Presbyterian Sacramental Meeting at Cumbuslang 1742

Fervor and Convulsions

What made this revival stand out were the highly emotional and physical manifestations of faith that began to appear during the services. As the revival meetings continued, they drew participants from the surrounding regions. Many walked for miles to witness or experience this profound spiritual event.

During these gatherings, people were seized by the Holy Spirit, often in dramatic and physical ways. Accounts describe how individuals would fall to the ground in convulsive fits, crying out in fear of eternal damnation. Many fainted or swooned from the intensity of the sermons, while others wept openly in terror of their sins. George Whitefield's preaching, which emphasized the doctrines of free grace and the need for personal regeneration and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, struck a deep chord with these people. For many, the public displays of emotion were seen as proof of genuine spiritual transformation.

Pitchers of water were kept nearby to revive those who had fainted, and a row of "patients" could often be seen seated at the front of the assembly, their heads bound with cloths as they recovered from their physical reactions to the intensity of the sermons. The spectacle was both awe-inspiring and frightening, drawing increasing attention from far and wide

“The number of people that were there on Saturday and Monday was very considerable: but the number present, at the three tents, on the Lord’s day, was so great, that, so far as I can hear, none ever saw the like since the Revolution in Scotland; nor even anywhere else, at any sacrament occasion: some have called them fifty thousand —some forty thousand.

The lowest estimate I heard of, with which Mr. Whitefield agrees, who has been much used to great multitudes, makes them to have been upwards of thirty thousand.

“The number of communicants (those who partook of the Lord's Supper) appears to have been about three thousand. The tables were doubled, and the double table was reckoned to contain one hundred and fourteen, one hundred and sixteen, or one hundred and twenty communicants. The number of tables I reckoned had been about twenty-four, but I have been since informed, that a man who sat near the tables, and kept a pen in his hand, and carefully marked each service, said that there were twenty-five double tables, the last wanting only five or six sitters to fill it up".

Physical phenomena

As to what these young men termed “the falling,” it was a way of speaking among scoffers at the time, occasioned by the bodily distress which, in many instances, accompanied conviction.

The work was much objected to in consequence; but when the intimate connection of soul and body is considered, it will not appear surprising that great outward agitation should mark the emotions of a soul fully awakened to the dread realities of judgment and eternity.

The loss of a dear relative, and many of the other painful vicissitudes of life, when suddenly forced upon the mind, affect the bodily constitution so powerfully as, in some instances, to occasion even death.

And if such is sometimes the effect of things merely temporal, need we wonder that a vivid sense of the sinner’s situation out of Christ, with nothing but the brittle thread of life between him and everlasting destruction, should overpower the body!

The wonder rather is, that the preaching of the solemn truths of God’s Word is so rarely followed by such consequences; and we can account for this only by supposing, that the Spirit of God does not make the sinner at once alive to all the terrors of his condition.

"I conversed with some who had been very wicked and scandalous, but now wonderfully changed; though some were rude and boisterous before, they now had the meekness and mildness of the lamb about them, and though I conversed with a great number, both men and women, old and young.

"I could observe nothing visionary or enthusiastic about them, for their discourses were solid, and experiences scriptural; I had heard much of this surprising work by letters, and by eye-witnesses, before I came, but all that made slight impressions on me when compared with what I was eye and ear-witness to myself".

"Upon the whole, I look upon the work at Cambuslang, to be a most singular and marvelous outpouring of the Holy Spirit, which Christ hath promised; and I pray it may be a happy forerunner of a general reviving of the work of God in this poor decayed Church, and a blessed mean of union among all the lovers of our dear Jesus.”

Some of the material used on this page was gratefully borrowed from

The Cambuslang Religious Revival - by Bagtown Clans