CAMP-MEETINGS: Religious gatherings held in a grove, usually lasting for several days, during which many find shelter in tents or temporary houses. The main features are the open-air preaching, the night prayer-meetings, and the freedom of the life. They are not now so common as formerly. The first meeting of the kind is said to have taken place in Kentucky, on the banks of the Red River, in 1799, under a Presbyterian and a Methodist minister. These denominations at first used them in common; but gradually the Presbyterians withdrew, and they became almost exclusively Methodist and Baptist gatherings. In recent times the Methodists have purchased tracts of land in desirable locations on the seaboard or inland, and turned them into parks, with comfortable houses, streets, post-offices, meeting-places, Biblical models, etc., and there in the summer many persons live, and there the religious gatherings of different kinds are held daily. Thus the primitive camp-meeting is continued in an improved form. The credit of introducing campmeetings into England is due to the Rev. Lorenzo Dow, an eccentric though able minister of Methodist views, who in 1807 proposed it in Staffordshire. Two Methodists, William Clowes and Hugh Bourne, were so impressed with the advantages of this style of service that they persisted in holding them after they were disapproved by the Wesleyan Conference in 1807; for doing which they were finally expelled. In 1810 they founded the Primitive Methodists, which body uses the campmeeting, The Irish Wesleyans commenced using them in 1860.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: S. C. Swallow, Camp-Meetings: their Origin, Hist., and Utility, also their Perversion, New York, 1878.

CAMUS, ca"mü', de Pont Carré, JEAN PIERRE: French prelate; b. in Paris Nov. 3, 1584; d. there Apr. 25, 1652. He became successively bishop of Belley 1609, abbot of Aulnay in Normandy 1629, but retired to the Hospital des Incurables in Paris 1651. He was an extremely prolific writer. The catalogue of his writings (Paris, 1653) contains 186 titles. Among them are many moral romances, which were admired in his time, and some translated into English, but are now forgotten. He is still remembered for his satirical pamphlets against the mendicant orders, e.g., Désappropriation Claustrelle and Pauvreté Evangélique, which were elaborately refuted in Anti-Camus (Douai, 1634), and especially for the fruit of his great intimacy with Francis of Sales, L'Esprit du bien-heureux Francois de Sales (6 vols., Paris, 1641, new ed., 3 vols., 1840, abridged by Collot, 1737; Eng. transl. of abridgement, The Spirit of S. Francis de Sales, London, 1880). His dogmatic work in the Latin translation Appropinquatio Protestantium ad Ecclesiam Catholico-Romanam is in vol. v. of Migne's Cours de théologie.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: F. Boulas, Camus, Lyons, 1879.