From the first paragraph: The Second Great Awakening in the United States helped elevate revivalism and the stress on individual conversion to a position of central and continuing prominence in the religious scene. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the strongest Protestant challenge to this increasingly dominant understanding of Christian faith was that raised by John Williamson Nevin, first in The Weekly Messenger of the German Reformed Church and, subsequently, in his pamphlet, The Anxious Bench. Nevin called upon both Lutherans and Reformed to repudiate revivalism in favor of a return to their Reformation heritage with its emphasis on Word and sacrament, a heritage that exalted the sacramental grace and rested upon "the system of the Catechism."
