Here is The Love Vast As the Ocean

Just after eleven o’clock on a Wednesday evening in 1904, a solo voice rang out with the hymn “Here is love vast as the ocean”. Maybe a thousand people were in Ebenezer Baptist Church, Abertillery at the time, leaning over the galleries, packing every pew and squeezing into every spare corner. They’d been here for more than four hours, in a service of intense emotion.
Meetings like it were taking place across Wales night after night, with fervent prayer and passionate singing – and similar disregard for the clock. They both excited and appalled, left many puzzled and some frightened, but it was reckoned that in little over a year a hundred thousand people had made a new commitment to Jesus Christ. For a period whole communities changed, as men and women found themselves drawn into a powerful experience of God; and sparks from their awakening were soon to ignite fires in more than a dozen other countries. And the hymn that soloist struck up spontaneously about “love vast as the ocean” was heard so often that it became known as “the love song of the revival.”
The revival spread far and wide. Within a decade, in Korea and India, in France and Madagascar, and in a dozen other countries, movements influenced by the revival in Wales were touching many thousands.
“Men who had not taken one penny home in 17 years now took all home…Houses became decently furnished, women and children became decently clad. The public houses became practically empty, for though all accustomed to frequent them did not attend places of worship, yet the fear of God had fallen upon them for a time. Bridges and walls, instead of being covered with obscene remarks, were now covered with lines from Bible and hymn book. The streets echoed with hymns, rather than the drunkard’s songs once wont to be heard. Visitors from London, from the south of England, from the north of Scotland, visited the Church to gaze upon the Lord’s great and gracious work. Alas, that so many of the converts have fallen away – fallen away through such causes as always operate; but for the Glory of God and the encouragement of men, let it be known to all those who will carry God’s work on when the present generation has passed to its rest, yea, let it be known that drunkards, swearers, gamblers of most abandoned and hopeless type became holy men, that backsliders of 20 years returned to the fold, men who had entered only on the profession of religion, entered into its power, and they are with us still, and by the Grace of God will remain faithful unto death.”
Rev David Collier