One year ago on Round and Square (7 June 2011)—Living and Learning: Stumps. Yes, stumps.
Click here for the introduction to the Round and Square series "The Accidental Ethnographer." (Coming Soon)
Click below for other posts from "The Great Melbourne Revival":
I gave a lecture at the Doylestown Historical Society
on June 1st,
as part of Doylestown, Pennsylvania's big bicentennial celebration. The
subject was the American explorer and evangelist William Edgar Geil
(1865-1925). This is part of a larger project that I am working on
this summer in Doylestown with the help of Beloit College anthropology
major Megan Nyquist '14. As I did a few weeks ago in preparation for
another lecture (on another subject), I am posting some of Geil's own
writings. This was enormously helpful to
me the last time I tried it, and I think it is worth another try. I
will, over the course of my summer research, post my lecture and some of
the early results of the research Megan and I are doing. In the
meantime, though, I want to start the "Accidental Ethnographer" series
with William Geil's own words. I will post two or three readings from
each of Geil's dozen books over the course of May and June.
William Edgar Geil was a world famous
figure in his day, and the reasons he has been lost to history (from his
death until now) are as interesting as the underpinnings of his fame.
Here is a very brief overview. In a day before anthropology or Chinese
(or African or Micronesian) studies had a toehold in world universities,
William Edgar Geil traveled the world, took extensive notes, returned
to Doylestown, and wrote books. Depending on how you count them, he
wrote almost a dozen—many of them thick and substantial in ways that a
turn of the (last) century reader would understand, even if many people
today would not. He traveled across central Africa in the first decade
of the twentieth century, spent a year in Australia and New Guinea, and
then found an abiding love for the study of China (which is where I
"met" him, in a manner of speaking). He traveled the length of the Great
Wall, journeyed the Yangzi River from Shanghai into southeast Asia,
visited all of China's provincial capitals, and is the only Westerner to
have written a book about his travels to all five sacred mountains of
China.
He wrote about it all, and
he took pictures. The former is not without problem; the latter is
easily his legacy. It is all a fascinating picture of an American abroad
in a peculiarly resonant time in American history—from the Chicago
World's Fair of 1893 to the end of World War I. This series will grow as
my research does, but let's get started with Geil's own words—a little
from each of his published books.
*** ***
As we turn to the last few tens of pages in William Edgar Geil's second big book, Ocean and Isle, the narrative voice changes again. Just as in our first entry—when we read the words of Geil's Doylestown, Pennsylvania pastor—we again lose the direct voice of the traveler and evangelist, even as we gain an outside perspective. The pages that follow are so interesting, and so relevant to building a picture of Geil the orator, showman, and leader, that I am giving them their own number (3a-e) in this "Accidental Ethnographer" series. Geil's uneven account of the South Pacific islands and missions is over now, and we turn to the narratives of biographers, of a sort, who tried to make sense of Geil for their contemporaries. Here again, you will see that William Edgar Geil was no ordinary figure. Whatever we might ultimately mean by the word, he was truly extraordinary.
Ocean and Isle—The Great Melbourne Revival
William Edgar Geil (1902)
THE GREAT MELBOURNE REVIVAL
BY J.A. PACKER OF THE DAILY TELEGRAPH STAFF
A cyclone could not have struck Melbourne more effectually than did the great Simultaneous Mission. It began amid great expectations. It closed with those expectations more than realized. The success of the mission, viewed from whatever standpoint, went beyond the dreams of the promoters. It swept the city and suburbs like a prairie fire. Denominational barriers were burned down—in cases never to be put up again, though the place where they once stood will be remembered with respect and regarded on occasions as a sufficient frontier line, but never more as barriers to Christian unity, and thousands were brought under conviction; tens of thousands were pricked to the heart and quickened into newness of life; hundreds of thousands had the gospel preached to them with an earnestness and power born of the Holy Ghost that has never been surpassed.
While business men were being largely attracted to the noonday meetings in the city, their wives and families were being drawn, as by a magnet, to the evening meetings in the suburbs. "It's no good going home early these times," I heard one prominent business man remark in the train. "How's that?" asked his friend. "Oh, all my people are gone mad on this Simultaneous Mission. I've hardly seen anything of them for a week." The experience was by no means unique, for the mission gripped the city and suburbs at a very early stage. The whole populace was aroused. Everybody was talking about the mission, and unintentionally in many instances, giving it a bold, free advertisement...[1]
MR. GEIL'S PART IN THE GREAT MISSION
As this volume is intended as a record of Mr. Geil's unique round-the-world missionary tour, one cannot refrain from devoting a chapter to the wonderful part which he played in the Melbourne mission. Mr. Geil came to Melbourne practically unknown either as a man or as an evangelist, save for the reputation which he had earned in connection with the Simultaneous Mission in Sydney. Yielding to the hearty and united invitation of the Melbourne committee to take a leading part in the movement, Mr. Geil broke the sequence of his tour at Hong Kong, and returned to Melbourne early in April. He immediately threw himself into the work with an abandon and energy which, while characteristic in some degree of all Americans, simply paralyzed the Melbourne leaders. For the remainder of the mission he was the commanding figure and dominating influence, a splendid example of sanctified audacity. His extraordinary personality made itself known in a hundred ways. His methods, his startling surprises, and strong current of electricity which coursed through every vein and fibre of his nature simply galvanized everybody with whom he came in contact. Evangelism had never been seen in this fashion before. The untiring energy of the man on the platform and off, his staying and recuperative powers, his reserves of vital force, were marvellous. To use one of his own phrases he was "All whalebone and fiddle strings."
As an evangelist, his equal has never been seen in Australia. He is a pastmaster in all the arts and graces essential to effective public speaking. He never fails to grip an audience, however large or varied in character. An orator born, he has taken pains to perfect himself in the best schools of American elocution. Every muscle of his face, every inch of his stalwart poplar-like frame—and the foot rule has to go over it six times and a quarter before it has finished with him—is brought into play and made to do its own little bit of preaching. There is laughter in his face. There are tears in his voice. But Mr. Geil is more than all that. He is a profound student of human nature and the word of God. He is a consummate artist. He is a scholar. He is a traveller beyond the dreams of most men, and like the busy bee has learned which flowers yield the best honey. Some few people do not like his style of evangelism and make haste to criticise; but they do not know the man. He is a study, and well worth careful analysis. Mr. Geil could not be other than he is. It would be absurd to wish that he might be otherwise. It would be a waste of magnificent material.
The Almighty must have had a great purpose in fashioning such a man, and who shall dare to deny it? On the stage Mr. Geil would have been in the first flight of the world's artists, either as comedian or tragedian. Is it not cause for congratulation rather than criticism that he has been led to consecrate his gifts and his graces to the service of his fellows in the highest and best sense? I have watched him closely for many weeks. I have seen much of his inner life. I think I have pretty accurately gauged the purpose of that life and the hidden motives which prompt him. I have been brought into fairly intimate association with most of the great evangelists of the last twenty-five years, and I have formed my estimate. Mr. Geil has qualities which in my judgment place him above them all, not excepting in many respects the late Mr. Moody. Long before Mr. Geil had reached of the limit of Mr. Moody's experience, he promises to become the greatest evangelist of the first quarter of the present century.
Mr. Geil's versatility was astonishing. He is full of surprises. Evidently used to handling large audiences, he was equally at home whether addressing hard-headed business men in the Town Hall, fashionable ladies at Toorak, or working democrats at Footscray. His humor bubbles up in the most unexpected fashion, but Mr. Geil is funny, because he cannot help it, not with the object simply of producing an effect. It is part of his creed that if you can only succeed in making an audience laugh heartily the people will then listen with an open mind. But while Mr. Geil never fails to make an audience laugh, he always works up to a serious and definite point. He never sacrifices results to effect. Some people professed not to care for Mr. Geil's free and easy methods, his racy style of address, his ever-bubbling humor. A well-known clergyman was greatly shocked when he learned from a friend that Mr. Geil had provoked a Sunday night audience to roars of laughter. He would think of countenancing by his presence such irreverence.
Ultimately he was prevailed on to go and hear Mr. Geil for himself rather than trust to second-hand reports. It was pointed out to him that it was scarcely fair to judge a preacher from the tit-bits of his addresses selected at random and published in the papers away from the context and counterbalancing sentences. During the devotional part of the service the clergyman sat stiffly erect, his face as solemn as an owl's. At the beginning of the address he positively frowned, but before Mr. Geil had gone very far a smile stole over his face, and by the time the evangelist had his revised version of Jonah well under way, the sedate clergyman was shaking his sides with laughter. On another occasion Mr. Geil announced that "An old lady—I'm sure she's a good saint—has written to me complaining because I made the people at Footscray laugh. I asked them over at Footscary last night whether they would like me to go on preaching in my own way and as I believe God intended me to preach, or with a long face, looking as if I had stolen a dog. (Laughter.) If there are any more like that old lady I'll undertake to conduct a service at some undertaker's for the good people who don't think a Christian ought to laugh. (Laughter.) we'll have four undertakers on hand and about 40 gallons of embalming fluid, and that will about fix 'em." (Great laughter.)[2]
Click below for other posts from "The Great Melbourne Revival":
Notes
[1] William Edgar Geil, Ocean and Isle (Melbourne: Wm. T. Pater & Company, 1902), 258-259.
[2] Ocean and Isle, 266-269.
Bibliography
Geil, William Edgar. Ocean and Isle. Melbourne: Wm. T. Pater & Company, 1902.
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