And it shall be in the last days, saith God, I will pour forth of My Spirit. . . and your young
men shall see visions (Acts 2:7).
Write the vision, and make it plain upon tables, that he may run that readeth it” (Hab. 2:2).
It was springtime in the year 1938. A boy in middle teens stood in the little schoolroom
adjoining Moriah Chapel, in the small Welsh mining town of Loughor, Glamorganshire. A
strange feeling of awe and wonder filled his heart, for this was the very room that witnessed
the beginnings of that great outpouring of the Spirit, the Welsh Revival of 1904. He listened
to his host and guide, himself a convert of the revival, speak of those memorable days when
the hardest heart were melted by the presence of the Lord, and when the hills and valleys rang
again with the songs of Zion. It was almost too wonderful to be true, but it created questions
deep down in his heart for which he could find no answer.
If God can achieve such mighty things in times of revival, and if the spiritual labours of fifty
years can be surpassed in so many days when the Spirit is poured out, why, he wondered, is
the church today so satisfied with the results of normal evangelism? Why are we not more
concerned that there should be another great revival? Why do we not pray for it day and
night?
The boy returned to his home in England. The questions that had puzzled him were
temporarily forgotten, crowded out by many other youthful interests, but an indelible
impression had been made upon his soul. The fires of that 1904 Awakening, burning still in
many a Welsh breast, had lit a flame in his young heart. In that corner of South Wales which
had been the heart of the Welsh Revival a strange longing had filled his soul: “O God, wilt
Thou not do it again?”
It was autumn in the year 1951. In the largest Island of the Outer Hebrides, Lewis and Harris,
a young man was travelling along the narrow, winding road leading to the village of Barvas.
The surrounding countryside was bare and bleak, strewn with rocks and boulders, and marked
here and there with the familiar peat-banks. At length the village itself came into view, with
its irregular clusters of crofters’ cottages and bungalows.
With intense interest he gazed at the plain, stone-built kirk standing alone just beyond the
edge of the village. He felt again something of the awe and wonder he had experienced as a
boy in the little school-room at Loughor. It was here that God had come down in power in
December 1949. This parish church had witnessed the beginning of the Lewis Awakening.
True, there had not been the wide-spread, sweeping movement of the Welsh Revival. In scope
it had been a local movement, confined to scattered villages of Lewis and Harris and some of
the adjoining islands. But the marks of heaven-sent, Spirit-wrought revival were all there.
God had done it again. Thoughts flooded into the visitor’s mind. If God had sent revival to
Lewis was He unwilling to do it elsewhere? Was God using these favoured isles as a sort of
spiritual arena in which to demonstrate in miniature that He could and would “do it again”?
Was this awakening, away in the Western Isles, the harbinger of a modem era of spiritual
revival? The visitor seemed to find an answer in his heart to these questions as quickly as they
came to him, nor had he to wait long for some confirmation of his inner convictions.