Joel Bean and the Revival in Iowa

Abstract

constituting Bangor Quarterly Meeting in the central part of the state. he found there heartened him. Lord's work is progressing in many localities and deepening in many hearts, he wrote to the Friends' Review. A true work of grace was begun, and has been carried forward. The Lord visited his people. Sinners were awakened. The worldling's rest was disturbed. The unbeliever was made to tremble, and many were awakened from the lethargy of a lifeless profession. There had been some excesses over which he expressed regret, but, he argued, may no more conclude that the religious movement out of which they have sprung, is all wrong, than that the rise of Quakerism was wrong, because of the Ranterism which so soon followed it. The Iowa Friend concluded with a question and an observation for doubters: What Reformation has not been attended by some excesses? How rare the vigorous growth that needs not the pruning hand.' The language of this eminent Iowa Friend would become familiar to Orthodox Quakers in the 1870s as a wave of revivals identical to those common in evangelical denominations swept through their meetings. This enthusiast was not, however, David B. Updegraff or John Henry Douglas or Esther Frame or any of the others whom we have come to think of as stalwarts of the Great Revival. He was none other than Joel Bean, who within fifteen years would become not only the revival's foremost opponent but also its famous victim. At one time Joel Bean was one of the best-known Friends in the United States, connected by marriage with the Philadelphia Shipleys, widely traveled in the ministry, and, in the 1880s and 1890s, the center of one of the most ferocious controversies ever to divide