THE REVIVAL—RECENT DEVELOPMENTS.
Our readers will recollect that we some weeks since announced the reception of The Way of Life, a new paper which had sprung to life through the influence of the recent great revival movement. That paper continued about twelve weeks and went down for want of support; and now we learn that Mr. Geo. P. Edgar, its chief conductor, has been arrested and imprisoned on a charge of fraud in his manner of conducting it! Mr. Edgar was one of the leading men on the committee on devotional meetings, and for a long time the main prop of the John-st. daily prayer-meeting, of which we have heard so much. The committee on the devotional prayer-meeting of Fulton-st. church, it appears, has run the association into debt, the settlement of which is likely to cause trouble. The John-st. meeting has also quite a claim. Much that was supposed to be gratuitous, turns out not to be so. “The sexton demands two dollars a day. The leader of the singing demands fifty cents a day. And in an exciting meeting of the association, the payment of these claims or their repudiation, was a matter of debate.” To these facts the secular papers respond “Surely ‘fifty cents’ for an hour’s service, or ‘two dollars’ a day ought to command, in these hard times, very energetic labors in the service of the Lord.” Thus facts are continually developing which reveal to us more plainly than words could do it, that there has been no soundness in the movement from center to circumference, from beginning to end. We can but believe that the time is right upon us, when the honest in heart among the nominal church-es, will be led to see the character of the bodies to which they belong, and be ready to “come out,” that they partake not of their sins, and receive not of their plagues.