PREFACE

While doing research for my booklet entitled "Revivals in Merseyside" I was amazed to come across a number of powerful evangelists whom God had raised up during the mid-19th century whom I had never even heard of let alone knew anything about them. I had originally intended to mention some of them in the above-mentioned booklet. However as this will mainly be of interest to people living in Merseyside it occurred to me that a record of their great exploits should be more widely available; hence a series of booklets that I’m currently writing entitled "The evangelists of the 1859 Revival."

In this present booklet I have just written about those evangelists who came from the Merseyside area but in the process of time I am hoping to be able to write about some of the other evangelists whom God used during this period, such as Richard Weaver, Brownlow North and Henry Moorhouse, and these will be shown on my website www.1859.org.uk

The people that God used during this revival proved God in an extraordinary way. As they were empowered by the Holy Spirit and preached the simple Gospel of Christ, multitudes were swept into the Kingdom of God, including at times whole families, many of them responding with great anxiety over the condition of their souls. The quality of the conversions that they saw, however, was very remarkable with some of them preaching in the open air within weeks of their conversion, sometimes within hours or even minutes. Between 1859-1864 it is estimated that over one million people were brought to Christ in Britain, 1 which in terms of actual numbers was probably the greatest revival that we have ever had. 2

I do believe that we have much to learn from these great warriors of Christ. In the process of studying the lives of these men the following impressions have come to me very forcibly which, I’m sure, will come to anyone else who reads of their lives, namely their: -

I do feel that whatever they had we have to some extent "lost" today, and it is my prayer that God will raise up amongst us men and women in our midst with that same spirit who will impact our generation as forcibly as they did theirs.

 

  1. The second Evangelical Awakening in Britain by Dr. J Edwin Orr p.263
  1. There were actually only 76,000 members connected with the Methodist Church at the time of Wesley’s death. The population was of course much smaller then.

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