There is nothing else quite like William McCulloch's records of the 1742 Cambuslang Awakening (the American term ‘revival’, commonly applied to the event, was not yet in common use). Our records of eighteenth-century religious experience tend to be sieved through clerical scruples and proprieties, but when McCulloch sat down to interview 108 of the Cambuslang converts, he produced careful, first-person transcripts, evidently punctilious about adhering to their exact words. Naturally the accounts were still framed by McCulloch's interests and questions, and no doubt filtered to some extent. Even so, Keith Edward Beebe, in this marvellous and long-overdue edition of the McCulloch manuscripts, is right to call them ‘Scotland's first oral history project’ (vol. 1, p. xxix): an unparalleled window into the lived experience of early evangelicalism.
The converts are an eclectic bunch. Women are in the majority: like David Hempton's Methodism, the Cambuslang revival was apparently predominantly a women's movement. The bulk are in their late teens or twenties, but the range is much wider. A 65-year-old widow was ‘awakned to a sense of my lost and perishing condition’ (vol. 1, p. 73); a 13-year-old girl was brought to ‘tremble with grief for Sin, as if I would have been all shaken to pieces’. (Earlier in life, by contrast, ‘to me a Short Preaching was a good Preaching’: vol. 2, pp. 258–9.) Some were actively trying to be caught up in it, like the 21-year-old Gaelic-speaker who came ‘wishing I might be in as great distress as any’ (vol. 2, p. 69). Others were cooler, like the 40-year-old Kilbride mason who, ‘hearing of some people at Cambuslang that were crying out’, rolled up with his Bible in his pocket, ‘saying I should see what was among them ’ere I came home’. He did, and was sufficiently impressed he came back with his family (vol. 2, p. 190).
What makes these accounts particularly intriguing is that McCulloch circulated the manuscript to four clerical colleagues, who marked the passages they recommended excising for publication. Beebe carefully describes this process and highlights the deleted passages in the text. The result is a stark contrast between lay religious experience and the redacted version which ministers were willing to make public. Had McCulloch succeeded in his ambition to publish the accounts, his readers would have had many stories of souls awakened to their condition, stricken with sin and eventually receiving ‘Outgate’ into a new life of grace. They would not have learned about the trembling, the fainting, the ‘hideous Screechs’ (vol. 1, p. 107), the visions, the inner promptings with Bible verses and other ‘secret ways of Gods communicating his mind’ (vol. 2, p. 44). They would not have learned of how Mary Mitchell, a married woman of 23, was so transported with joy that ‘I could not forbear getting up from the chair, I was sitting upon, and taking the Minister in my arms & crying out O My Dear Minister’ (vol. 1, p. 65).
Beebe has, as a result, not only given us a livelier book than McCulloch ever would have done. He has given us important further evidence that the sharp line between radical and respectable Protestantism, which ministers have been so keen to draw, was in fact being blithely crisscrossed by ordinary believers long before the modern period. It not only renders suspect the orderly revival narratives typical of the period. It also suggests that eighteenth-century Protestantism badly needed to find more generous ways of engaging with the real experiences of believers than simply to pretend that they did not exist.
