With me the doctrine that God gives the Holy Spirit definitely in answer to prayer is not a matter of mere exegesis, it is a matter of personal experience. If it were a matter of mere exegesis, I would believe it. If it was clearly taught in the Bible, I would believe it, whether I had experience or not; for I do not believe in bringing the Bible down to the level of our experience but in bringing our experience up to the level of the Bible. But with me it is a matter of certain experience. I know that God gives the Holy Spirit in answer to definite prayer as well as I know that water quenches thirst and food satisfies hunger. How often as I have knelt beside a single brother, and how often as I have knelt in a great gathering of God’s believing children, the Holy Ghost has fallen upon us as we prayed as definitely, and perceptibly, as the rain ever falls upon the thirsty ground.
I shall never forget one night in Chicago Avenue Church. The ministers of the city had been holding meetings at noon in the Young Men’s Christian Association preliminary to an expected coming to the city of Mr. Moody. At one of these noon meetings, one of the ministers of the city sprang to his feet and said, “Brother Torrey, what we need in Chicago is an all-night prayer meeting of the ministers.” “Very well, Brother E.,” I replied, “if the ministers of Chicago wish to have an all-night prayer meeting, let them come to Chicago Avenue Church at ten o’clock next Friday night, and if God keeps us there all night, we will stay all night.”
At ten o’clock the following Friday night some four or five hundred people gathered in the Vestry of Chicago Avenue Church. They were not all ministers, though there were many ministers. Indeed, they were not all men; there were some women.
Were you ever in a prayer meeting where the devil made a dead set to spoil the meeting? Well that was the kind of a meeting it was for the first two hours. To begin with three men got down by chairs near the door, and commenced to pound on the chairs and shout until some of our heads were nearly splitting, and when someone went to them and protested that things should be done decently and in order, they swore at the man who made the protest. Later still a man jumped up in the midst of the meeting and proclaimed that he was Elijah. He was not to blame. He was a lunatic. But these things disturbed many and they began to think of going home. But it is a poor prayer meeting that the devil can spoil, and hundreds of us were there with the determination to stay until we got the blessing.
About midnight God gave us complete victory, and for two hours there was such prayer in the Spirit as I have seldom heard.
A little after two in the morning while we were all kneeling in prayer, suddenly there fell upon us an awful hush. Nobody could speak, nobody could sing, nobody could pray. All you could hear was the subdued sobbing of joy unspeakable and full of glory.
The very air seemed tremulous with the presence of the Holy Ghost. It seemed to me as if, if I had looked up, I could almost have seen the Holy Spirit there visibly. I do not know how long we were held there in this awed silence before the presence of God. It was now Saturday morning. The following Sunday morning one of my deacons came to me and held out his hand and took mine and gave it a mighty grip and said, with choking voice, “I shall never forget yesterday morning to the longest day I live.”
In the early morning hours, one businessman went out of that meeting and took an early train for Missouri to transact some business. When the business was done, he said to the hotel proprietor, “Is there any meeting going on in this town?” “Yes,” he said. “There is a meeting going on in the Cumberland Presbyterian Church.” He was a Cumberland Presbyterian himself and went to the meeting. When the meeting was opened, he stood up and asked if he might say a few words. The permission was readily given, and with the power of the Holy Spirit upon him, he poured out his soul to the people. In a few days I received a paper from that town saying that fifty-eight persons were converted while he spoke.
A young man went out from that meeting to Baraboo, Wis., and in a few days I received a letter from Baraboo, Wis., saying that thirty-eight men and boys had been converted in Baraboo. That same man afterward laid down his life in South Africa after a brilliant record as a missionary there.
Another young man went out in the early hours and took a train to Wisconsin, and I soon began to receive letters from Methodist ministers and others near Milwaukee asking if we had in our Institute a young man named Sam J., and adding that a young man, giving that name, had appeared among them and was holding meetings in schoolhouses and churches and the soldiers’ home, and wherever he went there seemed to be conversions. But they knew nothing about him, and he said he was a student of the Bible Institute.
Men and women went from that meeting to the uttermost parts of the earth with the power of God upon them. As I have gone around the world and visited China, Japan, India and Australia and other lands, I think in every land I visited, I have found someone who was present that morning when the Holy Ghost fell upon us.