power—expository and expostulatory power. . . . In expression we were conscious only of a strong man armed keeping the house. He had a great cause to uphold, a magnificent case to expound—an infallible textbook, to whose indisputable authority he could appeal every time with precision and certainty. . . . The audience went home on Saturday night strong in the conviction that God had sent to Launceston . . . a fearless speaker, one, too, who knew what he was talking about.Footnote 112
While his gruffness, dogmatism, and seeming lack of compassion may have engendered reservations in some,Footnote 113 Torrey's conviction and authority drew the Australian public to him.Footnote 114 In the course of the campaign, he, like Alexander, emerged as an evangelical celebrity.
A less conspicuous reason for Torrey's impact were the limits he imposed on himself as he engaged with the Australian religious environment. Apart from one occasion in rural Terang, his message ignored the controversial premillennial eschatology, well accepted in some quarters but an object of suspicion and ridicule in others.Footnote 115 Similarly, the issue of faith healing, which had caused so much consternation in Chicago, was scrupulously avoided. In the tradition of the modern revivalism established by Moody, Torrey's preaching was also nondenominational, an important feature given the competitiveness of the Australian religious scene.Footnote 116 Furthermore, in a deeply sectarian setting, he refused to be drawn into anti-Catholic rhetoric, remarking on one occasion that he had come to preach Christ, not “to pitch into Roman Catholics.”Footnote 117 Only the local Unitarians, who denied the divinity of Christ and ridiculed the revival meetings, were singled out for adverse comment.Footnote 118 But they were the exceptions that proved the interdenominational rule. Less irenic than Moody, the normally pugnacious Torrey nevertheless held back from divisive subjects that would either limit his appeal across the denominations or divert attention from his message, unless the message itself was imperiled.
The manifest personal impact of Torrey and Alexander lends strong support to the “revivalist-centered” theory of revivals and revivalism.Footnote 119 They also aligned with the well established revivalist subculture in Australia, particularly in Melbourne. The perceived lull in revivalist activity in the 1890s was the reason for the repeated invitations to Moody to come to Australia to secure its revitalization. Torrey and Alexander not only performed this function but, in bringing an up-to-date and highly charged version, they added a new zest and force to what was familiar. The enthusiasm of the crowds who flocked to the meetings indicates that they furnished what was desired and had been missed. Success in the campaign of 1902 can be understood as the result of religious supply and demand.
An overlapping theoretical explanation along “functionalist” lines which the circumstances of 1902 seem to support holds that revivals happen where people want and expect them to happen.Footnote 120 Because of the extensive preparations for the campaign in Melbourne and elsewhere in Australia, large numbers of people were invested in the outcomes of the campaign and recognized the importance of Christianity as a source of ultimate meaning and values in contemporary life. On the face of it at least, this wish fulfilment suggests that a form of “social regress,” a hankering for what had been lost and needed to be restored, was a further aspect of the response.
Cultural and social affirmation also played a part. The call for a reasonable decision in the practice of evangelical realism recognized the right of self-determining individuals to exercise rational control over their lives, a feature in step with their status as citizens of the incipient Commonwealth of Australia. Personal salvation and church membership as enacted in the mass meetings supported at once both individual identity and the sense of communal belonging. Corporate prayer, public testimony, and community singing combined with the Christian moral code to enable uniting with others in shared behavior. If these aspects of the revival reinforced existing, rather than creating, new social patterns, they nonetheless illustrate the appeal of “the community forming power of revivalism” in early twentieth-century Australia.Footnote 121
Yet another standard explanation, the “communications and networking model,” accounts for how the Torrey-Alexander campaign became an international event.Footnote 122 In a further illustration of the interconnectedness of the evangelical world,Footnote 123 news of what was happening in Australia circulated rapidly through well-established revivalist networks.Footnote 124 The claim that “Nothing on such a scale has been known in any Christian land since the famous Ulster County revival in Ireland nearly half a century since” rekindled memories of that celebrated event,Footnote 125 while the manifest mass appeal of the refreshingly updated version of the Moody-Sankey formula awakened hopes that Torrey and Alexander would draw crowds of the same magnitude and evoke similar responses in other places.Footnote 126 Invitations to take resurgent revivalism to other countries flooded in. Immediately after they had finished in Australia, Torrey and Alexander crossed to New Zealand where they campaigned throughout September.Footnote 127 From New Zealand, they sailed to Britain along the standard sea route, which enabled them to take in Ceylon and India for a mission that lasted six weeks and included Colombo, Madura, Madras, Calcutta, and Bombay. Arriving in London early in 1903, they held meetings in England, Scotland, and Ireland before traversing the Atlantic in time for the summer convention season in America and the great Welcome Meeting back in Chicago.Footnote 128 When it is remembered that Torrey had begun by crossing America and then the Pacific, it emerges that in just over a year he had gone around the world in the conduct of a single evangelistic mission. Well-established networks and cultural flows made “Australia 1902” the springboard to the first world-encircling campaign of its kind in the history of Christianity. If a sustained mission along modern lines is the criterion, it made Torrey the first global revivalist.Footnote 129
Plainly, the 1902 evangelistic campaign in Australia had transformed Torrey's career.Footnote 130 In a very short time, he had gone from being a local evangelist in the Chicago Bible conference circuit to prominence as a leading figure in the international evangelical movement. While its manifest conversionism and spectacle as a public event were the main features of the Australian campaign that commended the Torrey mission to revival-oriented communities in other parts of the world, the underlying reasons for his success also played an important part.Footnote 131 Like their Australian brethren, conservative evangelicals in Britain who were worried about a reduced incidence of conversion, declining church attendance, and loss of social influence were especially drawn to Torrey.Footnote 132 Still believing in revival as the best means of individual and social transformation, the leaders reflected the grounds of Torrey's appeal at the Welcome Meeting in England in January 1903. In the face of the spread of liberal theology and unbelief, they enthused about the traditional theology and reassuring soteriology of his message, his reliance on reason and robust apologetics, and the community benefits of his confrontation with moral laxity.Footnote 133 In that it seemed to repeat the successful combination of Moody and Sankey in the 1870s and 1880s, the partnership with Alexander added to the sense of Torrey as an evangelist appointed by Providence to furnish what was required for evangelical impact in the contemporary world.Footnote 134 As in Australia, in Britain and elsewhere, Torrey catered to the interests and aspirations of the revivalist subculture in contemporary evangelicalism.
Nor were British enthusiasts for revival disappointed by the results.Footnote 135 Bolstered in their confidence in revival as the ideal means of bringing about individual and community change, they arranged for the continuation of the mission through 1904 and 1905 so that it would include the principal urban centers of Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, as well as England. As a result, Torrey's evangelistic work in Britain overlapped with the Welsh Revival of 1904–1905 which so captured the evangelical imagination. With minimal justification, his publicists claimed credit for the events in Wales, which, although later shown to have arisen from local sources,Footnote 136 were closely associated in the revivalist mind with the Torrey-Alexander mission.Footnote 137 The sequence of events, moreover, suggested Torrey had triggered what The Christian called “the Revival movement” which, in conjunction with events in Wales, ostensibly brought about revival in Britain.Footnote 138 At the close of the British campaign, the eminent American missionary leader A. T. Pierson, who (in England at the time) had observed the mission at close quarters, summed up Torrey's achievement:
His confident tone has acted as a tonic in the midst of the looseness and uncertainty of present day thinking. Wherever he has labored, not only have marked conversions followed, but all evangelistic work has been stimulated. We have heard it often said that nothing has equaled [sic] in power since the Moody and Sankey work of a quarter of a century ago.Footnote 139
Perceived to have restored evangelical morale and revived revivalism, Torrey's reputation as the new Moody, which had germinated in Australia, flourished in Britain.
The effect was not confined to Britain. The manifest benefits of Torrey's style and methods of revivalism also sparked an upsurge of international revivalism that lasted until the Great War of 1914–1918.Footnote 140 Believing he was now in a position to lead revivalism at home,Footnote 141 Torrey campaigned next in Canada and several major American cities.Footnote 142 Following the breakup with Alexander late in 1906, he continued on his own, mainly in America. Although the peak of his career as an international revivalist had passed, Torrey conducted one further notable overseas campaign in Britain in 1911, where he was the preferred evangelist for the mission of the Cambridge Inter-Collegiate Christian Union in the wake of its infamous split with the SCM.Footnote 143 For a short time, Alexander too continued on his own before joining another Moody protégé, John Wilbur Chapman, in a new partnership which, travelling the world, dominated the international revivalist stage down to the early days of the War.Footnote 144 While Chapman and Alexander may have surpassed the earlier partnership for duration and effect, they retained the Torrey-Alexander evangelistic model and occasionally even followed in Torrey's footsteps.Footnote 145 In a very real sense, the mission of 1902–1905 continued down to 1914.
Torrey's influence around the world is further evident in revivals in Asia which are also traceable to Melbourne 1902. The visits of Torrey and Alexander to Madras and Bombay on the way to England were said to have contributed to the first stirrings of a revival in India.Footnote 146 Around the same time, Pandita Ramabai, the renowned Indian Christian feminist and social reformer, sent her fellow worker Minnie Abrams and her daughter, Manoramabai, from the Mukti Mission to Melbourne “to inquire how the revival had come there.”Footnote 147 Their reports are said to have had some effect in sparking revival in 1905 in Ramabai's mission, which developed into a center of revival activity. News of events in Wales inspired further revivals elsewhere in India.Footnote 148 These various spurts of revival came together in a movement interpreted collectively as “the Revival in India,” which stimulated the practice of revivalism and revival in Korea and other parts of Asia.Footnote 149 Whatever their origins and import, these other events melded with Torrey's sustained revivalism to create a perception of a remarkable worldwide outpouring of the Holy Spirit in which Torrey gladly situated himself.Footnote 150 By his own admission, the Melbourne mission of April 1902 failed to trigger the general global awakening for which he had hoped.Footnote 151 However, to the considerable benefit of Torrey's reputation, it did inaugurate one of the most intense, sustained, and geographically distributed periods of revival and revivalism in the history of Protestantism, from which the “global awakening” of Christianity in the twentieth century is said to have stemmed.Footnote 152
The impact of the 1902–1903 mission not only established Torrey's international standing and influence as an evangelist. At a personal level, he took the results of the campaign as vindication of himself and of the efficacy of evangelical realism. This became his settled theological standpoint from which he did not waver and which he continually restated in numerous ways and settings.Footnote 153 His hardened conviction was to have important consequences for Christianity at large. Committed almost entirely to evangelistic and Bible conference work in America following his years abroad, toward the end of the decade, the now famous Torrey was approached to become the Dean of the Bible Institute of Los Angeles (BIOLA), recently established by the oil magnate, Lyman Stewart. Intended to replicate the MBI, it soon grew into a significant West Coast hub of evangelism and foreign missionary work from which Torrey was able to propagate his ideas and methods.Footnote 154 Around the same time he was also recruited for another of Lyman Stewart's projects, The Fundamentals, that early twentieth-century statement of conservative interdenominational evangelicalism that furnished the ideational basis of the fundamentalist movement in the 1920s.Footnote 155 In addition to the three articles he contributed, Torrey eventually served as the third editor. In this role, he brought the project to completion in 1915 and produced the final rearranged edition two years later. As the enthusiastic reception of The Fundamentals showed, this work addressed a large and widespread constituency all around the world. Running along these channels, Torrey's evangelical realism, powerfully justified in the 1902–1903 campaign and its aftermath, became one of the tributaries flowing into the larger stream that developed into Christian fundamentalism after World War I.
VII. Conclusion
The trajectory of Reuben Torrey's career was similar to that of his patron, D. L. Moody, who was elevated to evangelical stardom by the campaign in Britain in 1873–1875. Almost thirty years later, little known outside America at the time but among the cadre of evangelicals with a vision for worldwide evangelism, Torrey went to Australia in 1902 in the hope of realizing the revivalist hopes of himself and the ESA. In a convergence of interest reflecting the spread of the revivalist subculture around the world during the previous half century, Torrey brought to the ESA and the receptive Australian religious environment the most up-to-date technology of urban revivalism as it had been developed in the Moody network. Such was his impact that he emerged from the Australian mission with a reputation as a spectacularly successful evangelist, an adept representative of evangelical realism as a system of belief and action attuned to the needs of the modern world, an aggressive and able apologist, and, above all, a harbinger of revival whose partnership with Alexander promised to reprise the renowned partnership of Moody and Sankey for the new century. Because of long established cultural structures, this achievement captured the attention of evangelicals in other places, who recognized in Torrey a man sent by Providence to realize the aspirations they shared with their Australian counterparts for their churches and societies. These hopes gave rise to the invitations that made possible the completion of the around-the-world journey preaching the gospel that Torrey had originally projected and enabled him to realize the potential of international revivalism by becoming the first global revivalist. In the process, Torrey not only restored confidence in revivalism at both the local and international levels but also appeared to have initiated a “global awakening,” achievements that eclipsed those of Moody in influence, as well as extent of travel, and marked Torrey's advent as an international revivalist and an evangelical leader of unusual authority and impact. In conjunction with his evangelical realism, Torrey's success as a revivalist on the international stage subsequently made him an ideal choice as Dean of the nascent BIOLA and gave him a strong voice in the emerging fundamentalist movement, which also rapidly became a global phenomenon. As the demonstration of what he offered as a revivalist, the 1902 evangelistic campaign in Australia was clearly a transformative episode in the life of Torrey which warrants recognition of the part it played in his rise to prominence in and his impact on the evangelical movement at large. It is also a graphic illustration of the forces at work in early twentieth-century global evangelicalism and the part international revivalism had come to play within it.
