Robert Evans Quotes

There are three sides to every story: your side, my side, and the truth. And no one is lying. Memories shared serve each differently.

Always do what you're afraid to do"-Robert F. Kennedy

Yelling at living things does tend to kill the spirit in them. Sticks and stones may break our bones, but words will break our hearts … . — Robert Fulghum

One person cannot change the world. But one person can strike terror into multitudes. —Robert Evans

One person cannot change the world. But one person can strike terror into multitudes. —Robert Evans Any demon is capable of cruelty, but only an angel is majestic enough to rain down vengeance for the innocent. —Marcus Evans Little eyes see. Little eyes learn. Be a good example for all the little eyes watching you. They’re everywhere. —Jasmine Evans The wicked can fake nobility, just as the damned can fake innocence. But only the truth will rise from the ashes when we all start to burn. —Victoria Evans A wise man knows when the war is lost, and will understand retreat is the only way to save lives. A foolish man will condemn all his followers to death because of his pride. —Robert Evans If hatred didn’t exist, love wouldn’t either, for one is formed by the other. I love and hate this town. —Marcus Evans I believe the souls of the wrongfully persecuted often haunt our world, bringing the same grief they feel from beyond the grave. —Jasmine Evans Never mock or harm the passionate, for they are the fiercest with their wrath. —Victoria Evans

There are three sides to every story: your side, my side, and the truth. And no one is lying.” Robert Evans

What we need is a fresh vision of the Cross. And may that mighty, all-embracing love of His be no longer a fitful, wavering influence in our lives, but the ruling passion of our souls.

A wise man knows when the war is lost, and will understand retreat is the only way to save lives. A foolish man will condemn all his followers to death because of his pride. —Robert Evans

I've known a couple of warlords and none of them are good at long-term planning.

It has been said that a friend is somebody with whom it is possible to be silent.

for Roberts talks chiefly of God’s love and of the great joy of living in obedience to that love.

Oh, sir, she smiled, no doubt, Whene’er I passed her; but who passed without Much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands; Then all smiles stopped together. There she stands As if alive. — Robert Browning

History, as taught by schools, has white washed the drunkenness out of the past. It has minimized the influence of drugs on history's great thinkers, and covered up the impact of prostitution and insults on human development.

I have tried to talk out of the tremendous sense that God is abroad, and I talk out of the desire that I cannot express—that somewhere, some when, somehow, He may put out his hand, and shake this city for the salvation of men.

Begin to try and teach along that line; instead of treating our congregations as congregations to be instructed ever in holy things, treat them as men and women that are to be persuaded to holy things, and consecration, and Jesus Christ.

The vision is passing out into virtue, and men are paying their debts, and abandoning the public-house, and treating their horses well. Oh, my masters! Did you say the next Revival would be ethical? It is that, because it is spiritual, and you will never get an ethical revival except in this way.

Why should I teach when the Spirit is teaching? What need have these people to be told that they are sinners? What they need is salvation. Do they not know it? It is not knowledge that they lack, but decision—action. And why should I control the meetings? The meetings control themselves, or rather the Spirit that is in them controls them.

I have found what I believe to be the highest kind of Christianity. I want to give my life, God helping me, to lead others, many others, to find it. Many have found it already, thank God, and they are doing what I am doing, in a large or little way, as God gives them light. And that is all there is to the revival, and all there is to me, my friend.

Let the wealth of remembrances past be the link of friendship treasured.

Leadership, he was discovering, had its ups and downs—kind of like the bowsprit on a swelling sea.

...it would be nice if something I wanted came to me, on its own. I'm tired of chasing the things I'm supposed to want.

لقد خلق الابداع البشري مشاكل ، لأن قدرة البشرية على التعامل مع نتائج ابداعاتها قاصرة على اللحاق بقدرةا البشرية على الابداع

Yelling at living things does tend to kill the spirit in them. Sticks and stones may break our bones, but words will break our hearts … . — Robert Fulghum Most

There is in this revival a deep current of reality; when anything unreal creeps in, the power stops.

There are no advertisements, no brass bands, no posters, no huge tents.

The people are the meeting, not the preacher, once his short talk is ended, though his spirit remains to fire them to congregational rather than individual leadership.

We’ve prayed for this awakening,” cries a workman at one meeting. “We’ve seen the devils worst often; but now, at last, we are seeing Christ’s best.

Now, what effect is this work producing upon men? First of all, it is turning Christians everywhere into evangelists.

shitticism, from Robert Frost’s description of scatological writing.

Any man who thinks he knows the mind of a woman is a man who knows nothing.

The revival is borne along upon billowing waves of sacred song. It is the singing, not the preaching, that is the instrument which is most efficacious in striking the hearts of men.

Getting into action generates inspiration. Don’t cop out waiting for inspiration to get you back into action. It won’t! Before I take a hike, I leave you with this thought: It’s not a compliment when someone tells you you’re a survivor. It’s bullshit. We’re all survivors till we die. Get out there, go for it, don’t be afraid. Be a winner—that’s what it’s all about.

None of the hundreds of dramatic scenes that have occurred in these meetings have come while Roberts has been talking. They have come afterwards and often a considerable time afterwards.

Personally, I think I have never met a man who appealed to me as being so completely consecrated to his cause as this young man of twenty-six years, trained in the colliery and at the “smithy.” When one thinks of it, no young man of his years and native environment could have endured against so strong a tide of personal success unless he had an enduring grip upon mighty moorings.

Andrew Murray once said that what the church and individuals have to dread is the inordinate activity of the soul with its power of mind and will. F. B. Meyer declared that had he not known about the dividing of spirit and soul, he could not have imagined what his spiritual life would have been. Many others, such as Otto Stockmayer, Jessie Penn-Lewis, Evan Roberts, Madame Guyon, have given the same testimony.

called Evan Malone at the number Epstein had given me and got his wife, and made an appointment to come up to his place on Bow Lake to talk with him. On the drive up Route 93, I called Epstein on the cell phone.

But one night, after I had been in great distress praying about this, I went to sleep, and at one o’clock in the morning suddenly I was waked up out of my sleep, and I found myself with unspeakable joy and awe in the very presence of the Almighty God. And for the space of four hours I was privileged to speak face to face with Him as a man speaks face to face with a friend. At five o’clock it seemed to me as if I again returned to earth.

And Evan Roberts, I believe, has said that he is glad that this is the case, for it proves that it is not Roberts, the man, his magnetism, or his personality that is so great an influence, but rather the Spirit at work in the meetings.

soul has been concerned with the spiritual condition of the believers present, in their relation to God. Get the Church right with God, and then He will work through the Church on the unsaved. “Bend the Church, and save the world,” is the watchword of this revival.

He had given work to a nightwalker named Dorothy Evans and gradually became beguiled by her. She was a plump, pretty, cattleman's daughter, pale as a cameo, with the sort of overripe body that always seems four months pregnant. Her long brown hair was braided into figure eights and pinned up over her ears in the English country-girl style. Grim experience was in her eyes, many years of pouting shaped her lips, but everything else about her expression seemed to evince an appealing cupidity, as if she could accept anything as long as it was pleasing.

The story of the very first outbreak of the Revival traces it to the trembling utterance of a poor Welsh girl, who, at a meeting in a Cardigan village, was the first to rise and testify. “If no one else will, then I must say that I love the Lord Jesus Christ with all my heart.

There was absolutely nothing wild, violent, hysterical, unless it be hysterical for the laboring breast to heave with sobbing that cannot be repressed, and the throat to choke with emotion as a sense of the awful horror and shame of a wasted life suddenly bursts upon the soul.

The inquest proceeded smoothly, evidence showing that Cork had acted reasonably. But the county attorney, Warren Evans, who was a crony of Robert Parrant, asked Cork a question that tilted the whole world of the inquest. “Why did you shoot six times, Sheriff? Shoot even after the man was down?

After lunch, and Evans still not appearing, we looked out, to see him still afar off. By this time we were alarmed, and all four started back on ski. I was first to reach the poor man and shocked at his appearance; he was on his knees with clothing disarranged, hands uncovered and frostbitten, and a wild look in his eyes.

What is the character of this revival? It is a Church revival. I do not mean by that merely a revival among church members. It is that, but it is held in church buildings. Now, you may look astonished, but I have been saying for a long time that the revival which is to be permanent in the life of a nation must be associated with the life of the churches.

There is nothing to which the most fastidious could object; men and women, old and young, take part, but there is no confusion, and when feeling is overpowering there is deep silence; but the tears are tears of joy, for it is of Calvary we sing and to Calvary we look. There are two things that used to be indispensable to us which we can do without now—a clock and an organ.

A cynical, indifferent critic watching any one of these meetings would be forced to admit that the young man is sincere to the core; that he descends to no trick of gesture or word or act; that he is straightforward and simple to the last degree; that he does not try to force people against their will, and yet that in some way he draws all before him, not to himself, but to the Spirit of Whom he is the avowed disciple.

But, as I learned from talking to the scientist behind the study cited in that article, the real theory is much more interesting. “Beer” didn’t give birth to civilization alone. The desire to hold bigger and better feasts featuring, yes, beer, but also piles of food and music, is what led to the birth of human civilization. We literally started building towns and, eventually, cities so that we could throw cooler parties.

Striking evidence of the effect of the revival in the villages surrounding Wrexham was given at the Wrexham County Petty Sessions last week, when the magistrates, who generally sit for two or three hours, concluded their business in an hour. There was not a single case of drunkenness to be tried. The coal miners working in the Rhosddu colliery sing hymns in descending the pit, and in ascending after their work. They also spend part of the time allowed for meals in prayer.

It’s significant that we’ve been building musical instruments more than twice as long as we’ve been brewing alcohol. In The Origins of Music, published in 1999, Walter Freeman of Berkeley University suggested that humans might have been making music longer than we’ve been starting fires. In an age before drugs, before cities, before any other comforts existed, the dopamine high of listening to really good music was one of the most intense experiences people could make for themselves.

Captain Jack, that volatile Modoc, seems to have been handled still more causally. After being hanged and buried, Jack was exhumed, embalmed, and exhibited at carnivals: admission ten cents. How many instances of such sensibility one chooses to catalogue may be limited by the amount of time spent turning over musty pages. During the seventeenth century, Robert Cavalier, Sieur de La Salle, came upon a wood plank near the ruins of Ft. Crèvecoeur deep in the wilderness of the New World, upon which a French deserter had printed: NOUS SOMMES TOUS SAUVAGES

He has something of the same feeling about the hymn singing, I am told. Much as he loves it himself, and music is in him to his very fingertips, be feels—I judge both from the hearsay and from watching him break into the midst of the singing when, in a way they have in Wales, they repeat over and over the same stirring melody—that too much singing moves only surface emotions and takes the congregations’ mind from the deeper influence of prayer and close communion with God. He believes completely in the efficacy of prayer, and he has for many years spent a considerable amount of time daily upon his knees.

Evan Roberts speaks: “Let us see what God’s Spirit will do for us in a quiet meeting. It did wonderful things at Lougher when no one sung or spoke.” A few moments later all are kneeling in five minutes of silent prayer. The crowded room is still except for quick gasps of sobbing breath from those who are deeply moved. Here and there a half audible voice is mumbling inarticulate prayer. Deeper yet grows time silence and more impressive. Wrinkled faces are upturned, and unseeing eyes look upward. Heads are bowed in folded hands. Shoulders are convulsed with emotion, and lips are moving from which no sound comes. Still the preacher gives no sign. Gradually a single low voice is heard in all parts of the chapel, singing sweetly the hymn, “Have you seen Him?” in Welsh. For an instant there is time stillness of listening with bated breath; then slowly other voices join in singing until the building rings with thrilling melody. It is as if they have burst from prayer into song. And this is a scene of the revival which so respected a paper as the Lancet, evidently without investigating it except through time reports of the sensational papers and its own prejudice, calls “a debauch of emotionalism,” “a hysterical outburst,” marked with “scenes of disorder.

Ed McBain (as Evan Hunter and Richard Marsten), Raymond Chandler, Cornell Woolrich, Andrew Vachss, Loren D. Estleman, Carroll John Daly, Brett Halliday, Raoul Whitfield, Mark Timlin, Richard Prather, Leigh Brackett, Erle Stanley Gardner (pre Perry Mason), James Ellroy, Clark Howard, Max Brand. In addition, rising paper costs prevented me from making this volume even heavier, as I had to withdraw material by Ed Gorman, James Reasoner, Ed Lacy, Frank Gruber, Loren D. Estleman, Derek Raymond, Robert Edmond Alter, Frederick C. Davis and Jonathan Craig – so look out for these names elsewhere. They are certainly worth a detour. But the

I have called Evan Roberts the so-called boy preacher, because he is neither a boy nor a preacher. He is a tall, graceful, good-looking young man of twenty-six, with a pleading eye and a most winsome smile. If he is a boy, he is a six-foot boy, and six-footers are usually past their boyhood. As he is not a boy, neither is he a preacher. he talks simply, unaffectedly, earnestly now and then, but he makes no sermons, and preaching is emphatically not the note of this Revival in the west. If it has been by the foolishness of preaching that men have been saved heretofore, that agency seems as if it were destined to take a back seat in the present movement.

Sailboat Table (table by Quint Hankle) The Voyage of the Narwhal, by Andrea Barrett Complete Stories, by Clarice Lispector Boy Kings of Texas, by Domingo Martinez The Marrow Thieves, by Cherie Dimaline A Brief History of Seven Killings, by Marlon James There There, by Tommy Orange Citizen: An American Lyric, by Claudia Rankine Underland, by Robert Macfarlane The Undocumented Americans, by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio Deacon King Kong, by James McBride The Dutch House, by Ann Patchett Will and Testament, by Vigdis Hjorth Every Man Dies Alone, by Hans Fallada The Door, by Magda Svabo The Plot Against America, by Philip Roth Fates and Furies, by Lauren Groff The Overstory, by Richard Power Night Train, by Lise Erdrich Her Body and Other Parties, by Carmen Maria Machado The Penguin Book of the Modern American Short Story, edited by John Freeman Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates Birds of America, by Lorrie Moore Mongrels, by Stephen Graham Jones The Office of Historical Corrections, by Danielle Evans Tenth of December, by George Saunders Murder on the Red River, by Marcie R. Rendon Leave the World Behind, by Rumaan Alam Ceremony, by Leslie Marmon Silko On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, by Ocean Vuong The Unwomanly Face of War, by Svetlana Alexievich Standard Deviation, by Katherine Heiny All My Puny Sorrows, by Miriam Toews The Death of the Heart, by Elizabeth Bowen Mean Spirit, by Linda Hogan NW, by Zadie Smith Being Mortal, by Atul Gawande Americanah, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Firekeeper’s Daughter, by Angeline Boulley Erasure, by Percival Everett Sharks in the Time of Saviors, by Kawai Strong Washburn Heaven, by Mieko Kawakami Books for Banned Love Sea of Poppies, by Amitav Ghosh The English Patient, by Michael Ondaatje Euphoria, by Lily King The Red and the Black, by Stendahl Luster, by Raven Leilani Asymmetry, by Lisa Halliday All the Pretty Horses, by Cormac McCarthy Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides The Vixen, by Francine Prose Legends of the Fall, by Jim Harrison The Winter Soldier, by Daniel Mason

Oppenheimer’s character witnesses offered eloquent and sometimes poignant testaments. George Kennan was unequivocal: In Oppenheimer, he said, we were faced with “one of the great minds of this generation of Americans.” Such a man, he suggested, could not “speak dishonestly about a subject which had really engaged the responsible attention of his intellect. . . . I would suppose that you might just as well have asked Leonardo da Vinci to distort an anatomical drawing as that you should ask Robert Oppenheimer to speak . . . dishonestly.” This provoked Robb to ask Kennan under cross-examination if he meant to suggest that different standards should be used when judging “gifted individuals.” Kennan: “I think the church has known that. Had the church applied to St. Francis the criteria relating solely to his youth, it would not have been able for him to be what he was later. . . . it is only the great sinners who become the great saints and in the life of the Government, there can be applied the analogy.” One member of the Gray Board, Dr. Ward Evans, interpreted this to mean that “all gifted individuals were more or less screwballs.” Kennan politely demurred: “No, sir; I would not say that they are screwballs, but I would say that when gifted individuals come to a maturity of judgment which makes them valuable public servants, you are apt to find that the road by which they have approached that has not been as regular as the road by which other people have approached it. It may have zigzags in it of various sorts.” Seeming to agree, Dr. Evans responded, “I think it would be borne out in the literature. I believe it was Addison, and someone correct me if I am wrong, that said, ‘Great wits are near to madness, closely allied and thin partitions do their bounds divide.

Episcopal priest and gourmet chef Robert Farrar Capon says the parables show us that the Bible “is not about someplace else called heaven, nor about somebody at a distance called God. Rather it is about this place here, in all its thisness, and placiness, and about the intimate and immediately Holy One who, at no distance from us at all, moves mysteriously to make creation true both to itself and to him.”10

Where the facts themselves are highly interesting, the explanation of them must be still more so.

A wise man knows when the war is lost, and will understand retreat is the only way to save lives. A foolish man will condemn all his followers to death because of his pride - Robert Evans

Fire on the Mountain, by Anita Desai Sailboat Table (table by Quint Hankle) The Voyage of the Narwhal, by Andrea Barrett Complete Stories, by Clarice Lispector Boy Kings of Texas, by Domingo Martinez The Marrow Thieves, by Cherie Dimaline A Brief History of Seven Killings, by Marlon James There There, by Tommy Orange Citizen: An American Lyric, by Claudia Rankine Underland, by Robert Macfarlane The Undocumented Americans, by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio Deacon King Kong, by James McBride The Dutch House, by Ann Patchett Will and Testament, by Vigdis Hjorth Every Man Dies Alone, by Hans Fallada The Door, by Magda Szabó The Plot Against America, by Philip Roth Fates and Furies, by Lauren Groff The Overstory, by Richard Power Night Train, by Lise Erdrich Her Body and Other Parties, by Carmen Maria Machado The Penguin Book of the Modern American Short Story, edited by John Freeman Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates Birds of America, by Lorrie Moore Mongrels, by Stephen Graham Jones The Office of Historical Corrections, by Danielle Evans Tenth of December, by George Saunders Murder on the Red River, by Marcie R. Rendon Leave the World Behind, by Rumaan Alam Ceremony, by Leslie Marmon Silko On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, by Ocean Vuong The Unwomanly Face of War, by Svetlana Alexievich Standard Deviation, by Katherine Heiny All My Puny Sorrows, by Miriam Toews The Death of the Heart, by Elizabeth Bowen Mean Spirit, by Linda Hogan NW, by Zadie Smith Being Mortal, by Atul Gawande Americanah, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Firekeeper’s Daughter, by Angeline Boulley Erasure, by Percival Everett Sharks in the Time of Saviors, by Kawai Strong Washburn Heaven, by Mieko Kawakami

Evan’s brain cataloged the word. Shit. From the Old English word scitte, meaning purging or diarrhea. Taboo after the sixteenth century and censored from the works of James Joyce and Hemingway. Modern derivations include shitload—a great many; shit-faced—drunk; and of course shitticism, from Robert Frost’s description of scatological writing. Thus was the curse of being a semiotician. No word too common to avoid scrutiny.

Friendship is like peeing on yourself: everyone can see it, but only you get the warm feeling that it brings. ~Robert Bloch~

Books When Books Went to War, Molly Guptill Manning Books as Weapons, John B. Hench The Book Thieves: The Nazi Looting of Europe’s Libraries and the Race to Return a Literary Inheritance, Anders Rydell The Berlin Stories, Christopher Isherwood The Rise and the Fall of the Third Reich, William L. Shirer The Death of Democracy, Benjamin Carter Hett In the Garden of Beasts, Erik Larson Gay Berlin, Robert Beachy Articles Leary, William M. “Books, Soldiers and Censorship during the Second World War.” American Quarterly Von Merveldt, Nikola. “Books Cannot Be Killed by Fire: The German Freedom Library and the American Library of Nazi-Banned Books As Agents of Cultural Memory.” John Hopkins University Press Appelbaum, Yoni. “Publishers Gave Away 122,951,031 Books During World War II.” The Atlantic “Paris Opens Library of Books Burnt by Nazis.” The Guardian Archives Whisnant, Clayton J. “A Peek Inside Berlin’s Queer Club Scene Before Hitler Destroyed It.” The Advocate “Between World Wars, Gay Culture Flourished in Berlin.” NPR’s Fresh Air More The Great Courses: A History of Hitler’s Empire, Thomas Childers “Hitler: YA Fiction Fan Girl,” Robert Evans, Behind the Bastards Podcast Magnus Hirschfeld, Leigh Pfeffer and Gretchen Jones, History Is Gay Podcast “Das Lila Lied,” composed by Mischa Spoliansky, lyrics by Kurt Schwabach

The country that occupied this continent was the most powerful nation on earth. They held the keys to the deadliest military machines ever constructed. It was easy to get Americans to support involvement in a thousand little conflicts, because each only required a small fraction of the nation's military power. It only risked a few American lives. But millions of people around the world died. Women and children and old men and dumb, young boys from Yemen to Turkey to Guatemala. To justify those murders Americans had to make those people less than human. And once they'd done that, it wasn't such a great jump to do it to their neighbors" - Robert Evans, "After the Revolution

but that was back in the AmFed. It’s a sinful thing for a man to touch a woman other than his wife. That’s why the Israelites used midwives.

Steph did make a note to start looking for a good Dread Pirate Roberts type to take over as Captain Teach

Traditions, Commander Roberts mused silently, were funny things. They started when you least expected them and endured through everything the universe could throw at them.

ان البشرية التى بدأت فى الأصل كبضعة جزيئات كبيرة بقطرة دقيقة فى بحر بدائي ,هذه البشرية قد طورت الان امكانية ان تبيد معظم الحياة الموجودة على سطح الارض

إننا جنس محدث ثراء يجاهد ليصبح محدث إفلاس

We don’t bolt, Ensign.” Roberts smiled, but without amusement. “We advance cautiously to the front and quickly to the rear.

I am vice president,” wrote John Adams, the first to inhabit the office. “In this I am nothing. But I may be everything.” In January 1961, as Lyndon Johnson left the Senate for the vice presidency, his future held the dim but tantalizing promise of the presidency, of “everything.” But in the meantime LBJ would not resign himself to nothingness. It was not his nature. Throughout his life Johnson had assumed positions with no inherent power base and infused them with irrepressible energy, drive, and ambition: as assistant to President Cecil E. Evans of Southwest Texas State Teachers’ College, as speaker of the “Little Congress” of staff members in the 1940s, and as party whip and leader in the 1950s, power seemed to flow to him and issue from him naturally. In Johnson’s political ascent, power was the constant; public offices were quantities to be stretched, exploited for public and personal gain, and, ultimately, discarded along the climb. If this was arrogance, it was well grounded. Lyndon Johnson was never nothing; and if the vice presidency meant little today, that could not be the case for long. The press accepted Johnson’s bold claim with little skepticism. On the eve of the inauguration, U.S. News & World Report exclaimed that “the vice presidency is to become a center of activity and power unseen in the past.” The magazine foresaw “important assignments” for LBJ in foreign affairs, especially in the explosive Cuban situation. Undoubtedly, President Kennedy would rely heavily upon the negotiating skills of his brilliant second, Lyndon Johnson, “a new kind of vice president.” And LBJ, surely, would demand no less. “The restless and able Mr. Johnson is obviously unwilling to become a ceremonial nonentity,” Tom Wicker rightly predicted in the New York Times. Johnson’s former Senate colleagues agreed, assuring reporters that LBJ “will be very important in the new Administration—and much utilized.” Headlines heralded Washington’s new “Number 2 Man.

Let’s not worry about when we go down, Commander. Let’s just worry about what kind of company we keep when we do.” Roberts nodded slowly, smiling. “Right you are, sir. Right you are.” “Battle stations!” Eric snarled, leaning forward. “Stand by all weapons! Check fire until you see the white of their eyes….

And if you aren’t afraid to swallow your pride and admit that we are, in fact, hardwired to give some fraction of a fuck what Donald Trump has to say, I’ll do my best to take you back to where this all started . . . Monkeys,

There are three versions of the truth. Mine yours

Happy 100th Birthday, dear Adolph! Zukor, that is. From around the world they flew to

Listen to these two confessions at Ammanford. The first is from a middle-aged man holding a baby in his arms: “I used to spend three or four pounds in a single evening at the bar. I’d give my wife and children a few stray shillings now and then. I’d steal coppers from my child’s money-box and spend them for beer. I was seldom sober. But, thank God, that’s done with.

In this village I attended three meetings on Sunday two and a half hours in the morning, two and a half hours in the afternoon, and two hours at night, when I had to leave to catch the train. At all these meetings the same kind of thing went on, the same kind of congregations assembled, the same strained, intense emotion was manifest. Aisles were crowded. Pulpit stairs were packed and, mirabile dictu! two-thirds of the congregation were men and at least one-half young men.

And they do say that the publicans (saloon keepers) are closing,” says a bent little man with a black beard, in a train to Landore, and certainly many drinking places that were crowded are empty,

There were several pictures of Lula with Evan Duffield, a few of them clearly taken by one or other of the pair themselves, holding the camera at arm’s length, both of them apparently stoned or drunk.

It was a meeting characterized by a perpetual series of interruptions and disorderliness. It was a meeting characterized by a great continuity and an absolute order.

It was a meeting characterized by a perpetual series of interruptions and disorderliness. It was a meeting characterized by a great continuity and an absolute order. You say, “How do you reconcile these things?” I do not reconcile them. They are both there. I leave you to reconcile them. If you put a man

and natural, no orator, no leader of men; nothing of the masterfulness that characterized such men as Wesley, and Whitefield, and Moody; no leader of men. One of the most brilliant writers in one of our morning papers said of Evan Roberts, in a tone of sorrow, that he lacked the qualities of leadership, and the writer said if but some prophet did now arise he could sweep everything before him. God has not chosen that a prophet shall arise. It is quite true. Evan Roberts is no orator, no leader. What is he? I mean now with regard to this great movement. He is the mouthpiece of the fact that there is no human guidance as to man or organization.

In connection with the Welsh revival there is no preaching, no order, no hymnbooks, no choirs, no organs, no collections, and, finally, no advertising.

The impulse appears to have been sporadic and spontaneous. In remote country hamlets, in mining villages buried in distant valleys, one man or one woman would have it laid upon his or her soul to pray that the Holy Spirit might be poured out upon the cause in which they were spiritually concerned. There does not seem to have been any organized effort anywhere.

The vast congregations were as soberly sane, as orderly, and at least as reverent as any congregation I ever saw

The pit ponies, like the American mules, having been driven by oaths and curses since they first bore the yoke, are being retrained to do their work without the incentive of profanity.

There is less drinking, less idleness, less gambling. Men record with almost incredulous amazement, how one football player after another has foresworn cards and drink and the gladiatorial games, and is living a sober and godly life, putting his energy into the revival.

The most extraordinary thing about the meetings which I attended was the extent to which they were absolutely without any human direction or leadership. “We must obey the Spirit,” is the watchword of Evan Roberts, and he is as obedient as the humblest of his followers. The meetings open—after any amount of preliminary singing while the congregation is assembling—by the reading of a chapter or a psalm. Then it is go as you please for two hours or more.   And the amazing thing is that it does go and does not get entangled in what might seem to be inevitable confusion. Three-fourths of the meeting consists of singing. No one uses a hymnbook. No one gives out a hymn. The last person to control the meeting in any way is Mr. Evan Roberts. People pray and sing, give testimony or exhort as the Spirit moves them. As a study of the psychology of crowds I have seen nothing like it. You feel that the thousand or fifteen hundred persons before you have become merged into one myriad-headed, but single-souled personality.   You can watch what they call the influence of the power of the Spirit playing over the crowded congregation as an eddying wind plays over the surface of a pond. If anyone carried away by his feelings prays too long, or if anyone when speaking fails to touch the right note, someone—it may be anybody—commences to sing. For a moment there is a hesitation as if the meeting were in doubt as to its decision, whether to hear the speaker or to continue to join in the prayer, or whether to sing. If it decides to hear and to pray the singing dies away. If, on the other hand, as usually happens, the people decide to sing, the chorus swells in volume until it drowns all other sound.

But for the most part revivalism means a spiritual awakening, the conversion of individuals who, from living in indifference or in vice, turn from their evil ways and lead new lives in which, however imperfectly, they endeavor consciously to follow Christ.

Whence has it come? All over Wales—I am giving you roughly the result of the questioning of fifty or more persons at random in the week—a praying remnant have been agonizing before God about the state of the beloved land, and it is through that the answer of fire has come.

The horses are terribly puzzled. A manager said to me, “The haulers are some of the very lowest. They have driven their horses by obscenity and kicks. Now they can hardly persuade the horses to start working, because there is no obscenity and no kicks.” The movement is characterized by the most remarkable confessions of sin, confessions that must be costly.

There are two essential functions to the Christian priesthood: The first is eucharistic, the giving of thanks; the other is intercessory, praying. That is all. That is going on. The Church everywhere singing and praying and offering praise, and pleading with God. Every meeting is made up almost exclusively of these things.

And yet those who know the language say that he has said nothing that is extraordinary; that there has been little brilliancy of phrase; that he has talked simply and cheerfully of his own experience, and has asked those who are not Christians to give themselves to God. Certainly it has all been very quiet. There has been no loud rantings, nor spectacular displays, nor open appeals to the emotions. But what is happening?

Un poderoso avivamiento en Gales Cuando George tenía 15 años, su vida cambió radicalmente, al igual que la vida de su hermano Stephen. Un joven lleno del Espíritu llamado Evan Roberts comenzó a predicar en todo el territorio de Gales, trayendo un poderoso movimiento del Espíritu Santo por donde quiera que fuera. Desde la edad de 13 años, Roberts había clamado por una visita de Dios. Durante diez años, había orado para que el avivamiento viniera a Gales. Entonces, en 1903, a la edad de 25 años, comenzó a orar por un poderoso movimiento del Espíritu Santo. Ese año, después de escuchar un mensaje acerca de rendirse a Dios, cayó de rodillas y le pidió al Señor que lo doblegara y lo usara para su gloria. Sintió que la paz y el poder de Dios lo visitaban, así como un deseo ardiente de llevar el Evangelio de Cristo a la gente en todo ese país. A partir de noviembre de 1904, cuando Roberts predicaba en iglesias y en reuniones al aire libre, el Espíritu Santo se derramaba. Había llanto y quebrantamiento, confesión de pecado y arrepentimiento en cada reunión. El avivamiento galés había comenzado. Las sesiones de avivamiento se llevaban a cabo donde sea que aquel fuera llevado a ministrar. Las multitudes venían y el Espíritu Santo se movía en oleadas sobre los corazones de la gente. El canto y la alabanza continuaban, a veces durante horas, seguidos de la confesión de pecados y el santo arrepentimiento. La oración era levantada al unísono, y los miembros de la congregación a menudo interrumpían las oraciones con una palabra del Señor. Estas reuniones continuaban hasta las primeras horas de la mañana, con el Espíritu moviéndose en los corazones de las personas, incluso cuando había poca o ninguna predicación. Decenas de miles llegaban a las sesiones diarias y eran convertidos por el poder de Dios. El efecto en Gales fue enorme. Los bares y las casas públicas se cerraron; las ventas de licores se redujeron en un 75%. Las capillas estaban abiertas, y el número de iglesias estaba creciendo. Durante el curso del avivamiento en este país, cientos de miles de personas se convirtieron. El avivamiento se extendió como un reguero de pólvora, y una de las áreas más afectadas fue Maesteg, la ciudad natal de George y Stephen Jeffreys. Roberts y sus obreros visitaron el área en tres ocasiones distintas y trajeron más de cinco mil personas al Reino de Dios. El 20 de noviembre de 1904, el reverendo Glasnant Jones se puso de pie delante de la congregación de Siloh y predicó un mensaje de salvación. Antes de esta fecha, George y Stephen habían asistido a la iglesia en alguna ocasión. Esa mañana, experimentaron una conversión dinámica y fueron bautizados en el Espíritu Santo. Inmediatamente después, comenzaron a servir al Señor en la iglesia en todas las maneras que pudieron. Para la consternación de estos hermanos y de gran parte de Gales, el avivamiento galés duró solo dos años antes de que cayera en decadencia.

lost, and will understand retreat is the only way to save lives. A foolish man will condemn all his followers to death because of his pride. —Robert Evans

Victoria Evans broke up with Kyle because of that. She yelled at him in front of the school. Three months later, Robert Evans was convicted of those murders. Quickest hearing process in the history of murder cases. And two kills occurred the very week after his left hand was broken. He couldn’t have been the murderer. But that didn’t matter. They wouldn’t listen to the science. They only listened to that pompous prick Agent Johnson. Sheriff Cannon just wanted someone to persecute.

Ezra Klein’s Why We’re Polarized; George Packer’s Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal; Evan Osnos’s Wildland: The Making of America’s Fury; Yascha Mounk’s The Great Experiment: Why Diverse Democracies Fall Apart and How They Can Endure; Suzanne Mettler and Robert Lieberman’s Four Threats: The Recurring Crises of American Democracy; Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt’s How Democracies Die; Bill Bishop and Robert Cushing’s The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart; and Michael Sandel’s Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy. I also suggest you read the January/February 2022 issue of the Atlantic. For contrast, and decidedly more upbeat, is Robert Putnam’s The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again. The public hearings held by the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol should be required viewing and are readily available online.

One person cannot change the world. But one person can strike terror into multitudes.—Robert Evans

I'd sit beside him at the white table, and together we would stare into the photographs of Walker Evans, William Eggleston, Robert Frank, and Diane Arbus. "This is all America," Greenland would say, whispering excitedly in a rare display of respect for decorum. "We need a car, Corn Dog. We have to go out there and see some of this stuff and some of these people. This is where all your music comes from.