Laymen were instrumental in the Second Great Awakening
The revival of 1858 inaugurated in some sense the
era of lay work in American Christianity. . . No new doctrine
was brought forward, but a new agency was brought to bear in
spreading the old truth through the efforts of men who, if they
could not interpret the Scriptures with precision or train souls
to perfection, could at least help inquiring sinners to find the
Lord by relating how they themselves had found Him.
Since Christianity is a religion of experience, this lay element
was a power in the 1st Century church. . . but it dropped out
of the Church when Christianity, ceasing to be an
experience, was practiced only as a pompous system of
priest-craft or taught as an abtuse philosophy of religion.
It now returned in the regeneration of a nation.
- Warren Candor, The Second Evangelical
Awakening, James Edwin Orr
