Stephen Crane and Methodism's Realism: Translating Spiritual Sympathy into Urban Experience

Abstract

In 1883, three years after Reverend Jonathan Townley Crane died, the widowed Helen Crane moved their family from Port Jervis, New York to Asbury Park, New Jersey--one of the many resort towns that had recently sprung up along the Jersey Coast. This section of the Jersey Shore was familiar territory to the Cranes; almost a decade before making Asbury Park their permanent home, Reverend Crane and his family had begun attending Methodist summer camp meetings in neighboring Ocean Grove. Established in 1869 by members of the National Camp Meeting Association for the Promotion of Holiness, Ocean Grove was part of a much larger movement within the Methodist Episcopal Church to revitalize a membership that some felt had lost its prior spiritual zeal and unity. Adherents to the holiness movement advocated a return to turn-of-the-century evangelical preaching styles and to the community-based organizational forms--such as camp meetings and love feasts--that distinguished early Methodism from other Protestant denominations. Full of spontaneous preaching, singing, witnessing, and praying, the frontier-era camp meeting reached its spiritual and peak in the love feast--an event that, as John Wigger explains, traditionally centered upon the eating of a small portion of bread and drinking of a little water in imitation, not of the sacrament, but of the communal fellowship of the early saints, and, most important, unrehearsed individual testimonies of struggles and triumphs in the faith, of what God had done in the lives of those present. (1) Typical of many of Methodism's small-scale liturgical events, the love feast facilitated spiritual uplift through contact. As participants shared the sacred knowledge that they had accumulated through personal experience, they pushed one another to new spiritual heights by strengthening their bonds. At the love feast and class meeting, explained Edmund S. Janes in 1862, Methodists came together not as mere pupils or catechumens, but as fellow-Christians, met for the interchange of religious experience, congratulations, sympathies, and assistances in the way of life. Only through these forms of interactive worship could Methodists realize Christian intimacy, such stated seasons of fellowship, such familiar conversation on religious experience, such spiritual sympathy. Methodism was, Janes explained, an experimental religion that offered its adherents a social means of grace. (2) While modifying the structure of frontier camp meetings, love feasts and other organizational forms in order to accommodate Methodists' changing tastes and leisurely habits, the National Camp Meeting Association for the Promotion of Holiness hoped that a return to these liturgical practices in resort towns like Ocean Grove would provide similar spiritual and benefits for late-nineteenth-century campers. (3) Working as a seaside correspondent in Ocean Grove and Asbury Park for the New York Tribune during the summers of the early 1890s, Reverend Crane's youngest son, Stephen, attested to the replication in Ocean Grove of antebellum Methodism's socio-spiritual dynamics. Briefly sketching the activities of the most important day of Ocean Grove's ten-day camp meeting, Crane wrote: usual 9 o'clock meetings were held an hour earlier to-day, as the camp-meeting love feast had the right of way at that hour. At the young people's meeting a number were converted. The Rev. C. H. Yatman, the leader, possesses a strong-personality and magnetism which, with a graphic way of putting things, wins souls to higher things.... Dr. Stokes asked the people to shake hands in token of brotherly love, which they did with shouts and tears. (4) Taking for granted the confluence of religious conversion and interpersonal connection, Dr. Ellwood H. Stokes--first president of the Ocean Grove Camp Meeting Association--encouraged the young campers to consummate their spiritual experience by shaking hands with one another; he thus began instilling within them a pattern that they would regularly reenact at Ocean Grove. …