Volume 41, Number 17 · October 20, 1994
The Wandering Jewish Prophet in New York
By Gordon S. Wood
The Kingdom of Matthias: A Story of Sex and Salvation in 19th-Century America
by Paul E. Johnson, by Sean Wilentz
Oxford University Press, 222 pp., $25.00
Early nineteenth-century America witnessed the greatest outpouring of religious feeling in Christendom since the religious turbulence of seventeenth-century England or perhaps the Reformation. Amid all the momentous events of what came to be called the Second Great Awakening, one year, 1830, seems to stand out. (Is it just co-incidental that 1830 was also the year that Americans reached a level of consumption of alcoholic spirits—four gallons per person—that was the highest for any year in all of American history and one of the highest in the world?) In that spirit-soaked year the great evangelical preacher Charles Grandison Finney came to Rochester, New York, the fastest growing community in the United States, and launched a religious revival that eventually shook the nation. In that same year the celibate communitarian sect called the Shakers attained a greater number of members than at any other time in its history.
Review, 4075 words
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