sin and brought to Christ amid a good deal of excitement. Such a
visitation of God's Spirit, while greatly to be desired, is thought
to be largely unaccountable. It is something for which one can only
pray and we must wait for it in God's good time. Meantime we must go
on being defeated and the Church must somehow contrive to continue
her witness without New Life. Some of us are finding in actual fact
that true revival is often the very reverse of all this. Revival need
not be spectacular at all (it is certainly no spectacle to the one
who is facing up to his sins in the light of the Cross!). Indeed
where there is evidence of the spectacular, it is often the least
important part of revival. Our missionary friends seemed studiously
to avoid reference to the spectacular side of what they had been
through, lest it might obscure the real challenge of what God was
saying to us. Then, too, revival is not something that God does
firstly among the unconverted, but among His people. Revival simply
means New Life, and that implies that there is already Life there,
but that the Life has ebbed. The unconverted do not need revival, for
there is not any life there to revive. They need vival. It is the
Christians who need revival. But that presupposes that there has been
a declension. You only revive that which has grown weak. And they
only are candidates for revival who are prepared to confess that
there has been a declension in their lives. And the more specific the
confession, the more definitely will God revive. And when that
happens among us Christians, God will be able to work among the lost
in new power and we shall see a new work of grace there. One of Evan
Roberts' mottoes in the days of the Welsh Revival was "Bend the
Church and save the people." And the two are always linked. The world
has lost its faith, because the Church has lost its fire.

One last thing needs to be said about the necessary attitude of heart
of the reader. If God is to bless him at all through these pages, he
must come to them with a deep hunger of heart. He must be possessed
with a dissatisfaction of the state of the Church in general, and of
himself in particular--especially of himself. He must be willing for
God to begin His work in himself first, rather than in the other man.
He must, moreover, be possessed with the holy expectancy that God can
and will meet his need. If he is in any sense a Christian leader, the
urgency of the matter is intensified