tihvaxy of tire trheolo^ical ^tmimvy 
 
 PRINCETON • NEW JERSEY 
 
 •3 
 
 PURCHASED BY THE 
 
 MRS. ROBERT LENOX KENNEDY 
 
 CHURCH HISTORY FUND 
 
 BR52.0 C35 
 
 Chapell, F.L. (Frederic Leonard), 1836-1! 
 
 Great awakening of 1740. 
 
THE 
 
 Great Jlwakenitid 
 
 of 1740 
 
THE 
 
 Htm nmM\m 
 
 of 1740 
 
 "Bj/ Rev. F. L. CHAPELL 
 
 Lectures delivered before the Baptist Church of Ev- 
 anston, ILL, the Second Baptist Church of Chicago^ 
 and other churches; published by request in "The 
 Standard," and used for the Gordon Missionary 
 Training School, Boston. 
 
 PHILADELPHIA 
 
 American :©apti6t publication Soctctig 
 1903 
 
COPYRIGHT 1903 BY THE 
 
 AMERICAN BAPTIST 
 PUBLICATION SOCIETY 
 
 Published December, 1903 
 
 jfrom tbe Socictie's own press 
 
Content0 
 
 I. The Great awakening of 1740— 
 Introductory 7 
 
 II. John Wesley and the movement 
 IN Great Britain 23 
 
 III. Jonathan Edwards and the 
 
 MOVEMENT IN NEW ENGLAND . . 42 
 
 IV. Gilbert Tennent and the Move- 
 
 ment IN the Middle Colonies . 67 
 
 V. George whitefield, the Cosmo- 
 
 politan evangelist 90 
 
 VI. James Davenport and the Dis- 
 
 orders no 
 
 VII. results and Lessons of the 
 
 Great awakening 126 
 
I 
 
 ^be 0reat Bwaftening ot 1740— 
 UntroDuctors 
 
 |HE chief religious fact of the eight- 
 eenth century, the great revival 
 of spiritual religion, is usually 
 termed the Great Awakening of 1740, be- 
 cause its chief intensity, in this country, 
 culminated about that time. But it was by 
 no means confined to that year. It com- 
 menced more than a decade before that date 
 and continued with power more than a de-_ 
 cade after it. Yea, more ; it is continuing 
 yet, for the revivals with which we are re- 
 peatedly visited, are but the echoes and 
 reverberations of that mighty blast of the 
 gospel trumpet which then awoke a slum- 
 bering church and a slumbering world. Nor 
 will these echoes cease till the mightier 
 blast of Gabriel's more majestic trump shall 
 announce the glories of the kingdom of God. 
 I. Let us, in the first place, step back 
 one hundred and forty years or thereabout. 
 
8 
 
 and take a little survey of the religious con- 
 dition of the world in the first third of the 
 eighteenth century. And I may as well 
 say at the outset that it is a dark, sad pic- 
 ture that we shall look upon, for the eight- 
 eenth century, one of the most interesting 
 epochs of all history, as a whole is a dark 
 period. Dreary and dreadful epithets have 
 been well-nigh exhausted in describing it. 
 It has been called gloomy, melancholy, 
 shameful, fearful, terrible, infernal, devil- 
 ish. It has been termed the age of skepti- 
 cism, the period of the eclipse of faith. It 
 -has been likened to the awful volcano, and 
 to the terrible storm of the whirlwind or 
 the hurricane. And it was all that it has 
 been called. For I know not any other 
 period of the world's history that shows 
 such a general and terrible sway of essen- 
 tial devilishness as that which, during this 
 century, commenced with a false philoso- 
 phy in the cloisters of the savants and 
 ended with the Reign of Terror in the streets 
 of Paris. The enemy came in truly like a 
 flood, but the Spirit of the Lord lifted up 
 a standard against him. 
 
 But it is not my purpose to survey the 
 whole battle ground, to canvass the con- 
 flict in continental Europe, and in the do- 
 
9 
 
 mains of the Roman and Greek commun- 
 ions, but merely to show how the Lord 
 came to the rescue of those who had the 
 best claim to being his witnesses in the 
 world, namely, the Protestant churches of 
 Great Britain and America. 
 
 I. Let me begin by noting some of the 
 political and material facts of history at this 
 time. And the first thing that strikes us 
 Americans is that this great republic of 
 the Western world had not then come into 
 being. There was in America only a line 
 of colonies on the Atlantic seaboard, con- 
 taining not more than two millions of in- * v" 
 habitants. New York, Boston, and Phila- • 
 delphia were hardly more than overgrown 
 villages. George IL was our king. Slavery 
 existed in Massachusetts and Connecticut, 
 as well as in Georgia and South Carolina, 
 while numbers of Indians swarmed around 
 the young and growing settlements. Yet 
 the colonies were so far established as to 
 have come into a secure and comfortable 
 position, while the disaffection toward the 
 mother country, that afterward produced 
 the Revolution, had not then arisen. 
 
 Across the ocean the kingdom of Great 
 Britain was in a high state of material pros- 
 perity. By a series of salutary events, af- 
 
10 
 
 ter the dethronement of James the Second, 
 throughout the reigns of William III., Queen 
 Anne, and George I., she had come into 
 a commanding position. The Protestant 
 house of Brunswick was firmly established 
 on the throne of the united kingdom under 
 a constitutional monarchy. The victories 
 of Marlborough had humbled her rivals, the 
 founding of the Bank of England and the 
 establishment of the East India Company, 
 together with the tribute of the American 
 Colonies, had greatly advanced her financial 
 interests ; and material prosperity had be- 
 gun to produce its invariable"fruits of profli- 
 gacy, dishonesty, and rash speculation. The 
 times were" so good politically and materi- 
 ally that they were bad enough morally 
 and religiously. 
 
 2. Another thing to be noticed was the 
 intellectual status of the times. It is always 
 the policy of Satan, where he cannot pre- 
 vent a movement hostile to him, to mount 
 it himself and, riding upon it, manage it in 
 his own interests. And this was the method 
 in which he was now treating the Protes- 
 tant Reformation. When he found that he 
 could not prevent free inquiry and the right 
 of private judgment ; when he discovered 
 that he could not prevent the establishment 
 
II 
 
 of a Protestant church, he determined that 
 he would push free inquiry into the ex- 
 tremes of skepticism and unbelief, and that 
 he would make the Protestant church as 
 devoid of true spiritual life as the Romish 
 had been. 
 
 This, it seems to me, is the explanation 
 of the fearful skepticism of the eighteenth 
 century. Over the intellectual world Satan 
 breathed the benumbing chill of unbelief 
 regarding things divine and supernatural. 
 Three leading classes of minds especially 
 fell under its influence, philosophers, states- 
 men, and historians ; and these gave direc- 
 tion to the general drift of thought. Many 
 of these stronger minds of this general 
 period, such as Hobbes and Locke among 
 philosophers, the Earl of Shaftesbury and 
 Lord Bolingbroke among statesmen, Hume 
 and Gibbon among historians, were his 
 chosen apostles for the dissemination of 
 infidel sentiments. Thus the foundations 
 were destroyed. This reigning unbelief, 
 together with the political and material pros- 
 perity already noticed, was fatal enough to 
 true piety. Natural religion was almost 
 the only one believed in at all, and this, as 
 we well know, has but little strength or con- 
 serving power. As a consequence the public, 
 
12 
 
 losing faith in God and the Bible, lost faith in 
 and respect for restraining principles of any 
 kind and a sort of lawlessness and vicious- 
 ness began to be rife that alarmed the better 
 class of reflecting minds. 
 
 3. It was then that popular literature com- 
 menced the work in which it has since so 
 largely exerted itself ; namely, of attempt- 
 ing to correct and teach morals. It was 
 then that Steele's " Tatler " began to tell 
 of the vices of society ; then that Addison's 
 "Spectator" began to hold them up to 
 view ; then that the '* Guardian," also ed- 
 ited by Steele, sought to defend the public 
 from its insinuating enemies, and soon after 
 that Johnson's "Rambler" peregrinated for 
 the same good cause. And these did pro- 
 duce some superficial improvement ; but it 
 was only superficial, as such work always 
 will be unless it is based on the firmer foun- 
 dation of revealed truth and solemn penalty. 
 It is in vain to say this or that is shameful 
 and disastrous, unless you can show, from 
 eternal truth, why it is shameful and to 
 what disaster it will lead. 
 
 II. But now, leaving the general view of 
 the times, I wish to present more particu- 
 larly the state of the Protestant churches at 
 this period and the condition of religion 
 
within them. And what were the denomina- 
 tions then in existence ? Think a moment. 
 There were no Methodists, and that is say- 
 ing a great deal "when you are taking an 
 inventory of true religion. Again, there 
 were very few Baptists, and that too is 
 saying a great deal when you are searching 
 in the same direction. The Baptists could, 
 indeed, claim at this period a recognized 
 denominational existence of a hundred 
 years, both in Europe and America. There 
 were now eight small Baptist churches in 
 Rhode Island and a number of others scat- 
 tered through the various colonies, with a 
 respectable number in several European 
 States. But nowhere did they have a legal 
 right to exist except in Rhode Island. In 
 England they were persecuted till the Act 
 of Toleration in 1689, and in America they 
 only obtained full legal rights after the Rev- 
 olutionary War. They, therefore, did not 
 form any very important, practical element 
 in the religious status of this period, though 
 their protesting voice was often heard. 
 
 The only Protestant denominations of 
 prominence in Great Britain and America 
 at this time were Episcopalians, Congre- 
 gationalists, and Presbyterians, and these 
 even were not as we find them now. They 
 
14 
 
 have greatly changed, at least the last two, 
 in two important particulars : first, in their 
 relation to the State ; and second, in their 
 practical use of infant baptism. These 
 three churches were at that time State 
 Churches : the Episcopal, of England ; the 
 Congregational, of New England ; and the 
 Presbyterian, of Scotland. They were, 
 moreover, tenacious of these political rela- 
 tions and regarded the Baptists as pestilent 
 heretics because they pleaded for a separa- 
 tion of Church and State. Infant baptism 
 too was by them universally practised, and 
 the infants baptized were very generally 
 regarded as Christians and as full members 
 of the church. Practice on these latter 
 points, however, was not uniform through- 
 out these three churches, nor indeed in the 
 same church at different times or in differ- 
 ent places. Hence I must particularize a 
 little in regard to each of them and state 
 a little more fully what was involved in 
 infant baptism and the union of Church 
 and State. 
 
 I. The Episcopal Church was, perhaps, 
 the best exemplification of these doctrines. 
 Slie held that at baptism the child was 
 regenerated and ingrafted into the church, 
 and that such regeneration and church 
 
15 
 
 standing was necessary to good civil stand- 
 ing. And as the partaking of the sacra- 
 ment of the Lord's Supper was an expres- 
 sion of church standing, so it was necessary 
 to civil standing. The law required every 
 one who was to hold a civil office to 
 ''qualify*' himself by partaking of the 
 sacrament. Hence, any clergyman who 
 refused to give the sacrament to any appli- 
 cant inflicted a civil injury and was liable 
 to prosecution at law for the offense. Any 
 one who had been baptized and had learned 
 the creed and catechism and was not scan- 
 dalous in life had a legal right to the sacra- 
 ment. In all this there was not the least 
 reference to the spiritual state of the heart. 
 Any discrimination in favor of true religion 
 by evangelical rectors only produced trou- 
 ble for them. John Wesley, during his 
 sojourn in Georgia, was prosecuted at law 
 for refusing the sacrament to a person 
 whom he judged to be unfit for its recep- 
 tion. Such a thing as intelligent conver- 
 sion was not at all insisted upon in the 
 Episcopal Church. 
 
 2. The condition of the Congregational 
 Church of New England, though theoretic- 
 ally different, had come to be practically 
 about the same. The original Puritans 
 
i6 
 
 who emigrated to this country for con- 
 science' sake knew what true religion was, 
 and they attempted to insist on this in 
 their church order. The Cambridge plat- 
 form, laid down in 1648, declared that none 
 except such as might " in charitable discre- 
 tion " be considered regenerate persons 
 should be admitted to the communion. 
 But the union of Church and State and 
 the theory of infant baptism overthrew the 
 laudable intention. By the law of the 
 >yNew England colonies no one could hold a 
 civil office, or even vote at elections, unless 
 he were a church-member. Hence, those 
 who had been baptized in infancy would, 
 of course, claim their church-membership 
 in order to citizenship, and if church-mem- 
 bers, surely they must have all church 
 privileges. Thus, in course of time, the 
 Congregationalists receded from the noble 
 ground of the Cambridge platform and no 
 longer required evidence of conversion or 
 change of heart in order to full church- 
 membership. 
 
 3. Among the Presbyterians the case was 
 much the same. They have, indeed, ever 
 theoretically held that saving faith was 
 necessary in order to the partaking of the 
 communion. Hence, their preparatory lee- 
 
/ 
 
 17 
 
 ture and the meeting of the session before 
 the communion in order to examine the 
 baptized in reference to their qualifications 
 for partaking. But in Scotla^od- the Presby- 
 terian Church was established by law, and 
 
 all except the ignorant and the scandalous 
 had a legal right" to the sacrament. 
 Therefore, the sessions could not and did 
 not insist on evidences of conversion, but 
 sheltered themselves behind a curious 
 theory of some of their theologians, to the 
 effect that regeneration was such a subtle 
 and mysterious operation that no one could 
 judge from his feelings whether he was a 
 subject of it or not. But it was taken for 
 granted that all who had been baptized and 
 were not scandalous in their lives were 
 regenerated without regard to their emo- 
 tions or affections. Hence, all respectable 
 young people were usually admitted to full 
 membership when they arrived at years of 
 understanding. By this method a large 
 share of the communicants of the Presby- 
 terian Church of Scotland had no practical 
 experience of spiritual religion. And the 
 churches of this order in America were 
 constructed, as far as possible, on the Scot- 
 tish model. 
 
 Thus we find that at this time the three ' 
 B -^ 
 
i8 
 
 leading denominations of Protestantism 
 ignored vital piety in their church order. 
 The voice of the few and scattered Baptists 
 was raised from time to time in favor of a 
 converted church-membership, but with 
 little general effect since they had no legal 
 or influential standing. 
 
 III. From this constitution and order of 
 the churches several grave results followed. 
 
 1. The churches themselves were in a 
 very low state of spiritual life and power, 
 since a large portion of their members knew 
 nothing of that heart experience which 
 constitutes the essence of true religion. 
 Scarcely any discipline could be enforced. 
 No prayer meetings bearing any respect- 
 able proportion to the whole membership 
 could be held. The church as a whole was 
 not a spiritual body. There might be a 
 few spiritual members, but what were they 
 among so many ? The forms of religion 
 were observed, but the power was wanting. 
 
 2. Another result was that the ministry 
 was fearfully deteriorated, being composed 
 in many cases of those who made no pre- 
 tension to personal piety, for there was 
 nothing to hinder such taking the holy 
 office. If a change of heart was not neces- 
 sary for the membership, why was it for the 
 
ministry ? If religion consisted in the ob- 
 servance of the sacraments and a moral 
 life, truly he who was faithful in these re- 
 gards and was talented and well educated 
 was a proper candidate for the ministry. 
 Thus it came to pass that there were not 
 only unconverted and unspiritual men in 
 the ministry, but there were found leading 
 and prominent divines to argue that such a 
 state of things was perfectly proper, that K 
 it was not necessary to have an experi- 
 mental knowledge of religion in order to 
 preach it. This view seems strange to us 
 now. To be sure, many of the incumbents 
 of the livings in the Church of England are 
 worldly men. It does not perhaps shock 
 us to think of rectors and curates in the 
 Establishment, who make no pretension to 
 personal piety. But to think of this among * 
 Congregationalists and Presbyterians does 
 seem decidedly incongruous ; yet such was 
 the sad fact before the Great Awakening 
 of 1740, and may be again should spiritual 
 life run low. 
 
 3. But the saddest result of all was the 
 effect that this state of things had upon the i 
 general public. People heard scarcely any- • 
 thing in many cases from the pulpit that 
 was at all searching, for a dead ministry 
 
20 
 
 must, of course, preach dead sermons. But 
 if the truth did sometimes fall upon the peo- 
 ple, it had but little effect, when they re- 
 membered that they were already members 
 of the church, and that they had fulfilled 
 the requirements of the church. They con- 
 sidered that they were Christians already, 
 in some sense, for they had been baptized 
 in the name of the Father and of the Son 
 and of the Holy Ghost, and they were re- 
 membering Christ in the holy sacrament 
 according as they were commanded. They 
 were doing all that they could, and what 
 more was required of them ? And, as if to 
 take off the point of any scriptural arrow 
 from a new-birth text that might penetrate 
 the joints of this churchly harness, it was 
 maintained in many quarters, as I have al- 
 ready remarked, that regeneration was so 
 subtle an operation as not to be cognizable 
 by the affections. If one had obeyed God 
 in the ordinances he was to presume that 
 he had been regenerated, even though he 
 might not be aware of any experience of 
 religion in the heart. The general result 
 was, of course, that the need of conversion 
 was practically denied. 
 
 Such was the state of the best, or at least 
 the most influential portion of Protestantism 
 
21 
 
 in the earlier years of the eighteenth cen- 
 tury. And what saith the Scripture ? " If 
 the light that is in thee be darkness, how 
 great is that darkness." If, now, you will 
 remember what I said in the earlier part of 
 this discourse as to the mighty wave of 
 skepticism and irreligion that was pouring 
 over the earth from the high places of in- 
 tellectual thought ; if you will remember 
 that Christianity was by the learned re- 
 garded only as a subject of ridicule, un- 
 worthy of inquiry or discussion ; if you 
 will remember that worldly prosperity was 
 causing men to feel independent of God ; 
 if you will take all these things into con- 
 sideration, you will see that to human view 
 Christianity was clean gone forever. The 
 floods of ungodly men were sweeping on, 
 and a corrupt and enervated church had 
 neither doctrine nor life wherewith to stem 
 the tide. You can therefore understand 
 why the infidel element of the time was 
 confident of a complete victory, and why 
 the faithful few mourned with such a pa- 
 thetic and bitter cry over the departing 
 glories of Zion. 
 
 IV. For there were a few godly souls 
 that humbly lamented the state of affairs, 
 and were sending up their prayers to the 
 
22 
 
 great Head of the church for the interposi- 
 tion of his mighty power. Bishop Burnett 
 and Dr. Watts, and men of such spirit, were 
 mourning, praying, and exhorting, while 
 Bishop Butler and men of cool, steady faith 
 were preparing their arguments to show the 
 thinking minds of the day that it might be 
 a sensible thing, after all, to consider the 
 claims of a revealed religion. 
 
 But He who purchased the church with 
 his own precious blood, saw from on high 
 the situation and prepared his chosen 
 agents. In the year 1703, three able and 
 ^/ godly ministers of Christ, one in England, 
 one in America, and one in Ireland, had 
 each a son born to him, and these three 
 infants were, in the providence of God, to 
 become the men that were largely instru- 
 mental in the revival of true religion, sever- 
 ally, in the bosom of the three churches we 
 have been considering. The names of 
 V these three children were John Wesley, 
 Jonathan Edwards, and Gilbert Tennent. 
 And a few years later there was born one 
 whom no one church or land could claim as 
 her own, George Whitefield, who with a 
 heart as large as the world, traversed up 
 and down its length and breadth, preach- 
 ing the everlasting gospel to every creature. 
 
23 
 
 and serving as a uniting bond between all 
 those who loved our Lord Jesus Christ in 
 sincerity and in truth. 
 
 To trace the lives, times, and works of 
 these men, and to set forth the great awak- 
 ening which God wrought through them, 
 will be the object of the remainder of these 
 discourses 
 
 II 
 
 5obn Wicelc^ ant) tbe fHlovemcnt in 
 Great Britain 
 
 E are now to look at John Wesley 
 and the revival movement in the 
 Episcopal Church of Great Britain 
 — a movement commonly known as the rise 
 of Methodism, and resulting, at length, in the 
 formation of the Methodist denomination. 
 
 Two considerations, however, will pre- 
 vent me from attempting anything like a 
 detailed account of the particular historical 
 or biographical facts in the case. One is, 
 that it is simply impossible, in a single dis- 
 course, to portray, even with tolerable full- 
 ness, a movement so vast in its propor- 
 tions, so mighty in its power, and so grand 
 in its results as the rise of Methodism ; the 
 other is, that it would be presuming upon 
 
24 
 
 the intelligence of my audience to rehearse 
 these common facts, so ably and frequently 
 set forth by this influential people, regard- 
 ing their early history. I shall take it for 
 granted that you are already acquainted 
 with the manner in which Wesley and his 
 fellow-laborers were called and prepared to 
 be leaders in this revival of religion so pre- 
 eminently apostolic ; and that you under- 
 stand that this work was carried on by 
 Wesley to the grandest results without any 
 . design or wish of founding a new church, 
 but simply as a revival of true religion in 
 the English Church. In fact, I trust that 
 you perceive that this was not a work of 
 Wesley, or of any other man, or any body 
 of men, but of God, and that as such it 
 was beset, opposed, and fought at every 
 step by the great enemy of God. This is 
 the feature of the movement that strikes 
 my mind as worthy of special considera- 
 tion — the grand spiritual conflict — and con- 
 sequently I shall, in this discourse, simply 
 call your attention to those points where 
 Satan pitched his battle with the Lord and 
 was so signally foiled. If, however, you 
 find your knowledge of the history scanty, 
 so that you cannot easily follow the thread 
 of my remarks, I would advise you never 
 
to read another work of fiction until you 
 have faithfully perused this grand record 
 of sublimest fact. 
 
 I think I see at least eight distinct points in 
 this history where the Lord gained a grand 
 victory oyer the great adversary of souls. 
 
 I. The^ first is where the enemy under- 
 took the destruction of the child. Old tactics, 
 these. He set Pharaoh's officers after the 
 infant Moses, and Herod's soldiers after the 
 infant Jesus. And in like manner he set the 
 Epworth rabble to burn the house wherein 
 was sleeping the little boy John Wesley. 
 
 It is well aflame before any of the house- 
 hold wakes, all is confusion and terror, each 
 rushes for himself through window, or door, 
 or whatever egress is possible, the mother 
 literally passing through the fire. And as 
 they gather outside looking anxiously in 
 each others' faces by the glaring light of 
 the burning dwelling, they discover that 
 one of the large flock is missing. The 
 little boy John is in there yet, upstairs fast 
 asleep, while the roof above him is burning 
 and his bed even is already taking fire. 
 Madly the father attempts the passage of 
 the stairs, but in vain. How the arch fiend 
 exults ! How he will nip that precious bud, 
 and destroy that potent germ ! But no ; 
 
26 
 
 God hath otherwise ordained. The boy 
 wakes, leaps from the bed, and flies to the 
 window. Some kind-hearted peasants make 
 a human ladder, one on top of another, and 
 down comes the boy. John Wesley is saved 
 to the world. 
 
 But this is not all. That escape stamped 
 upon the mind of the thoughtful boy, and 
 upon the heart of the prayerful mother, and 
 upon the soul of the believing father, the 
 idea of destiny. They felt that the escape 
 was for a purpose. Henceforth the father 
 planned, and the moth<?r prayed, and the 
 boy studied, feeling that God was with 
 him, and that work was before him. Ah ! 
 this idea of destiny is a power. The great 
 have it, and it furnishes courage and inspira- 
 tion for many a dark hour. How, then, 
 was the enemy doubly foiled I Instead of 
 destroying the child he gave clear articula- 
 tion to the secret thought of coming great- 
 ness in the Lord's cause. In after years 
 Wesley had engraven on one of his por- 
 traits the emblem of a burning house, and 
 underneath it the Scripture motto : " Is not 
 this a brand plucked from the burning .? " 
 
 2. The next point that I notice is where 
 the adversary invaded the Epworth rectory, 
 and beset the Wesley family with spiritual 
 
 \ 
 
27 
 
 manifestations. This table-tipping religion 
 that is so vaunting itself in our day is not 
 altogether a new thing. It is one of Satan's 
 old methods of operation, which he brings 
 forth from time to time, whenever he judges 
 he can gain an advantage by it. The 
 Wesley family seemed so surcharged with 
 destiny to the Lord's cause that he would 
 try anything and everything to lead them 
 astray. The manifestations began in the 
 Epworth rectory when John was under 
 twelve years, at a most impressible age. 
 And the Fox girls, or the Eddy brothers, 
 could hardly produce greater demonstrations 
 than those which came unbidden to this 
 quiet family. Whistlings and knockings 
 and moanings and trailing of garments, and 
 opening and slamming of doors, and jump- 
 ing of dishes, and even of so large an arti- 
 cle as a bed, and many other demonstra- 
 tions with a seeming intelligence behind 
 them, answering questions, interrupting 
 family devotions, showing special spite 
 against certain prayers — these were the 
 wonderful, yet clumsy methods of intrigue 
 used by the disturbed prince of evil as he 
 hovered around that noted family. 
 
 But they were received by that God- 
 fearing and Bible-believing household just 
 
28 
 
 as they always should be, as preternatural 
 phenomena harmless enough if let alone — ■ 
 a sort of intriguing challenge from the un- 
 seen world that was to be met in the firm 
 faith of God's word. Therefore none of 
 the family was led astray from the eternal 
 principles of revealed truth into wild vaga- 
 ries or vain speculations. But on the con- 
 trary a great advantage was gained ; for 
 there was thus engendered among them a 
 hearty practical faith in the supernatural, 
 which must be the habitual possession of 
 one who is to be valiant for the truth, and 
 which was especially needed in that age 
 when nature was so deified. A robust be- 
 lief in God and in the devil is necessary to 
 bold, efficient Christian character. Luther 
 had such, of whom it is related that some- 
 times being awakened by noises in the 
 night, he would listen a moment and then 
 saying, " It is nothing but the devil," would 
 turn over and quietly take another nap. 
 Something of this spirit did these manifes- 
 tations create in Wesley. They opened 
 his mind to the practical facts of the super- 
 natural realm, but made him fearless of the 
 presence or power of evil beings. Thus 
 again was the great adversary beaten by 
 his ovvn weapons. 
 
3. Next is Wesley's escape from mysti- 
 cism and asceticism. Surcharged as he was 
 with religious feeling, and with the ideas of 
 religious destiny, but still groping in spir- 
 itual darkness, not having yet learned jus- 
 tification by faith, he eagerly devoured in 
 his student and early ministerial days those 
 searching works of devotion that were then, 
 and are still now, standard in their depart- 
 ment, such as Thomas a Kempis' **Imita- , 
 tion of Christ,** Jeremy Taylor's ** Holy /( 
 Living and Dying," and Law's ''Serious 
 Call," works that go probing the secrets of 
 the heart and enjoining the strictest service 
 of the spirit— works which may be read 
 with the greatest profit by one whose piety 
 is intelligent, healthy, and joyful, but which 
 may prove a snare and a burden to one who 
 has not learned the freeness of pardon in 
 Christ. These works, I say, he eagerly 
 devoured, and soon felt that to realize their 
 holy teachings he must retire from the 
 world and give his whole time to medita- 
 tion and prayer. The life of a sort of Rom- 
 ish recluse became his ideal, as it has of so 
 many earnest and devoted souls. Here, 
 again, Satan rejoiced in hope, for he has 
 had great success in this line of action, 
 causing multitudes of those that might have 
 
30 
 
 been heroes or angels of mercy to imprison 
 themselves forever under the impression 
 that thus they were best doing God serv- 
 ice. And nothing would have been a 
 grander stroke of satanic policy than to 
 have slain John Wesley with the keen 
 sword of Thomas a Kempis. But here 
 again God saved him. His clear-headed 
 and warm-hearted mother objected to the 
 idea, and a discerning old Christian whom 
 he providentially visited at this time broke 
 in upon his dreams in words somewhat like 
 these, ** Young man, you can never serve 
 God and go to heaven alone. You must 
 either find or make companions." Thus 
 was he saved, and it can never be said that 
 John Wesley went, or tried to go, to heaven 
 alone. No, but rather escorted by thousands 
 whom he had been instrumental in teaching 
 the way of life. 
 
 4. The fourth point I notice is his escape 
 from legalism, a more dangerous foe even 
 than mysticism, especially at that time 
 when practical religion was at so low an 
 ebb, and when even the common charities 
 of life were so far neglected that to engage 
 in them was deemed unusually meritorious. 
 Companions, as advised, he found in his 
 brother Charles, in Whitefield, Morgan, and 
 
31 
 
 Kirkham, who with him constituted at Ox- 
 ford the " Holy Club." And if religion was 
 to be found in good works, surely these 
 young men found it. Fasting twice a week, 
 receiving the communion every Sabbath, 
 losing no moment of the whole day from 
 consecrated employment, all that could be 
 spared from study and from prayer being 
 given to the sick, to the poor, to the igno- 
 rant, to the prisoners, and, in fine, to every 
 suffering and needy class of society so gen- 
 erally and strangely neglected in that for- 
 mal age ; no wonder that their fellow-stu- 
 dents pointed the finger of scornful surprise 
 and wondering amazement at lives so zeal- 
 ous and self-denying. What could be more 
 natural than for these young men, thus toil- 
 ing and thus ridiculed, to suppose that they 
 had attained, that they were true and very 
 excellent Christians, far exceeding the great 
 mass of professors ^ And doubtless when 
 the Wesleys turned their backs upon the 
 cultured society of England to teach the 
 wild Indian of America the knowledge of 
 Christ, they did suppose that they were 
 among the truest and sincerest followers of 
 the Man of Nazareth that the world could 
 show. Punctilious, zealous, self-denying, 
 prayerful, who shall blame them for sup- 
 
32 
 
 posing that they had attained to the essence 
 of Christianity ? But oh, how fatal the 
 mistake had they stopped here ! And yet 
 how easy and natural to stop here, for who 
 was there to suggest anything further or 
 better than this self-denying life ? For 
 this even they were ridiculed, yea, perse- 
 cuted for righteousness* sake. And were 
 they not, therefore, according to the Sav- 
 iour's own words blessed ? Here, at least, 
 the enemy thought to hold Wesley, think- 
 ing after all he would get no higher concep- 
 tion of religion than this with which so 
 many are satisfied. 
 
 But God had ordered otherwise. On 
 shipboard, in their passage to America, 
 these Methodists rivaled the renowned 
 Moravians in the strict performance of re- 
 ligious duties, but when the terrible storm 
 arose, and all stood face to face with death, 
 then it became evident to Wesley that these 
 Moravians had something that he did not 
 have — perfect trust, perfect peace, perfect 
 love, that took away all fear — the heart 
 securely resting in God, the same in dan- 
 ger as in safety. Here was something to 
 which even the devoted Wesley was a 
 stranger, and to which he felt he must 
 attain. God would not allow him to rest. 
 
_|3_ 
 
 Good works and a self-denying life could 
 not satisfy him. 
 
 So we find him after a period of mission- 
 ary labor, wearily, hungeringly, thirstily, 
 crying out of the depths of his heart, as he 
 caught sight of his native land on the re- 
 turn voyage, ** I went to America to con- 
 vert the Indians, but oh, who shall convert 
 me ? Who, what is he that shall deliver 
 me from this evil, evil heart of unbelief ? 
 This have I found in the ends of the earth, 
 that I have fallen short of the glory of God." 
 And when some one suggested that he was 
 unduly excited, he exclaimed, " I am not 
 mad, but speak the words of truth and 
 soberness." 
 
 And thus he mourned and thus he sought, 
 till that memorable Wednesday evening at 
 a quarter^.before nine o'clock. May 24, 1738, 
 at the Moravian society meeting, when the J\ 
 burden that he had borne for a quarter of a 
 century fell off, and the thirst wherewith 
 for a quarter of a century he had thirsted, 
 was slaked in the fullness of a precious 
 draught from the stream of everlasting life. 
 Now John Wesley, after twenty-five years 
 of blind groping in feebleness, sees with a 
 clear eye and holds with a firm grip and 
 feels with a full heart the main essential 
 C 
 
34 
 
 truth of Christianity. Now he is a Chris- 
 tian ; now he is a man of power ; now he 
 will move the world. This was one of the 
 grandest triumphs of God's Spirit that the 
 world has ever seen, and the enemy, in- 
 stead of hindering the discovery and at- 
 tainment of this essence and strength of 
 Christianity, only stamped its importance 
 and preciousness all the more forcibly on 
 the heart of this great.movement. 
 
 5. The next poinji'' of victory was the 
 humble, Christ-like endurance of persecution 
 on the part of the Methodist preachers. 
 Whitefield soon led Wesley into the open- 
 air work, and he in turn many kindred 
 spirits. The power of God worked might- 
 ily with them, so that in a few years the 
 whole kingdom was moved. They went 
 everywhere preaching the word to every 
 creature. All classes heard with wonder, 
 but particularly were the degraded and 
 vicious obedient to the truth. The colliers 
 of Kingswood, the wreckers of Cornwall, 
 the soldiers of the army, and all such neg- 
 lected and hardened classes were won to 
 Christ by hundreds and by thousands. The 
 English, the Welsh, the Irish, and even the 
 phlegmatic Scotch, were all melted before 
 the burning words of ardent love and holy 
 
35 
 
 fire. This was more than the enemy could 
 quietly endure, and in his rage he threw off 
 disguise and turned his hand to open, brutal, 
 savage persecutions. It seems almost im- 
 possible to believe that such things occurred 
 in Christian England in the days of some 
 of our grandfathers. They are more be- 
 coming the untaught heathen upon whose 
 territory Christianity seemed an encroach- 
 ment in the days of old. 
 
 But truth is stranger than fiction. These 
 noble men, who without money and with- 
 out price, so ardently toiled for a revival 
 of the established religion of the realm, 
 were treated by State officials and wild 
 mobs alike as the veriest outlaws who 
 were to be silenced at any price. Volumes 
 might be written full of thrilling narrations 
 of the sufferings and of the marvelous 
 escapes of the Methodists in the first half- 
 century of their career. They were ar- 
 rested, fined, imprisoned, stoned, beaten, 
 kicked, ducked, and maltreated in almost 
 every possible way. To knock them sense- 
 less on the ground, and then to walk and 
 jump on them, "to tread the Holy Ghost 
 out of them," as their tormentors used 
 blasphemously to say, was a favorite ex- 
 ample of the perfect devilishness of the 
 
36 
 
 spirit of brutal opposition that confronted 
 these men of God. And the worst phase of 
 it ail was that these mobs were frequently 
 set on openly or countenanced tacitly by 
 the regular clergy of the Establishment, 
 whose altars these Methodists were replen- 
 ishing, and from whose hand they received 
 the sacraments of the Lord's house. 
 
 Yet so plentifully was the spirit of the 
 Master supplied that the inhuman policy 
 failed ; failed not only to deter these 
 preachers from their work, but also to 
 raise any resentful or bitter feeling in their 
 breasts. It is marvelous how these men 
 could suffer such indignities and yet go 
 cheerfully on in their work, loyal still to 
 the mother church and receiving the sacra- 
 ments at her altars. Never, perhaps, were 
 the Saviour's evangelistic directions more 
 fully complied with. When they were 
 persecuted in one city they fled to another, 
 and oftentimes while yet sore and stiff 
 with beatings and bruises, stood imme- 
 diately up, meekly, yet earnestly to pro- 
 claim the word of the Lord. The adver- 
 sary succeeded no better with brute force 
 than with cunning intrigue. 
 
 6. Another point where a great victory 
 was gained was in the avoidance of fanat- 
 
37 
 
 icism. No such powerful religious work 
 can be carried on without great arouse- 
 ment of the feelings, and the instances are 
 not few where, in weak human nature, 
 passion gains the advantage over reason 
 at such times. Great mental agitation 
 will frequently produce physical contor- 
 tions that become in a measure epidemic 
 and distract attention from the more im- 
 portant exercises of the soul. Satan, more- 
 over, at such a time almost invariably steps 
 in to counterfeit or unduly increase true 
 emotion, till he brings disgrace on the whole 
 work. In notable instances a mighty work 
 of God has thus been brought to a morti- 
 fying and disgraceful end. Such was the 
 case with the splendid work in London un- 
 der Edward Irving in the present [19th] cen- 
 tury. By this means the Great Awakening 
 itself was badly marred in some parts of 
 America. And if ever an opportunity was 
 afforded to Satan to gain a victory in this 
 regard, it surely was among these shout- 
 ing Methodists. Excitement ran high, and 
 wild demonstrations frequently drowned 
 the preacher's voice. Visionary and ex- 
 citable men had, of course, their supposed 
 revelations from the Lord to do all manner 
 of absurd things. But God so protected 
 
38 
 
 the coolness and good sense of the Wesleys, 
 who had already in their childhood made the 
 acquaintance of the chief author of confu- 
 sion, that he was in a large degree foiled, and 
 the Methodist movement, noisy and demon- 
 strative as it was in many cases, was never- 
 theless saved from any great vagaries of fa- 
 naticism. And, I ween, Satan was never 
 more crestfallen than when he discovered 
 that he could not turn the strength of this 
 great movement into ranting, visions, vag- 
 aries, and general, profitless fanaticism. 
 
 7. Still another point wherein a great 
 victory was gained was in reference to doc- 
 trinal discussion. There is a strange fasci- 
 nation in controversy. Men will fight for a 
 truth that they will not think of obeying. 
 The ages have been polemical, the Middle 
 Ages especially. The Reformation was 
 largely a war of doctrine. And we of this 
 day can scarcely realize the zest and the 
 heat of the Calvinistic and Arminian con- 
 troversy in the period we are considering. 
 Calvinism had been the orthodoxy of non- 
 conformity, but Wesley proved an Armin- 
 ian, while Whitefield, the great evangelist 
 of the age, and the bosom friend of Wes- 
 ley, remained a stanch Calvinist. These 
 two giants in the cause could not agree. 
 
39 
 
 Whitefield's Tabernacle rose near Wesley's 
 Foundry. And now, thought Satan, for 
 a grand theological fight that shall kill the 
 spiritual revival. But these two men, 
 warned of God as it would seem, came 
 together, realizing the situation, and agreed 
 to disagree in belief while working together 
 in the same grand cause. They exchanged 
 pulpits and gave to each other the right 
 hand of fellowship to go on their several 
 ways. Thus the Lord's army marched on 
 in two great divisions instead of being 
 compressed into one. Whitefield with 
 Lady Huntington and the Calvinistic wing 
 took one class of minds, and Wesley with 
 the Arminian wing took another class, 
 sweeping the whole field for God. 
 
 8, The last point that I will notice is in 
 reference to ^ecclesiastical ambition. The 
 Methodist societies grew so rapidly, count- 
 ing in a few years their tens of thousands 
 of members, that the idea of power and 
 importance could not fail to be protruded. 
 This people, at first so derided and de- 
 spised, were becoming a strong body, and 
 might very naturally be pardoned for glory- 
 ing in the fact. The question of organizing 
 a new church could not fail to be agitated, 
 especially since the mother church was so 
 
40 
 
 averse to adopting or acknowledging these 
 new-born children. There was, therefore, 
 every opportunity for the uprising of an 
 ecclesiastical ambition and pride. But such 
 a spirit would be fatal to the simplicity and 
 purity of the spiritual interests of the body. 
 Here lay a great danger. Here, then, was 
 Satan's grandest opportunity. Ecclesiasti- 
 cal ambition, desire of earthly power and 
 name — this has ever been and ever will 
 be his most potent and most successful 
 weapon. But it was long before he could 
 wield it here. During the lifetime of Wes- 
 ley that insinuating thought was kept won- 
 derfully in abeyance. 
 
 This movement of Methodism was not to 
 found a church as a party, or to establish 
 any institution, but merely to save souls. 
 It was not an ecclesiastical ambition, but a 
 revival of religion. And this doubtless was 
 the most potent reason that led Wesley to 
 be so exceedingly cautious in regard to 
 breaking with the Establishment. He re- 
 peatedly discountenanced the idea, forbid- 
 ding his preachers to administer the ordi- 
 nances, even when strongly urged by the 
 people and the apparent necessities of the 
 hour to do so. His attitude was, I believe, 
 quite as much in the interest of spirituality 
 
_4i_ 
 
 as of divinely ordained church order. At 
 any rate it stands out as one of the marvel- 
 ous phenomena of the time — that a pure and 
 simple Christianity flourished so long and so 
 vigorously without becoming leavened with 
 party and worldly pride. Scarcely ever, I 
 think, has the wily deceiver been kept so 
 long outside an historical movement of the 
 church before he could find an entrance. 
 
 And, therefore, as we review all these 
 perils and escapes, the grand lesson that 
 this movement was of God and not of 
 man becomes indelibly stamped on our 
 minds. If ever a man did what he did not 
 intend to do ; if ever a man was held in the 
 hollow of God's hand ; if ever a man was 
 directed, molded, sustained, instructed, and 
 guided by divine power, that was John 
 Wesley. He was nothing, but the power 
 behind him was everything. It is no part 
 of my plan to trace the subsequent history 
 of Methodism, or to forecast its future. It is 
 certainly a very different thing to-day from 
 what it was then. But it is with its early 
 days that I am concerned. And what did it 
 effect then ? It put a new face on English 
 history. It generated new ideas, infused a 
 new spirit, created new facts. And this to 
 the degree that no historian, however secu- 
 
42 
 
 lar his aim may be, can ignore it. Religion 
 was seen to be not a matter of form and rit- 
 ual, but of knowledge and experience ; not 
 a weakling to be defended with laws and 
 guns, but di power that could break its way 
 anywhere and hold its ground everywhere. 
 And English history reads so differently 
 because of it ! True, the proud, cold church 
 as a whole would not receive it ; but never- 
 theless it saved her ; yea more, it saved the 
 nation. Why did not English deism roll on 
 in its destructive course to its logical results.? 
 When France went on in her devilish frenzy 
 till she made her capital a hell upon earth, 
 why did England stop in her dangerous 
 ways } The answer is plain : " When the 
 enemy came in like a flood the Spirit of the 
 Lord lifted up a standard against him." 
 
 Ill 
 
 5onatban BDwarDs anO tbe ^movement in 
 IRew BriQlanD 
 
 E have looked at the revival move- 
 ment in old England as led by John 
 Wesley, now let us look at the 
 same movement in New England as led by 
 Jonathan Edwards. I say the same move- 
 
43 
 
 ment, for this Great Awakening, however 
 different its manifestations might have been 
 in different places, was all of the same 
 mighty Spirit. Yet the scene that we shall 
 now survey appears very different from 
 that before considered, and the man whose 
 life I shall now portray is of a type con- 
 siderably removed from that of the great 
 founder of Methodism. But if different, 
 no less instructive. The men and their 
 labors differed because their fields were 
 different. New England had no dense 
 populations of neglected, ignorant, irrelig- 
 ious, and vicious people. It had been but 
 an hundred years founded ; the original set- 
 tlers were men of earnest religious purpose. 
 Religion was the great fact of their lives. 
 And with their descendants at this time it 
 was still so, though rather as a matter of 
 theory than of heart experience. The 
 church was the chief institution in every 
 New England village, while next to it and 
 tributary to it was the school. The State 
 even was subservient. Every one was in 
 some way connected with the church and 
 conversant with" its doctrines. These doc- 
 trines were the staple mental pabulum of 
 the people. Newspapers were rare, but 
 sermons were thick, and long too. The 
 
44 
 
 clergy were well educated. Harvard and 
 Yale were already founded for the express 
 purpose of furnishing an able ministry. 
 And under their leadership the whole popu- 
 lation was intelligent. 
 
 Thus it came to pass that the Congrega- 
 \ tionalists have ever been so cultured a peo- 
 * pie. They are, perhaps, in proportion to 
 their numbers more intellectual than any 
 other denomination. From this fact two 
 results have been apparent. First, when 
 the Holy Spirit has been largely poured out 
 and spiritual life has been earnestly main- 
 tained, they have presented a grand array 
 of stable, cultured Christians. But when 
 spiritual life has waned, their declension 
 has been of the intellectual, rationalistic 
 type. Hence the Unitarian defection and 
 the great growth of skepticism and tran- 
 scendentalism that has sprung up in and 
 around Boston. While the irreligion of old 
 England was ignorant and vicious, that of 
 New England was intellectual and respect- 
 able. Therefore the man to lead the re- 
 vival in old England was a man of heart- 
 power, and the man to lead the revival in 
 New England was a man of head-power. 
 Not that Wesley was deficient in head, or 
 Edwards in heart, but the one did his work 
 
mainly through the heart, and the other 
 through the head. 
 
 In briefly portraying my subject, let me 
 put before you, first, the place ; second, 
 the man ; third, the work ; fourth, the 
 consequences. 
 
 I. One of the most lovely and fertile 
 spots to be found in generally barren and 
 rugged New England, is a basin about 
 seventy-five miles in circumference in the 
 center of western Massachusetts. It is 
 formed by the curvature of the mountain 
 ranges that come down from the north, 
 overlooked by the grim sentinels Tom and 
 Holyoke, and windingly traversed by the 
 Connecticut River. In the early ages per- 
 haps it was a lake, but the river breaking 
 through the mountain rock drained it, leav- 
 ing rich meadows of alluvial deposit. Such 
 a spot could not long be overlooked by the 
 pioneer settlers, nor fail to fall into able and 
 enterprising hands. 
 
 As early as about 1650, one Anthony 
 Stoddard, a stanch Puritan, related by 
 marriage to Governor Winthrop, bought 
 from the Indians a tract of land in this 
 mountain valley and began the settlement 
 of what is now Northampton. This family 
 of Stoddards, some of whom still dwell in 
 
46 
 
 Northampton, have ever been renowned 
 in the civil, classical, and religious annals 
 of our country, two of whom, especially, 
 have given guidance and inspiration to 
 many a student for the ministry — the eru- 
 dite author of the Latin grammar, and the 
 sainted missionary to the Nestorians. 
 
 People of high standing and character 
 from Boston were associated with Mr. 
 Stoddard in the settlement of the town, so 
 that it soon assumed a commanding im- 
 portance. A church was, of course, con- 
 stituted at once. The first pastor was a 
 brother of the celebrated Dr. Increase 
 Mather, of Boston ; the second, a son of 
 Eliot, the apostle to the Indians ; and the 
 third, Solomon Stoddard, the son of the 
 founder of the town. This man made him- 
 self and his church famous among all the 
 New England churches. He was of com- 
 manding personal appearance, of strong 
 intellectual powers, and of fervent, earnest 
 piety. He had graduated at Harvard, trav- 
 eled abroad, and preached somewhat else- 
 where, when at the age of twenty-nine he 
 took the pastorate at Northampton, which 
 he held until he was eighty-six, a period of 
 fifty-seven years. 
 
 Consider for a moment the influence 
 
47 
 
 such a man would wield, for such a length 
 of time, in such a position, amid such a 
 state of society. The son of the founder 
 of the town, of fine talent and education, 
 the minister of the parish for more than 
 half a century, it is no wonder that he be- 
 came a kind of oracle, a sort of divine 
 authority. The Indians even so far caught 
 the general impression as to regard him as 
 a superhuman being, so that when, in one 
 of the skirmishes of the time, a French- 
 man leveled his gun at him, they kept him 
 from firing by crying out in terror, " That 
 man is Englishman's God." 
 
 In course of time Northampton became, 
 as we might expect, an important center. 
 The regions round about were tributary to 
 it and took their impressions from it. Its 
 church was a kind of authority for all the 
 churches in that vicinity at least, and its 
 influence was felt more or less all over New 
 England. Probably no place except Boston 
 stood before Northampton in general in- 
 fluence at this time. Mr. Stoddard, more- 
 over, became very conspicuous in ecclesi- 
 astical circles for his advocacy of what has 
 been termed, the ** Half-way Covenant," 
 a departure from the Cambridge platform 
 regarding the terms of admission to the 
 
48 
 
 Lord's Supper. The original settlers of 
 New England, in constructing their plat- 
 form, declared that a profession of personal 
 piety was necessary to partaking of the 
 Supper and to full membership in the church. 
 Mr. Stoddard claimed that such a profession 
 was not necessary, but that the Supper 
 was a converting ordinance and could be 
 partaken of by any who wished, and, in 
 fine, that conversion was not necessary to 
 full church-membership, or even to the fill- 
 ing of the ministerial ofifice. His opinions 
 were accepted by nearly all the neighbor- 
 ing churches and by numbers in various 
 other parts of New England, and helped to 
 bring about that state of spiritual deadness 
 that preceded the great revival. He, of 
 course, conducted his own church on this 
 principle, and the consequence was that the 
 Northampton church became very large, 
 embracing the whole community without 
 regard to personal religious experience. It 
 was strong, wealthy, dignified, and self- 
 important, but unspiritual. Yet to the 
 credit of Mr. Stoddard it should be said 
 that personally he was a godly man, and 
 that his own piety and holy example pre- 
 vented many excesses that might have been 
 developed under such a system. 
 
49 
 
 2. Thus much regarding the place, and 
 now tlie man. When this influential pastor 
 came to be above eighty years of age his 
 people, as well as himself, began to look 
 about for a colleague. Of course, so ex- 
 traordinary a church must have an extra- 
 ordinary pastor, even as a colleague, and 
 such an one they found in the person of 
 young Jonathan Edwards. He was not a 
 stranger to the Northampton people, being 
 the own grandson of their adored pastor, 
 his talented daughter Esther having mar- 
 ried the Rev. Timothy Edwards, of Wind- 
 sor, Conn., whose fifth child and only son 
 was this celebrated Jonathan. The family 
 of Edwards was, like that of Stoddard, 
 highly talented and distinguished. The 
 father of Jonathan was a man of great 
 learning, who ministered most ably to one 
 church for sixty-four years, and only began 
 to use notes at the age of seventy, apolo- 
 gizing to his people for it, telling them that 
 his memory was failing somewhat, though 
 his judgment was as good as ever. 
 
 No wonder that such an ancestry pro- 
 duced a son whose powers as a metaphysi- 
 cian and a philosopher have been frankly 
 acknowledged by all the masters, both in 
 Europe and America. At an early age he 
 D 
 
50 
 
 showed his remarkable powers of mind, 
 . commencing the study of Latin at six, en- 
 [/ tering Yale before he was thirteen, and 
 graduating with the valedictory at seven- 
 teen. He was especially observant and 
 proficient in natural science, metaphysics, 
 and mathematics. When less than twelve 
 years of age he wrote to a gentleman in 
 Europe a long and exact account of his ob- 
 servations of the habits of field-spiders, 
 showing how they send their webs for long 
 distances horizontally from one object to 
 another. He read " Locke's Essay on the 
 Human Understanding " at the age of four- 
 teen, and wrote quite a metaphysical trea- 
 tise himself about that time. He can also 
 be said to have made in his youth the prin- 
 cipal discoveries in astronomy, electricity, 
 and chemistry that have since been an- 
 nounced to the world. For he always 
 studied with his pen in his hand, noting 
 down any thought that occurred to him, 
 and in these notes, which he left behind 
 him, are suggested quite a number of the 
 important facts in physics then unknown, 
 but which have since been made plain to 
 the world. 
 
 An acquaintance with him at this time 
 would have discovered only an incipient 
 
$1 
 
 philosopher or metaphysician. But God 
 had other work for him to do. He had 
 been from his early youth the subject of 
 religious impressions, but it was during his 
 college course that they ripened first into 
 complete confidence in Christ, and then 
 into his purpose to study for the ministry. 
 His religious experience, though quiet and 
 natural, was exceedingly thorough and in- 
 telligent, so that he carried to the study of 
 theology, which he commenced on taking 
 his bachelor's degree, a most earnest pur- 
 pose and extremely accurate habits of 
 thought. He took hold of theology just 
 as he had of mathematics, using in fact 
 many mathematical terms. A theological 
 question he called a theorem in divinity ; 
 he "proved" everything as he advanced 
 from one point to another, supplementing 
 his demonstration of the main question 
 with lemmas and corollaries. 
 
 After studying theology for two years he 
 preached to a Presbyterian congregation in 
 New York City, then was for two years a 
 tutor in Yale, during which time he grew 
 most wonderfully in grace and in knowl- 
 edge. It was within this period, at differ- 
 ent times, that he wrote those celebrated 
 resolutions for the regulation of his life. 
 
$2 
 
 They are seventy in number, and cannot 
 all be quoted here, but they show a mind 
 terribly in earnest in its great life-work. 
 Let me mention a few of them, to give an 
 insight into the heart of the man. 
 
 " I. Resolved, That I will do whatever I 
 think to be most to the glory of God and 
 my own good, profit, and pleasure in the 
 whole of my duration, without any consid- 
 eration of the time, whether now or never 
 so many myriads of ages hence." 
 
 ** 10. Resolved, When I feel pain, to think 
 of the pain of martyrdom and of hell." 
 
 " 22. Resolved, To endeavor to obtain for 
 myself as much happiness in the other 
 world as I possibly can, with all the power, 
 might, vigor, vehemence, zeal, violence I 
 am capable of, or can bring myself to ex- 
 ert in any way that can be thought of." 
 
 ** 37. Resolved, To inquire every night as 
 1 am going to bed wherein I have been neg- 
 ligent, what sin I have committed, and 
 wherein I have denied myself. Also at the 
 end of every week, month, and year." 
 
 "51. Resolved, That I will act so in every 
 respect as I think I shall wish I had done, 
 if I should at last be damned." 
 
 " 63. On the supposition that there never 
 was to be but one individual in the world 
 
53 
 
 at any one time, who was properly a com- 
 plete Christian : Resolved^ To act just as I 
 would do if I strove with all my might to 
 be that one who should live in my time." 
 
 Such was the man, such his talent, and 
 such his spirit when at the age of twenty- 
 ^^yi three he began to preach to the large, com- 
 ' \ placent, self-sufficient congregation of North- 
 ampton in 1727. The blight of unspirituality 
 and worldliness was at this time on all the 
 churches. No revival had been enjoyed by 
 the congregation for about ten years. Yet 
 the way of the Lord was preparing, and 
 Edwards was to be one of his prime agents. 
 
 3. This young pastor at once laid down 
 for himself the most rigid rules for work. 
 He uniformly wrote two sermons a week, 
 besides preparing various solid treatises for 
 the press. Judging that he was not adapted 
 to pastoral work he did not attempt it, but 
 confined himself thirteen or fourteen hours 
 each day at his study forging arguments for 
 God. In about two years his grandfather 
 died and he was left sole minister of this 
 '< important parish. Most carefully he studied 
 the situation that he, as the ambassador of 
 God, might fully and worthily meet it. 
 Divine truth was his weapon. He had no 
 grace of style or delivery. He wrote plainly, 
 
_54_ 
 
 almost jaggedly, and read very closely, hold- 
 ing his face quite near to his manuscript. 
 But the truth he most masterfully declared. 
 f"^' There was, as we may well suppose, an 
 ; abundance of false doctrine prevalent in 
 this mixed church. Many had begun to 
 think that by uniting with the church and 
 partaking of the sacrament they were do- 
 ing something by which they might be 
 saved, and thus they were losing sight of 
 Christ. Edwards determined to meet this 
 state of things by preaching boldly the 
 essential truths of the Calvinistic system. 
 Some of his friends were fearful and begged 
 him to hold. But he heeded them not. He 
 began by a series of discourses on " Justi- 
 fication by Faith," which he followed by 
 others on ''God's Sovereignty," proving 
 that no one had done or could do anything 
 to merit or purchase salvation ; that God was 
 under no obligation to save any one; that all 
 men were under condemnation, not having 
 a word to say; that nothing save God's for- 
 bearance kept any one out of hell for an 
 instant. One of his favorite texts and fre- 
 quent quotations was that strong passage 
 from the Epistle to the Romans, " That ev- 
 ery mouth may be stopped and that all the 
 world may become guilty before God." 
 
55 
 
 The Holy Spirit now began to be won- 
 derfully poured out, sealing the truth of the 
 pulpit, and such was Edwards' tremendous 
 earnestness and argumentative power that 
 he seemed for the time to carry all before 
 him. He realized that all out of Christ 
 were on the very verge of hell, and help- 
 less in themselves to get away from the 
 perilous position. Yea, more, they seemed 
 to be slipping in without any power to hold 
 themselves. All that men could do was to 
 cast themselves helpless on the mercy of 
 God and the merits of Christ, if perchance 
 they might thus be saved. And mighty, 
 mighty indeed were the results of this pre- 
 sentation of truth with the accompanying 
 power of the Holy Spirit. Northampton 
 was shaken, and the whole valley was 
 moved, for Edwards did not confine his 
 labors to his own pulpit. The realities of 
 eternity seemed to stand in very sight, and 
 men cried out in agony of soul. The world 
 and its affairs seemed forgotten. Under 
 the spell of those powerful sermons time 
 and place were all swallowed up in the 
 terrible realities of the eternal world. Once 
 when he preached on the judgment some of 
 his auditors really expected to see the Lord 
 coming in the clouds as soon as the sermon 
 
J6_ 
 
 closed. And when he preached at Enfield 
 his famous sermon entitled, " Sinners in the 
 Hands of an Angry God," from the graphic 
 text, ** Their feet shall slide in due time," 
 such was the influence upon the congrega- 
 tion, which had assembled in a careless 
 mood, that some of them actually caught 
 hold of the benches to save themselves 
 from slipping into hell. Yet there was 
 nothing exciting in his manner, for stand- 
 
 / ing quite still and reading very closely he 
 scarcely raised his hand except to turn the 
 leaves of his manuscript. But the truth 
 was presented with strong argument, in a 
 mathematical exactness of demonstration 
 whose conclusions could not be avoided. 
 And God was present in great power to 
 send the truth home, so that some three 
 
 'y hundred were hopefully converted in the 
 Northampton congregation in the course of 
 six months. This was in 1734-1735, a little 
 previous to the more general awakening 
 throughout the country. Edwards wrote 
 an account of this powerful work, which 
 was published in Boston, republished in 
 London, and extensively circulated in Eng- 
 land and Scotland as well as at home, thus 
 preparing the way for the wide-spreading 
 work that broke out so generally in 1740. 
 
57 
 
 Into the particulars of this general work 
 I cannot enter. Suffice it to say that about 
 1740 the revival reappeared, not only at 
 Northampton and vicinity, but in almost 
 every church throughout New England. 
 The same indications of overwhelming spir- 
 itual power were manifest in many places 
 under the ordinary ministry. In numerous 
 instances the people would so cry out in 
 public service, that pastors were obliged 
 to pause in the preaching from time to 
 time to allow the tumult to subside. And 
 in some cases it was customary to carry 
 out of the church to some neighboring 
 house those that were overcome by the 
 power, in order that the services at the 
 church might proceed. 
 
 To add to the interest, Whitefield trav- 
 ersed the land, preaching to those im- 
 mense audiences that frequently assem- 
 bled in the open air because no church 
 could contain them, and cavalcades of de- 
 voted friends accompanied him from one 
 town to another, thus transmitting the en- 
 thusiasm from place to place. Edwards 
 was delighted to have him visit Northamp- 
 ton, and himself sat in his own pulpit 
 weeping like a child, as that matchless 
 preacher swayed with his burning pathos 
 
58 
 
 the auditors who were usually fed on the 
 more argumentative sort of preaching. 
 
 Gilbert Tennent also came up from New 
 Jersey and preached with most salutary ef- 
 fect in Boston and throughout southern Mas- 
 sachusetts and Connecticut. A newspaper 
 was established for the express purpose of 
 reporting the progress of the revival — the 
 first religious newspaper, I believe, ever 
 printed — and thus the friends of God were 
 everywhere cheered and aided in their work. 
 
 A very moderate estimate of the number 
 I converted in the American colonies at this 
 ^'^ time is fifty thousand, which in proportion 
 O. to the population would be equal to one 
 million in our time. And many of these, it 
 must be remembered, were people who had 
 before maintained a form of godliness and 
 were intelligently acquainted with Chris- 
 tian doctrine, but destitute of the power. 
 
 4. The consequences. The American re- 
 vival was more of a work within the church 
 than the Methodist movement. Wesley 
 could get scarcely any countenance from 
 the Establishment, so that he was obliged to 
 labor outside among the neglected classes, 
 and ultimately to found a new church. Ed- 
 wards and the New England pastors gener- 
 ally reaped their harvest principally from 
 
y 
 
 J9_ 
 
 their own congregations. And yet even 
 here the enemy found a foothold and stirred 
 up the spirit of opposition. Some pastors, 
 cold-hearted or unconverted, repelled the 
 work so that in a considerable number of 
 cases, particularly in Connecticut, new con- 
 gregations were formed, calling themselves 
 Separatists, the majority of whom ultimately 
 became Baptists. And even where there was 
 no formal division, there was a divergence of 
 sentiment in regard to the value and propri- 
 ety of the revival. As remarked in the pre- 
 vious chapter, there are almost always at 
 such times high excitements and even ex- 
 travagances among the demonstrative which 
 greatly offend persons of cooler tastes and 
 temperament. These things are emphasized 
 by such persons and made the occasion for 
 condemning the revival as a whole. This 
 was the case even in New England. There 
 was thus developed a party that opposed 
 the movement, having for its champion a 
 Doctor Chauncy, of Boston, who published 
 several works against the revival. Ed- 
 wards very naturally replied to him and 
 became the champion of the revival party, 
 and it is largely for this reason that he has 
 so generally been regarded as its leader. He 
 did not lead it as did Wesley by traveling 
 
6o 
 
 from place to place, overseeing the work. 
 But it began with him, and found in him its 
 principal defender. 
 
 Edwards was never an advocate of ex- 
 travagances, but he well knew from his 
 own studies that a clear apprehension of 
 the truth of God might well strike the sin- 
 ner with dismay, and he well knew from 
 his own experience that a real view of the 
 matchless beauties of the Saviour could 
 transport the beholder out of the conscious- 
 ness of earthly things. He himself had 
 sometimes been so overcome with the glory 
 of God in some of his retirements as to 
 lose his consciousness for a considerable 
 time. And his beautiful, saint-like wife, 
 Sarah Pierrepont, had at times been so 
 rapt in the contemplation of God as to lose 
 her strength and to lie in a trance-like state 
 for hours. He could, therefore, well sym- 
 pathize with others of a more excitable 
 nature who were sometimes carried beyond 
 the bounds of moderation. 
 
 But a most solemn and instructive con- 
 sequence of the work remains to be told, 
 hi the course of his studies and of his ex- 
 perience, Edwards came to see how im- 
 proper and unsafe it was to admit to the 
 church of God people who knew nothing 
 
6i 
 
 about experimental religion. He saw how 
 radically wrong was the theory of his 
 grandfather Stoddard on this point ; how 
 impossible it was under this system to 
 maintain discipline, and what a damaging 
 effect it produced upon the hearts of the 
 members, leading them to think that they 
 were thus in some measure the people of 
 God, and so keeping them from Christ. 
 For years he studied and pondered the 
 subject, and after a time wrote his cele- 
 brated treatise on the *' Religious Affec- 
 tions," for the purpose of showing what 
 true religion was, and what feelings one 
 ought to possess in order to be a member 
 of Christ's visible people. Finally he came 
 to the conclusion that he could no longer 
 admit any to the church uoless they made 
 a credible profession of faith in Christ. 
 He was well aware that this decision would 
 cost him dearly, but he could not violate 
 his sacred convictions. 
 
 At last the issue came on this wise. It 
 was the custom under the system of Mr. 
 Stoddard, when any one was to be married, 
 to first unite with the church in order to 
 proper standing as the head of a family. In 
 the autumn of 1748, when Edwards had 
 been pastor of the church about twenty 
 
 1/ 
 
62 
 
 years, a young man intending to be married, 
 presented himself for membership. This 
 was a fair place for Edwards to declare 
 himself, as his mind was now fully made up. 
 The young man asked for membership in 
 Christ's church, not because he was anx- 
 ious to confess Christ, but because he was 
 to become the head of a family and de- 
 sired the proper standing for that position. 
 The pastor then made known his senti- 
 ments, and soon after called the leading 
 men of his church together and laid the 
 matter before them, asking that he might 
 preach a few sermons on the subject, ex- 
 plaining the change in his views. But to 
 this request they would not consent, fear- 
 ing that so able a reasoner would win 
 many to his side. On the other hand, 
 i/they immediately set measures on foot to 
 (remove him from the pastorate. The whole 
 town was stirred in view of such an inno- 
 vation, and the majority determined that 
 they never would yield or be convinced. 
 Many of the influential men in town had 
 been admitted to the church by Mr. Stod- 
 dard as unregenerate persons, and to refuse 
 to admit any more upon that basis, was 
 virtually to say that they had no right in 
 the church. And should it be that their 
 
63 
 
 high standing in the community was to be 
 lowered by the theological opinions of a 
 single man ? Should they allow that this 
 young Mr. Edwards had a truer conception 
 of propriety than the great Mr. Stoddard, 
 who had been their renowned leader for 
 more than half a century ? No, indeed. 
 Of course the evil heart of unbelief and 
 the machinations of the adversary were at 
 the bottom of it all. But traditional eccle- 
 siastical customs are powerful and subtle 
 weapons. 
 
 I cannot tarry to detail the controversy ; 
 but after two years of sad, and, on the one 
 side, shameful contention, a council called 
 from the neighboring churches that had 
 been under Mr. Stoddard's influence, by a 
 majority of one dismissed Jonathan Ed- 
 wards from the pastorate of the Northamp- 
 ton church. Satan was jubilant, and even 
 went so far as to induce the church to pass 
 a resolution forbidding Edwards ever to 
 preach in that pulpit again, even as a tem- 
 porary supply. 
 
 Thus was the leading minister of all New 
 England, and the champion of the great re- 
 vival, wounded in the house of his friends 
 and shamefully ejected from one of the 
 first pulpits in the land, simply for con- 
 
64 
 
 tending for the purity of Christ's church. 
 After waiting for some time he received a 
 call to the western part of the State, to the 
 joint work of preaching to a frontier church 
 and laboring as missionary among the In- 
 dians. He accepted it and toiled most 
 devotedly in this situation for several 
 years, during which time he wrote his 
 ablest work, his treatise on the "Freedom 
 of the Will," which has made his name 
 famous over all the world. From this ob- 
 scure station he was very unexpectedly 
 called to the presidency of what is now 
 the College of New Jersey, at Princeton, 
 an institution that grew out of the spirit 
 and needs of the Great Awakening. He 
 had just entered upon his duties there 
 when death cut him down, at a time and 
 in a position where it seemed that his best 
 and greatest work could be done. So it 
 appeared to his friends as they stood around 
 his bed, and supposing him unconscious, 
 they gave vent to their thoughts, lament- 
 ing his loss. But the dying hero heard 
 them, and rousing himself he said, '"*^Trust 
 in God and ye need not fear." These were 
 his last words. 
 
 But Satan's victory did not prove so 
 grand as it at first appeared. Yea, it turned 
 
6; 
 
 out to be a defeat. For the humble, quiet, 
 Christlike spirit with which the great man 
 bowed to his fate, exchanging with cheer- 
 fulness one of the first pulpits in the land 
 for a lonely mission to the Indians, put to 
 shame and convicted his opposers, so that 
 some of them, even in his lifetime, came 
 to him and with bitter, repentant tears con- 
 fessed their sin. 
 
 Attention was moreover called to the 
 principle in debate, and the denomination, 
 as a whole, saw that Edwards was right, 
 and adopted his practice. So that it has, 
 after sloughing off the Unitarian element, 
 been saved to evangelical principles. For 
 years Stoddardism has been almost un- 
 known among the Congregational churches. 
 To be sure there are some of their clergy 
 even now that seem to advocate something 
 like it, and there always will be the logical 
 tendency to it so long as infant baptism is 
 practised, which is the root of the whole 
 evil. But should any adopt it, it will bring 
 the old story over again, a corrupt church, 
 and a departure from the faith. 
 
 Again, the respite which Edwards enjoyed 
 from the labors of so exhausting a pastor- 
 ate, gave him leisure to produce those pro- 
 found works which have done so much for 
 E 
 
66 
 
 the establishment of a correct theology. 
 So that there is no name of which the 
 Congregational churches are more proud 
 to-day than that of Jonathan Edwards. 
 Just as the glory of Christ shone out, and 
 was in great measure achieved by his deep 
 and bitter humiliation, so it was with Ed- 
 wards. He did not live to enjoy the victory 
 on earth, but it came, as it always will 
 come, sooner or later, to those who stand 
 by the truth and suffer for its sake. 
 
 And last, the great revival to which he 
 gave so much of his best strength, and for 
 which he suffered so much disgrace, has 
 assumed its true place in history, and is 
 ever being better understood by those who 
 are truly on the Lord's side. Those who 
 labored in it are remembered, while those 
 who opposed it are forgotten. Chauncy 
 is a name unheard, while Edwards is on 
 every tongue. " The name of the wicked,'* 
 and of those who come to be in any man- 
 ner arrayed, even though unwittingly, on 
 the side of the wicked, ** shall rot, but the 
 righteous shall be an everlasting remem- 
 brance.'* ** They that be wise shall shine 
 as the brightness of the firmament, and 
 they that turn many to righteousness as 
 the stars forever and ever." 
 
67 
 
 IV 
 
 Gilbert ^ennent anD tbc fnlovcmcnt in tbe 
 fnliDDlc Colonics 
 
 lAVING noted the revival movement 
 in New England among the Con- 
 gregationalists, we are now to con- 
 sider it in the Middle Colonies among the 
 Presbyterians. 
 
 But we must, at the outset, remember 
 that the Presbyterian Church of America 
 was at this time in a situation quite differ- 
 ent from that of its sister denomination 
 already considered. Instead of being old, 
 strong, well-established and equipped, it 
 was rather in the weakness and destitution 
 of infancy, and lacking somewhat also in 
 homogeneousness. The first Presbyterian 
 church that was fully established in this 
 country was that of Philadelphia, in 1703, 
 the very year in which Wesley and Ed- 
 wards and Tennent were born, conse- 
 quently the denomination could not be very 
 large when these men came upon the stage 
 of active life. It had not then, as it has 
 now, a General Assembly, various synods, 
 numerous presbyteries, and strong institu- 
 tions of learning. There was, at tbe 
 
 / 
 
68 
 
 commencement of this period, but one 
 synod, that of Philadelphia, consisting of 
 less than half a dozen presbyteries. Yet 
 the denomination, actually so small and 
 apparently insignificant, was potentially 
 and prospectively large and important. The 
 prominent part it had acted in European 
 affairs, the large constituency it there pos- 
 sessed, with the strong incoming tide of 
 immigration, and the wide field here open- 
 ing before it, made it of great value in the 
 religious history of this continent. There- 
 fore God, in his gracious visitation of his 
 people at this time, could not fail to have 
 in tender and high regard this promising 
 nucleus of a strong church. There was 
 need that this important denomination 
 should receive such divine impulses as 
 should make its coming career strong for 
 the truth and the life of vital godliness. 
 <r This church had, in common with others, 
 fallen considerably away from the true life 
 and walk of a Christian people. Its creed, 
 as we have seen, was as good as those of 
 its neighbors, in fact better ; but the in- 
 terpretation put upon it, and the practice 
 growing out of it, were damaging enough to 
 vital religion. The Presbyterians have, in- 
 deed, never formally held, as have the Con- 
 
69 
 
 gregationalists, that unregenerate persons / 
 ought to be admitted to full membership 1 
 and to the ministry. But they have held, 
 or at least numbers of them held at this 
 time, that it was quite difficult, in fact im- 
 possible, to discover from the affections 
 whether regeneration had taken place or 
 not. The prevailing sentiment was, that 
 it was taken for granted that all those who 
 had been baptized and were not scandalous 
 in their lives, were regenerate without re- \l 
 gard to their emotions or affections. In 
 fact, baptism was thus practically regarded 
 as a converting ordinance. A conscious 
 experience of the regenerating work of the 
 Holy Spirit was not insisted upon, and 
 hence a large portion of the Presbyterian 
 membership was without vital piety. 
 
 Another thing to be noticed is, that this 
 church, though exceedingly tenacious that 
 her ministers should be none other than V 
 thoroughly educated men, had neverthe- ^\ 
 less no institution for their training. She 
 was dependent, therefore, for the care of 
 her fast-forming congregations in New Jer- 
 sey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware, upon 
 such ministers as emigrated from Europe, 
 or those that were educated at the Congre- 
 gational colleges of New England. The 
 
70 
 
 supply from the former source was doubt- 
 ful both as to number and quality, while 
 that from the latter was not exactly in 
 accord with the customs and spirit of Pres- 
 byterianism. 
 
 The great need, then, of this denomina- 
 V tion was a revival of true religion and a 
 supply of true ministers. These blessings 
 God was pleased to send in considerable 
 degree through the instrumentality of the 
 Tennent family . 
 
 I have placed the name of Gilbert Ten- 
 nent foremost in this movement, because 
 he was the most distinguished member of 
 this noted family. Yet he was not such a 
 pre-eminent and world-widely recognized 
 leader among the Presbyterians as was 
 Wesley among Methodists, or even Edwards 
 among Congregationalists. Perhaps the 
 genius of Presbyterianism would not admit 
 of any one great hero. ' Its distinguishing 
 characteristic is steadiness and moderation. 
 It occupies middle ground, avoiding all ex- 
 tremes, and hence can apparently have no 
 grand leader in any particular direction. 
 The fiery heart of Methodism may appro- 
 priately exhibit such a fervent hero as 
 Wesley, and the intellectual soil of Con- 
 gregationalism might produce such a mental 
 
71 
 
 hero as Edwards. But how is it possible 
 for steadiness and adherence to the golden 
 mean to set forth a pre-eminent leader ? 
 
 The Tennent family, God's chosen agent 
 of blessing to the Presbyterian Church, 
 consisted of the father, William, and four 
 sons, Gilbert, John, William, and Charles, 
 all five able ministers of the gospel. They 
 were natives of Ireland, and formerly, 
 while the sons were children, members of 
 the Episcopal Church. But God in his 
 providence touched their hearts and led 
 them forth into the wilds of America, and 
 into the more congenial home of the Pres- 
 byterian body. About the year 1720 we 
 find the father pastor of a small church 
 on Neshaminy Creek, Bucks County, Pa., 
 about ten miles north of Philadelphia. 
 This senior Tennent was a man of most 
 excellent education, and thoroughly filled 
 with the Holy Ghost — one of the forerun- 
 ners, as was the senior Wesley, of the 
 great awakening. God was using him for 
 ends far beyond his own knowledge. His 
 heart was moved by the condition of affairs. 
 He looked upon the young church of his 
 choice, needing a ministry but having no 
 schools ; he looked upon his own four boys 
 growing up about him, needing an educa- 
 
72 
 
 tion but having no opportunities, and he 
 determined, lone man though he was, and 
 poor at that, to do what he could in the 
 strength of the Lord to supply this pressing 
 need. His own little dwelling had no extra 
 rooms, but the trees of the forest were 
 growing all around, and strong, honest 
 muscle lay in his arm. And therefore, 
 taking his axe, in true imitation of the sons 
 of the prophets of old, he felled trees and 
 built a log house of about twenty feet 
 square, which he devoted to the purpose of 
 sacred learning. 
 
 In the discussions which afterward arose, 
 his opponents derisively dubbed it *' Log 
 College," and as such it has passed into his- 
 tory. In marked contrast with the stately 
 four-story brick and stone edifices that we 
 are wont to call theological seminaries was 
 this lowly cabin of the wilderness, and in 
 marked contrast with the richly endowed 
 faculties and heavily laden library shelves 
 that we deem necessary to the conduct of 
 such institutions was this lone and poor 
 backwoods parish minister, with the few 
 books at his disposal. But perhaps never 
 in modern times has any institution of sacred 
 learning been more honored of God than 
 was this. The classical training here ob- 
 
73 
 
 tained was of no mean quality, for it may 
 be doubted if the students of Princeton to- 
 day could furnish better Latin theses than 
 did the graduates of Log College ; but the 
 chief glory was that the Holy Ghost was 
 there in large measure. There this man of 
 God with his four sons, and many other 
 young men looking forward to the ministry, 
 studied and prayed and became filled with 
 intellectual and spiritual might. The place 
 became the headquarters of the spiritual ele- 
 ment of the Presbyterian Church. These 
 men were of the same stamp with Wesley 
 and Edwards, believing in a religion of the 
 heart that could be known and felt, in dis- 
 tinction from a religion of creed and ritual 
 whose existence must be guessed at. 
 
 This school had been in operation about 
 fifteen years at the time when the revival 
 wave rose so high during Whitefield's visit 
 to this country ; and it had, of course, sent 
 forth quite a number of young and zealous 
 ministers who entered warmly into the 
 work. Among these were the four Ten- 
 nent brothers, Gilbert, who settled in New 
 Brunswick, New Jersey, John and William, 
 who successively occupied the pulpit at 
 Monmouth or Freehold, and Charles, whose 
 field was in Delaware. 
 
 X 
 
74 
 
 Perhaps in no way can we better under- 
 stand the spirit and temper of these men, 
 and learn how intensely real to them were 
 divine things than by noting several inci- 
 dents of their remarkable lives. 
 
 The story of John's conversion and brief 
 ministry is well calculated to bring tears 
 and smiles in quick succession. He had 
 been an exemplary youth, his only apparent 
 sin being merely a too great indulgence in 
 temper. But when he was brought under 
 conviction his anxiety and anguish were 
 exceedingly intense, causing him to pray 
 unceasingly for four successive days and 
 nights. Toward morning of the fourth 
 night he was quite overcome, the power of 
 speech departed, and his attendants sup- 
 posed him to be dying. Then in this dire 
 extremity the peace of God took possession 
 of him, his strength revived, and he broke 
 out in rapturous praises, telling all whom 
 he could find of the great things God had 
 done for his soul. He gave the freshness 
 of his youth and his new-found joy to the 
 pastorate at Freehold, and in less than two 
 years, when consumption cut him down, 
 his congregation was completely trans- 
 formed from a careless, lifeless people into 
 one of the greatest devotion, spirit, and 
 
7$ 
 
 earnestness. He fairly bore them on and 
 in his heart, so that his great care in dying 
 was for them, lest they should be left as 
 sheep without a shepherd, a regard which 
 they most fully reciprocated, lamenting 
 most deeply his loss. There is still extant 
 a fragment of an old manuscript book kept 
 by the session of his church, in which, in 
 a minute of his death, he is called "the 
 reverend and dear Mr. John Tennent, the 
 most laborious, successful, well-qualified, 
 and pious pastor this age afforded, though 
 but a youth of twenty-four years five 
 months and eleven days." He had lived 
 so near heaven, and had so carried his peo- 
 ple with him, that it seemed to them that no 
 one could possibly fill his place. His brother 
 William, however, most completely met the 
 want, having been peculiarly qualified by 
 one of those rare experiences that so won- 
 derfully put a man in sympathy with the 
 other world, namely, a trance. 
 
 The story of IVilliam's trance has been 
 often told, and yet it will bear repetition. 
 He was at the time studying with his brother 
 Gilbert in New Brunswick, and so urgently 
 applied himself to his books as to fall sick, 
 apparently with consumption. During his 
 sickness his religious hopes became ob- 
 
76 
 
 scured, which added to his weakness and 
 carried him fast toward the grave. One 
 day, while conversing with his brother in 
 reference to his spiritual condition, he 
 fainted and died to all appearances. The 
 body was laid out according to the usual 
 custom, and an hour appointed for the 
 funeral the next day. His regular physi- 
 cian, however, who was much attached to 
 him, was absent from home at the time of 
 his supposed death, and on returning at 
 evening was exceedingly surprised at the 
 event, and after examining the body ex- 
 pressed doubts as to whether death had 
 actually taken place, thinking that he could 
 perceive a little warmth in the region of the 
 heart. He begged, therefore, for the priv- 
 ilege of attempting to restore consciousness, 
 which was very reluctantly granted, for the 
 relatives were perfectly satisfied that the 
 young man was dead. The funeral, how- 
 ever, was postponed till the third day, the 
 physician meanwhile using every means of 
 restoration within his power, but in vain. 
 The third day and the time of the funeral 
 arrived, when the determined doctor begged 
 for one hour more, and when that was gone 
 for half an hour more, and when that was 
 gone for a quarter of an hour more. By this 
 
time Gilbert, at whose house the strange 
 scene was passing, became somewhat im- 
 patient with the physician, and entering the 
 room declared that it was shameful to be thus 
 working over a dead man, and demanded that 
 the funeral exercises should immediately be 
 proceeded with. At this critical moment 
 the supposed corpse opened its eyes and 
 groaned, and in the course of two hours 
 more was restored to a sort of conscious- 
 ness, yet his recovery was very slow, and 
 for a time extremely doubtful. And when 
 at length assured, as to his bodily life, his 
 friends discovered to their consternation 
 that he had no knowledge of his former 
 life or acquirements. The work of his 
 education was begun over again by teach- 
 ing him the alphabet, and proceeding 
 through the lessons of childhood. But one 
 day, when reciting his Latin lesson from 
 *^ Cornelius Nepos,^^ he suddenly started, 
 clapped his hand upon his head, hesitated 
 a moment, and then said, " It seems to me 
 I have read that book before "; and in a 
 short time the memory of his former knowl- 
 edge came back to him as of old. 
 
 But the most interesting feature of the 
 case is his experience during the three 
 days in which he was apparently dead, 
 
78 
 
 and the influence that it had on his after- 
 life. He never alluded to it descriptively, 
 except when pressed by his friends to do 
 so; for, he said, it was, like Paul's rapture 
 into heaven, unutterable. It was some- 
 thing so sacred and so far beyond the 
 power of earthly language to describe, 
 that it was almost useless and well-nigh 
 sacrilegious to attempt any narration of it. 
 He promised, however, to leave among his 
 writings some account of it. But he died 
 amid the confused times of the Revolu- 
 tionary War, and his papers were lost and 
 destroyed, so that we shall never have a 
 minute description of this precious ex- 
 perience. Suffice it to say, that he felt 
 himself transported to heaven, where he 
 saw an indescribable glory and heard un- 
 speakable words and unearthly music, and 
 was just about to join himself to the happy 
 company of angels, when his attendant 
 put his hand upon his shoulder and said : 
 **You must go back"; this gave him a 
 pang so that he groaned, and opening the 
 eyes of his body, saw the physician and 
 his brother bending over him and realized 
 that he was yet, or again, on earth. The 
 period of his absence did not seem to him 
 more than twenty minutes, but it gave 
 
79 
 
 him such a view of the glory and reality 
 of heaven, and of the comparative insig- 
 nificance and unsubstantiality of earthly 
 things, that he became ever after chiefly 
 engaged with " that world," so that it was 
 with difficulty that he could attend to 
 earthly matters sufficiently to keep his 
 material interests in proper condition. For 
 three years, as he averred, that heavenly 
 scene was never out of his mind, and dur- 
 ing nearly half a century that he lived 
 after it, to preach the gospel, it stamped 
 him peculiarly as an ambassador from the 
 other world. His obliviousness of earthly 
 matters and methods seemed in some in- 
 stances an apparent damage to him, bring- 
 ing him into various difficulties. 
 
 Yet God provided for him, and on one 
 occasion seemed to grant him miraculous 
 deliverance. It was on this wise. Some 
 enemies of the gospel brought an action at 
 law against him, wherein for his defense, 
 and in accordance with the truth, he would 
 need to prove an alibi, he having been ab- 
 sent in Maryland on a preaching tour at a 
 certain specified time. Had he been like 
 other men versed in and dependent on the 
 methods of the courts, he certainly would 
 have sent to Maryland and procured wit- 
 
8o 
 
 nesses to prove the alibi. But he did no 
 such thing, paying no attention whatever 
 to the affair at all, except to repair to 
 Trenton, at which place the court sat, on 
 the day for the trial, trusting in the Lord 
 for acquittal. Some of his legal friends 
 approached him, and finding that he had 
 procured no witnesses, begged him to ask 
 for a postponement, feeling confident that 
 he would be convicted. He would not 
 listen to their advice, however, but started 
 for the court-house at the appointed hour, 
 conscious of his own innocence, and con- 
 fident that the great God of that glorious 
 heaven whose wonders he had seen would 
 in some way take care of him. As he 
 passed along the street, a man and his wife 
 accosted him, asking if his name was not 
 Tennent. On his replying yes, and in- 
 quiring if they had any business with him, 
 they answered that they were from Mary- 
 land, where he had been preaching, and 
 that they had both been warned in a 
 dream, thrice repeated, that he was in 
 Trenton needing their assistance; and that 
 in obedience to these dreams they had im- 
 mediately come to his aid. He took them 
 along to the court-house, where they also 
 found one of the tools of the scheming 
 
8i 
 
 persecutors so troubled in conscience at 
 the part he was playing in the wicked plot 
 that he made full confession. By the testi- 
 mony of these three persons Mr. Tennent 
 was of course triumphantly acquitted ac- 
 cording to his trust in God. 
 
 Other remarkable incidents might be 
 cited. But we must leave these personal 
 narrations to pursue the course of the gen- 
 eral work of God at this period. 
 
 It can be seen at a glance that the pres- 
 ence X)f Log College, sending forth a min- 
 istry of such spirit and power, could not 
 fail to make a marked impression amid a 
 church composed in a large degree of form- 
 alists, who had no sympathy with so ear- 
 nest an evangelicity. And it was most 
 natural that a kind of hostility should 
 spring up against these earnest men, as 
 against irregular enthusiasts. Nor could 
 these zealous souls, on their part, eas- 
 ily brook the lifeless sort of religion that 
 prevailed in too many of the churches, 
 and they were not slow, and perhaps not 
 very discreet in their condemnation of cold 
 formalism. 
 
 By degrees, therefore, the Presbyterian 
 
 church became divided into two parties 
 
 known as the ''Old Side'' and ''New Side,'' 
 F 
 
82 
 
 and at each meeting of the synod some 
 measure would very likely be passed that 
 in some way bore upon the point of differ- 
 ence between them. Thus matters went 
 on from year to year till, in 1738, the 
 synod having, of course, a majority of Old- 
 Side men, passed a decree that no pres- 
 bytery should license any candidate, not a 
 graduate of a regular European or New 
 England college, until he had first passed 
 an examination before the synod as to 
 his literary qualifications. This was aimed 
 against Log College men, who, though well 
 informed in classical and theological stud- 
 ies, were doubtless quite deficient in the 
 arts and sciences, and might fail in these 
 departments before a critical and really 
 hostile synod. 
 
 Gilbert Tennent had now been pastor 
 some ten years at New Brunswick, and 
 was a man of considerable power ; William 
 was at Freehold, also a strong man ; and 
 a goodly number of the Log College men 
 were close about them, making up, for the 
 most part, the presbytery of New Bruns- 
 wick. These zealous and stanch souls 
 believed that fidelity to gospel truth de- 
 manded resistance to ecclesiastical error. 
 Consequently, in the course of a year they 
 
83 
 
 showed their strength and determination 
 by licensing a Log College man, without 
 requiring him to pass an examination be- 
 fore the synod. 
 
 Another act which the synod had passed 
 was that no minister should preach within 
 the bounds of a brother minister's parish 
 without first obtaining his consent. This 
 was to prevent these earnest revival men 
 from itinerating through the country and 
 preaching wherever they could find a will- 
 ing congregation. This decree also the 
 New-Side men disregarded, and continued 
 to go anywhere and everywhere that the 
 way seemed to open, preaching the gospel 
 with great power and success. 
 
 Meanwhile, the memorable year of 1740 
 was close at hand, and the revival power 
 was increasing everywhere. Whitefield 
 came up from Georgia through these col- 
 onies, and, of course, sought out such kin- 
 dred spirits as were the Tennents. In Gil- 
 bert he found a man not only after his own 
 heart, but with considerable of his own 
 power. He took him for a traveling com- 
 panion as far as New York, and there, as 
 an auditor himself, sat listening with rapt 
 interest to this hitherto comparatively ob- 
 scure preacher. And the testimony of 
 
J. 
 
 Whitefield was, that hi never heard such 
 a searching sermon. ** He is," said he, 
 ** a son of thunder, and fears not the face 
 of man." 
 
 After the great itinerant had gone on to 
 Boston and lighted the fires there and 
 throughout New England, as he returned 
 through New Jersey he advised Gilbert 
 Tennent to make the tour of New England 
 after him and continue the work which he 
 had begun. Naturally, being a modest and 
 timid man, he would have shrunk from so 
 great an undertaking, which was to go 
 among entire strangers outside the bounds 
 of his own denomination, and that too in 
 the footsteps of so brilliant a preacher as 
 Whitefield, and to so cultured a center as 
 Boston. Well might a Log College man 
 hesitate, according to earthly standards, to 
 undertake such a work. But he, with true 
 apostolic spirit, conferred not with flesh 
 and blood ; but, believing himself to be 
 called by God, went, and preached with 
 magnificent success for three months in 
 Boston, and was instrumental in the con- 
 version of a great multitude of souls. As 
 he retraced his steps through Massachu- 
 setts, Connecticut, and New York, he left 
 a fire behind him in almost every village. 
 
85 
 
 A curious fact of his preaching was that in 
 many places his sermons did not seem to 
 produce any immediate marked result in 
 the way of sudden awakenings or conver- 
 sions, which were then so common. But 
 in a few days after he was gone, those 
 who had listened to him would be struck 
 under conviction, and a blessed work would 
 be the result. When in the vicinity of New 
 Haven, so great was his fame that some of 
 the students of Yale walked fourteen miles 
 to hear him. 
 
 This recognition by Whitefield and this 
 successful preaching tour abroad gave Ten- 
 nent confidence and independence. He 
 had, moreover, gotten more completely into 
 the length and breadth and depth of the 
 general revival work, so that when he ar- 
 rived home he took a bolder stand than 
 ever before against its opposers. He felt 
 himself called of God to rouse the slumber- 
 ing and dead orthodoxy of the Presbyterian 
 church, and he soon preached a terribly 
 scathing sermon against the Old-Side party, 
 which was published and widely circulated. 
 It was commonly known as the ^* Notting- 
 ham sermon/' being delivered at a "viHage 
 of that name. And a keen-edged blade it 
 was. He was particularly able in this line, 
 
7 
 
 86 
 
 the denunciatory seeming to be his forte. 
 He was of the true Elijah stamp, so much 
 so that he seems to have imitated him in 
 his personal appearance, having worn on 
 his journeys a leathern girdle about his loins 
 and allowed his hair to fall down uncut 
 upon his shoulders. 
 
 The Nottingham sermon brought matters 
 to a crisis, so that at the next meeting of 
 the Synod the Tennents and their sympa- 
 thizers, in fact, the Presbytery of New 
 Brunswick, were excluded from the body. 
 This Presbytery, however, nothing daunted, 
 went on its way rejoicing, and, finding sym 
 pathizers in the vicinity of New York, formed 
 with it the Synod of New York, into which 
 was gathered all the revival party, while the 
 anti-revival party still ruled the Synod of 
 Philadelphia. And thus the great enemy of 
 the church succeeded in arraying the first 
 two synods of the Presbyterian Church in 
 America against each other. 
 
 Yet in spite of these contentions among 
 the leaders, the spiritual work among the 
 people rolled on mightily with all those 
 who did not fight against it, of whom, how- 
 ever, there were not a few. But in the 
 course of time, which is a great adjudicator 
 of all strifes, it became evident that this 
 
87 
 
 warfare was singularly like that between 
 the house of Saul and the house of David. 
 The new party of youthful spirit and inspi- 
 ration waxed stronger and stronger, while 
 the old party of dignity and legitimacy 
 waxed weaker and weaker. Moreover, the 
 two parties began to understand each other 
 better and to be more conscious of their 
 own errors and indiscretions, so that after 
 seventeen years of separation the two 
 synods were reunited under the name of 
 the Synod of New York and Philadelphia. 
 
 And no one labored more for this reunion 
 than Gilbert Tennent himself. Soon after 
 the separation he was called to a congrega- 
 tion in Philadelphia that had been gathered 
 under the preaching of Whitefield. During 
 a pastorate here of nearly a score of years 
 he of course came into close contact with 
 many of the better sort of the " Old-Side " 
 party and learned somewhat of them. In 
 fact, he became quite different himself in 
 his style of preaching, laying aside his 
 furious fire and becoming more argumenta- 
 tive and intellectual. Indeed, one of his 
 old admirers declared that he never was 
 worth anything after he went to Philadel- 
 phia, for he then took to writing his ser- 
 mons and dropped out of his impassioned 
 
88 
 
 appeals extemporaneously delivered. But 
 Presbyterians cannot long be enthusiasts 
 or extreme partisans ; they must ever come 
 back to the mean of moderation. 
 
 But the thing of special note and prac- 
 tical instruction is that the ** New-Side " or 
 revival party, once so despised and derided, 
 became the leading, active, progressive ele- 
 ment in the reunited church. Log Col- 
 lege was the germ from which have grown 
 the renowned and godly institutions at 
 Princeton. The very site of that insignifi- 
 cant hut is now sacred to the heart of the 
 great Presbyterian body. After the cabin 
 had been torn down and the logs of which 
 it was composed scattered, a fragment of 
 one of them was found and rescued from 
 oblivion, from which a cane was made and 
 presented to the venerable Doctor Miller, 
 of Princeton, as a precious relic of so sacred 
 a shrine. And the men who were once 
 condemned and rejected as irregular and 
 pestilent enthusiasts whose mouths ought 
 to be stopped are now regarded as the true 
 heroes of the church, whose names are 
 held in the highest veneration. 
 
 In fact, the same thing that we saw in 
 the case of Wesley and of Edwards we see 
 here in the case of the Tennents. Yea, 
 
J9_ 
 
 we have seen the same thing so many 
 times in all ages that it is high time that 
 the lesson was learned. How many times, 
 when martyr fires have been furiously 
 lighted, must 
 
 The hooting mob of yesterday in silent awe return, 
 And gather up the ashes into memory's golden urn, 
 
 before we shall learn that the men who 
 have the spirit of Christ are the men who 
 are owned of Christ ? 
 
 But let us not leave this subject without 
 reminding ourselves afrfesh of the fact that 
 in all such cases the power is of God and 
 not of man. It was not the natural sagacity 
 and foresight of these men that wrought 
 the glorious work of establishing the Pres- 
 byterian Church of America as a true, spir- 
 itual body, instead of a false and dead 
 establishment. It was God that made the 
 senior Tennent equal to the task of fur- 
 nishing a spiritual ministry for the young 
 church. The overruling hand is so clear 
 in it all ! Who can look at the lives of 
 Wesley, Edwards, and Tennent, all born 
 in the same year, possessed of the same 
 spirit, and producing for three great de- 
 nominations the same results, though in 
 widely different spheres, and knowing for a 
 
90 
 
 long time nothing of each other's work, who, 
 I say, can review these facts and not be con- 
 vinced that the power was of God and not of 
 man ? Wesley in his struggles at Oxford, 
 Edwards in his arguments at Northampton, 
 and Tennent in the seclusion of Log College, 
 are all moved by one and the same spirit for 
 one and the same purpose. 
 
 (3eor0e TKUbftcfielD, tbe Cosmopolitan 
 Bvangelist 
 
 HUS far in these lectures I have 
 looked at the work in the several 
 fields and denominations, taking 
 especial note of the leaders in each depart- 
 ment. But I have carefully endeavored 
 not to lose sight of the fact that the whole 
 was one great work of God, not arising 
 from any one agency nor confined to any 
 one people or dependent on any one leader. 
 The holy fire broke out in many different 
 places, and, spreading in all directions, 
 enkindled the whole English-speaking em- 
 pire. But as every great movement has 
 its representative character, the Great 
 Awakening had its pre-eminent preacher, 
 
9^ 
 
 George Whitefield — than whom, I believe, 
 a greater of his kind is not to be found in 
 the history of the whole church. He is 
 emphatically the representative man of the 
 great revival of the eighteenth century. 
 No one country or denomination can claim 
 him. He was born in England, but died in 
 America. He was baptized in an Episcopal 
 church, but was buried in a Presbyterian 
 meeting-house. He is commonly reckoned 
 a Methodist, yet never technically belonged 
 to that denomination. He received Epis- j 
 copal ordination, yet sometimes broke bread 
 for the Congregationalists. He was an 
 exceptional character who soared above all . 
 party lines or ecclesiastical boundaries, f 
 His citizenship was in heaven, and he 
 seemed to fly over the earth preaching the 
 everlasting gospel to every creature, not 
 allowing himself to be holden to any place 
 or party. 
 
 Of course we have not exact accounts 
 and statistics of the labors of the apostles, 
 but the probability is that no man ever 
 traveled so far or preached so many times 
 to so many people within the same period 
 of years as did Whitefield. His parish em- 
 braced England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, 
 West Indies, Maine, New Hampshire, Ver- 
 
92 
 
 mont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Con- 
 necticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsyl- 
 vania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North 
 Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia. 
 And over this wide domain he swept like a 
 flying angel time after time for thirty-four 
 years, crossing the Atlantic Ocean thirteen 
 times and preaching over eighteen thousand 
 sermons to audiences varying from one hun- 
 dred to thirty thousand people, and all this 
 before the days of railroads and steamships. 
 But these dry facts do not fully let us 
 into the unearthly, majestic, and sublime 
 heart of the man. Few, I fear, understand 
 him. The world has not given him a niche 
 as a hero. He is so far above the range of 
 the experience of ordinary men ! He had 
 so little permanent connection with earthly 
 affairs. He wrote no theology, he founded 
 no church, he left no children, he reared 
 no monument. He did none of those things 
 by which men are commonly remembered 
 and appreciated in the world. His whole 
 interest/ was in heaven and in eternity. 
 *^ Astrd petamus " was the motto on his 
 seal,'"'" Let us seek the stars." His only 
 care was to save men for the world that is 
 to come. He preached as Apelles painted, 
 for eternity. He is not to be measured as 
 
93 
 
 are others. Nor are others to be measured 
 as is he. He is an exceptional character, 
 an exhibition of what the Spirit of God can 
 do with poor, weak humanity, a personal 
 exponent of that mighty wave of divine 
 power that visited the world at that time. 
 He comes nearer to John's vision of the 
 flying angel having the everlasting gospel 
 to preach to every creature than any other 
 man. The adjective " seraphic " has been 
 frequently applied to him, and not without 
 reason, yet in using it we must be careful 
 not to picture to ourselves a dainty saintli- 
 ness, for he was rather a warrior angel, 
 charging boldly upon the hosts of sin, often 
 faint, bleeding, panting, and covered with 
 the dust and gore of the battle. 
 
 But I must not deal too much in gen- 
 eralities. We need to consider three things 
 in order to understand the wonderful story 
 of Whitefield's preaching : i. His constitu- 
 tional fitness for a preacher. 2. His re- 
 ligious experience and call to the ministry. 
 3. The divine power that was abroad in 
 the world at the time. 
 
 I. He was an orator horn. He had, in the 
 first placey that sensitive, plastic, imaginative, 
 nervous constitution that took in the impres- 
 sion of all things with intense reality. His 
 
94 
 
 soul was like the photographer's plate that 
 needs but the light to receive the impression 
 of all things around ; or like the chords of 
 the i^olian harp that want but the breath 
 of the winds to awaken the sweetest music. 
 I His heart was alive to impressions from na- 
 ture, from men, from spirits, from angels, 
 and from God. The ear of his soul was 
 open to earth, to heaven, and to hell, to 
 time, and to eternity. He was, therefore, a 
 living reservoir of truths, facts, emotions, 
 illustrations, all burning hot within him. 
 j And his power of expression wdiS as great 
 as his susceptibility to impression. His was 
 one of the grandest voices that the world 
 has ever listened to, so powerful and yet 
 capable of such exquisite modulation. It 
 could be heard a mile in the open air when 
 he thundered the terrors of Sinai, or could 
 be reduced to a thrilling whisper as when he 
 said, ** Hark! Hark!" bidding his hearers 
 listen for the groans of the prostrate Sav- 
 iour in the dark shadows of Gethsemane. 
 The expression of his face too, changing 
 at will from that of a radiant angel to that 
 of an angry demon ! The glare of his eye, 
 the wave of his hand, the action of his 
 whole body, and his copious, yet honest 
 tears, all conspired to make him the per- 
 
95 
 
 feet orator. He was, moreover, an invalid 
 much of the time, and thus keyed up to 
 that extreme nervous tension that is some- 
 times so dreadfully helpful to the public 
 speaker. For many years he was accus- 
 tomed to vomit quantities of blood after 
 preaching, which seemed to come as a re- 
 fief to his surcharged system, so completely 
 and literally was his life given to his work. 
 He could throw himself en rapport with 
 almost any occasion, particularly with 
 the grand, the terrible, the thrilling, and 
 the sublime. A thunderstorm was his de- 
 light. In his youth he once took to the 
 fields in the midst of one, in the darkness 
 of the night, and tried to improve the aw- 
 ful scene in getting some idea of the judg- 
 ment day. Some of his grandest sermons 
 were preached in the midst of thunder- 
 storms, using the clouds, the darkness, the 
 thunder, the lightning, and the rainbow for 
 the illustrations of his subject. To such a 
 man the occasion and the circumstances 
 were instruments of power where to others 
 they would have proved hindrances and 
 obstacles. The tumult of a mob, and the 
 angry roar of an opposing multitude drew 
 him out to his grandest efforts ; it would 
 seem that sometimes he almost courted 
 
96 
 
 them. And yet, there was nothing in him 
 that approached at all to coarseness or rude- 
 ness, for nothing delighted him more than 
 the attendance of the cultured. He was 
 especially pleasing and successful as an 
 orator in Lady Huntingdon's chapel, where 
 were gathered the select few, such as Ches- 
 terfield and Bolingbroke and Garrick and 
 Hume, as he was at Moorfield, where he 
 contended like a charging war horse, for a 
 whole day, with the rude, coarse, devilish 
 mob of twenty or thirty thousand vaga- 
 bonds. He had been intimate with vari- 
 ous classes of people, and was at home 
 in the dialect and scenes of each. Once 
 preaching to the sailors in New York, he so 
 graphically described a storm at sea carry- 
 ing away the masts and throwing the ship 
 on her beam ends, that when he exclaimed, 
 " What next ? " his sailor audience were 
 so carried along that they rose in their 
 seats and shouted right out in church, 
 **Take to the life-boat!" "Yes," said 
 Whitefield, " to the life-boat, Jesus Christ, 
 the only refuge amid the storm of the wrath 
 of Almighty God." Numerous instances of 
 this sort are given where he so carried his 
 audience with him that they were trans- 
 ported to the scene he was describing. 
 
97 
 
 2. But I pass to the second point : His 
 religions experience and call to the ministry. 
 Nothing but that heartfelt experience of 
 eternal realities could ever have so called 
 out those marvelous powers of his in the 
 cause of religion. Had he not been led into 
 the ministry, he probably would have been 
 an actor. Unlike Wesley and Edwards and 
 Tennent, Whitefield was not born and nur- 
 tured in the ways of piety. He was the 
 son of a tavern-keeper, who, dying when 
 he was a boy, left him to the drudgery of 
 bartending and floor-scrubbing. But he 
 was ambitious of better things, and made 
 an attempt for a liberal education by going 
 to Oxford and supporting himself as a serv- 
 itor, that is, waiting on the tables of the 
 richer students, a business for which his 
 hotel life had particularly qualified him. 
 His heart, by degrees, had been drawn by 
 the Holy Spirit toward a godly life, and 
 falling in with the Wesleys and others of 
 the ** Holy Club," he commenced the 
 search for God in dead earnest. The Wes- 
 leys had at this time gotten no further 
 than their ascetic and legal strivings, and 
 into this they led Whitefield. It is touch- 
 ing and pitiful to see the awful, yet fruit- 
 less earnestness of his struggles. 
 G 
 
98 
 
 His nature was so much more ardent 
 than that of the Wesleys, that he quickly 
 went far beyond them, and brought himself 
 into such straits that they hardly knew how 
 to advise him any further. He fasted and 
 prayed and wept and watched with such 
 incessant vehemence that he brought him- 
 self near to death. He got scarcely more 
 than three hours sleep in a night. For diet 
 he allowed himself little more than dry 
 crusts of bread and sage tea, and purposely 
 wore old and dirty clothes, in order to mor- 
 tify his pride. To imitate Jesus in the 
 desert, he would go out into the college 
 yard at night, and in the pelting storm lie 
 for hours on the cold and wet ground, pray- 
 ing most piteously. The result was, as 
 might have been expected ; first, his mind 
 failed him so that he could no longer pre- 
 pare his lessons, causing him to burst into 
 tears before his tutors at recitation, and 
 then his health broke down and he lay help- 
 less with fever for some seven weeks. In 
 the course of this sickness he saw how use- 
 less it was to attempt to work out salvation 
 by these ascetic practices, and began in a 
 blind way to feel his utter helplessness to 
 do anything of himself to merit salvation. 
 Thus slowly was he taught the truth 
 
99 
 
 through bitter experience. But the time of 
 his deliverance was at hand. 
 
 One day feeling extremely thirsty, and 
 thinking of Christ in like suffering on the 
 cross, he was led to adopt his language, and 
 throwing himself on his bed, cried out in an 
 agony of soul, "I thirst, I thirst,'' having, 
 however, quite as much reference to his 
 spiritual as to his literal want. Then and 
 there he was enabled to trust. His burden 
 rolled off, and he began to give praise to 
 God. Soon after this clear reception of 
 Christ, being filled from this time forth 
 with an excess of joy, he went home to 
 Gloucester, and taking the Scriptures, 
 rather than his ascetic authors, for his read- 
 ing, drank in strong draughts of the living 
 water to his thirsty soul. 
 
 Here renovated in body, mind, and spirit, 
 he began to yearn toward the ministry of 
 reconciliation, longing to tell to others the 
 great joy that he himself had found. Yet 
 he was extremely modest and conscientious, 
 thinking himself unfit for the sacred office. 
 But good Bishop Benson and other friends, 
 discerning his talent and spirit, urged him 
 forward rather than held him back, till at 
 last he consented to be ordained, not, how- 
 ever, till he had compared the Thirty-nine 
 
100 
 
 Articles of the Church of England with the 
 Scriptures, and carefully examined himself 
 according to the qualifications laid down 
 in the Epistles to Timothy and Titus. Yet 
 he says that when he went up to the altar 
 for ordination, he could think of nothing 
 but Samuel standing as a little child before 
 the Lord with a linen ephod, and he adds, 
 **When the bishop laid his hands on my 
 head, my heart was melted down, and I 
 offered up my whole spirit, soul, and body, 
 to the service of God's sanctuary " ; but 
 in a letter to a friend at this time, he says : 
 " I have thrown myself blindfold, and I 
 trust without reserve, into God Almighty's 
 hands ; only I would have you observe that 
 until you hear of me dying for or in my 
 work, you will not be apprised of all the 
 preferment that I expect." A week after, 
 when he had preached his first sermon, he 
 commenced another letter, saying in the 
 fullness of his unfettered soul, '' Glory, 
 glory, glory be ascribed to an almighty, 
 triune God ! last Sunday I preached my 
 first sermon " ; and closed the letter by 
 saying, " Blessed be God, I now find free- 
 dom in writing. Glorious Jesus, 
 
 " Unloose my stammering tongue to tell 
 Thy love, immense, unsearchable." 
 
lOI 
 
 Here you see the kindlings of that mighty 
 flame. Here you see the mighty blasts 
 that fanned it. Some one went to Bishop 
 Benson and said that Whitefield's first ser- 
 mon had driven fifteen persons mad. '' I 
 only hope," replied the bishop, **that their 
 madness will last till next Sunday." Here, 
 then, was the all-engrossing, deeply rooted, 
 hard-earned experience, and thorough, con- 
 scientious consecration that called into ac- 
 tion his wonderful native powers. Re- 
 ligion was a great reality to him, and it was 
 the only reality with him. His experience 
 had burned through his whole nature, con- 
 suming all love of the world, and all the 
 pride of life, and leaving only the one ab- 
 sorbing passion of leading men to Christ, of 
 snatching them out of the follies of the world 
 and the powers of sin, into the clear light of 
 eternal blessedness. Such was the man, and 
 such was his experience and motive. 
 
 3. And now as to the times in which he 
 lived, or rather, as to the power of God that 
 was now abroad working with him, and pre- 
 paring the masses everywhere for his ap- 
 proach. I cannot exaggerate the importance 
 of this point. The times made the man quite 
 as much as the man made the times. The 
 Spirit of the Lord was moving the hearts 
 
102 
 
 of men toward religious things — not always 
 consciously or visibly. Perhaps, on the 
 other hand, the general irreligion of the 
 times was growing turbulent and defiant. 
 Such is often the case when the heart is 
 disturbed. The ungodly are restless and 
 passionate and hostile, because a strange 
 power that they understand not is getting 
 hold of them. But they are thus rendered 
 much more impressible. Then too, the 
 providences of God were co-working with 
 the Spirit in such a manner as to produce 
 the most mighty effects. Almost miracles 
 were wrought in the work. 
 
 Let me instance a case. In Yorkshire, 
 England, there was a devoted and evangel- 
 ical rector by the name of Grimshaw, who 
 had itinerated somewhat and had greatly 
 stirred up the people on the general subject, 
 and who, therefore, stood all ready to co- 
 operate with Whitefield. Therefore, when 
 it was announced that he and Lady Hun- 
 tingdon had come into the region thousands 
 assembled to hear the great preacher. And 
 now look upon the scene. A platform is 
 erected in the fields, for no church can hold 
 the multitudes. Whitefield and Grimshaw 
 take then their place upon it. The great 
 crowd stretches all around, waiting in 
 
103 
 
 breathless expectancy. A prayer is offered 
 — all is still. Whitefield rises and shouts 
 out his text. *' It is appointed unto men 
 once to die, but after this the judgment.'* 
 Then he pauses, when all at once a shriek 
 is heard ; away yonder in the crowd God 
 has emphasized the text. A person has 
 been struck dead. And Grimshaw, who 
 has left the stage to ascertain the cause of 
 the commotion, cries out : " Brother White- 
 field, you stand between the living and the 
 dead. The destroying angel is passing over 
 the congregation — * cry aloud and spare 
 not.' " In a few minutes quiet is restored, 
 the dead man has been carried out, and 
 Whitefield shouts his text again. *' It is 
 appointed unto men once to die, but after 
 this the judgment." Another shriek, and 
 another has fallen dead. And he too is 
 carried out, and once more the text is 
 announced, a pause is made — but as no 
 more fall the sermon proceeds. And how 
 could such a man as Whitefield preach to 
 such an audience in such circumstances, 
 when it seemed that God himself came near 
 to emphasize the text ? 
 
 And in almost every part of the world 
 where he traveled he could find some 
 mighty man of God that had prepared 
 
104 
 
 the way before him, some Grimshaw or 
 Wesley or Edwards or Tennent or Prime 
 or Parsons or Blair, for there were many 
 spiritual giants in those days. On the 
 other hand, the opposition that Satan stirred 
 up against him helped to awaken an inter- 
 est. He was preached against and written 
 against, and ridiculed and maligned and 
 persecuted in every way. Once in Ireland 
 he came near being stoned to death like 
 Stephen, and once in England he was at- 
 tacked in his own bed and barely escaped 
 with his life. All these things gave him 
 immense notoriety and drew immense 
 throngs, and a throng would always arouse 
 him to a mighty sermon. 
 
 Then too he attempted such daring deeds. 
 You have heard, perhaps, of his great field- 
 day on Moorfield, on the Whitsun holiday. 
 Moorfield was a vast playground in the sub- 
 urbs of London, where in those days the 
 most abandoned of the population, those 
 that never entered the churches and cared 
 nothing for religion, carried on their sports. 
 Whitefield often preached there, as did 
 Wesley and others of like spirit. But on 
 this occasion he conceived the idea of hold- 
 ing the place all day for God on this great 
 holiday, while the roughs claimed it as 
 
their own. Friends dissuaded and said he 
 would never get away alive. But he had 
 his pulpit erected beforehand and was on 
 it at six o'clock in the morning, gathering 
 the crowd about him and preaching until 
 weary. And again at twelve, at noon, and 
 again at six in the evening, holding a large 
 part of the assemblage with him, while the 
 savage opposition sought to drown his voice 
 with drums and to knock him off his pulpit 
 and to break up his audience by rushing 
 down upon it with columns of rowdies in 
 close file. But he held his ground all day, 
 and that evening at his tabernacle a thou- 
 sand requests for prayer were handed in 
 from those who had heard the word that 
 day, and three hundred and fifty were 
 added to his church as the result of that 
 heroic daring. Never, perhaps, was the 
 devil so stormed in his own quarters. It is 
 regarded as the greatest of his field-days. 
 Oh, shall we ever again have men that can 
 take hold in such a way of such classes of 
 society } 
 
 But I must not tarry with isolated inci- 
 dents. I suppose you know that his head- 
 quarters in England was the tabernacle in 
 London, the center of the Calvinistic Meth- 
 odists, and in America his orphan home in 
 
io6 
 
 Georgia was the one spot to which he re- 
 turned and for which he traveled. The 
 early example of Francke in building an 
 orphan home has been followed by various 
 kindred spirits. But it would seem that in 
 the course of providence Whitefield's or- 
 phan home was more the means for sending 
 him out itinerating than it was an end for 
 the care of the destitute. True, he built 
 an immense edifice, and collected large sums 
 of money for its support, and for a while it 
 did good work, but shortly after his death 
 the building was burned and the institute 
 broken up, so that not even this remains as 
 a monument of his labors. He was evi- 
 dently designed to be the chief itinerant of 
 the great revival. Learned men and ora- 
 tors had declared Christianity to be dead 
 and dying, and God determined to show 
 that Christianity was still living and could 
 fire the heart of man as nothing else could. 
 And yet it must not be supposed that he 
 was always on the top wave ; he had his 
 dark hours and his dull times, but he tri- 
 umphed over them all. 
 
 Perhaps I cannot better close this very 
 imperfect sketch of this most wonderful 
 man than by telling how at last he died — 
 it is so illustrative of his whole career. In 
 
107 
 
 September, 1769, he left England on his 
 last trip to America. He landed in Geor- 
 gia and had the satisfaction of finding his 
 orphanage in a most prosperous condition. 
 He then started North on a preaching tour, 
 though in feeble health. He made his 
 usual triumphant march up through the 
 colonies, preaching at Philadelphia and 
 New York and intermediate stations. Then 
 he took a tour up the Hudson and westward 
 in the State of New York as far as the coun- 
 try was then settled, and seemed trans- 
 ported with the opening fields in the New 
 World. Yet he was ripening fast, and was 
 in almost one continual strain of praise, 
 saying in one of his letters, "Hallelujah! 
 Let chapel, tabernacle, heaven, and earth 
 resound with hallelujahs ! I can say no 
 more, my heart is too big to say more ! " 
 The last entry in his journal was after hav- 
 ing preached from the coffin of a criminal 
 under the gallows, of which he says : 
 "Solemn! Solemn! Effectual good I 
 hope was done — grace, grace ! " Thus he 
 passed on northward, preaching every day. 
 His last sermon was delivered at Exeter, 
 New Hampshire, in the open air. He was 
 quite feeble, and some one said, "Sir, you 
 are more fit to go to bed than to preach." 
 
io8 
 
 '* True, sir/' he replied, recognizing liis 
 feebleness. And then stepping aside and 
 clasping his hands together and looking up 
 he said, with all the simplicity and earnest- 
 ness of a child, ** Lord Jesus, I am weary 
 in thy work but not 0/ thy work. If I have 
 not yet finished my course, let me go on 
 and speak for thee once more in the fields, 
 seal thy truth, and then go home and die." 
 He went, and nobly did he rally his dying 
 power for that last effort. His text was, 
 "Examine yourselves, whether ye be in 
 the faith ; prove your own selves." It was 
 one of his favorite themes, grown out of 
 his own experience, ** Faith and Works." 
 He was so near gone that his voice re- 
 peatedly flagged and grew hoarse. Then 
 he would rouse himself and soar aloft on 
 some flight of eloquence, and thus for two 
 long hours he threw his failing strength 
 into his loved employ. Conscious that he 
 was near his end he uttered in the closing 
 of the sermon these thrilling words : 
 
 ** I go to my everlasting rest. My sun 
 has risen, shone, and is setting — nay, is 
 about to rise and shine forever. I have not 
 lived in vain, and though I could live to 
 preach Christ a thousand years, I die to be 
 with him, which is far better." 
 
109 
 
 When the sermon was over he rode to 
 Newburyport, to the house of Mr. Parsons, 
 pastor of the Presbyterian church, at 
 which he was announced to preach on the 
 morrow, which was the Sabbath. 
 
 While he was at the tea table a crowd 
 gathered around the door and in the hall, 
 wishing to hear some words from him. But 
 he was so utterly exhausted that he turned 
 to a minister present and said : *' Brother, 
 you must speak to the people, I cannot say 
 a word," and taking his candle he started 
 for his chamber. But as he passed through 
 the hall the sight of the eager people touched 
 his noble soul, and he halted on the stairs 
 and began to exhort them. His heart was 
 full, and he talked on and on till the candle 
 in his hand burned down and went out, and 
 then he retired to his bed. In the middle of 
 the night his asthma came on very badly. 
 He sat up in bed and prayed for all his dear 
 ones, particularly for his orphanage in Geor- 
 gia and his tabernacle in London. But soon 
 he choked for breath, and flying to the win- 
 dow he threw it up and said, '* I am dying, 
 I am dying," and at six o'clock in the morn- 
 ing, just as the Sabbath sun was rising on 
 the world, his happy spirit took its flight. 
 
 According to his own desire he was laid 
 
no 
 
 to rest beneath the pulpit of the Federal 
 Street Presbyterian Church in Newbury- 
 port, where his dust still remains. Funer- 
 al services were held all over Protestant 
 Christendom, and every true minister of 
 Christ could say, as did the one who of- 
 fered the prayer at the funeral, *' My 
 father, my father, the chariot of Israel and 
 the horsemen thereof." But, as another 
 has said, he took his mantle with him. 
 There has been no one like him, and per- 
 haps never will be. Spurgeon has been 
 called the modern Whitefield. But Spur- 
 geon is about as much like Whitefield as 
 the patient ox is like the charging war 
 horse. He stands alone, **the prince of 
 pulpit orators," the cosmopolitan evangel- 
 ist, the concrete exponent of the Great 
 Awakening of the eighteenth century. 
 
 VI 
 5ame6 Davenport, anD tbe Disorders 
 
 HUS far, in these lectures, I have 
 surveyed the field and the work, 
 and made special mention of the 
 principal leaders — Wesley, Edwards, Ten- 
 nent, and Whitefield. Of them, and of 
 
Ill 
 
 their work, and of the movement as a 
 whole, I have generally spoken in terms of 
 unqualified approbation. But I should be 
 an unfair historian if I did not allude to 
 phases of the movement that were not what 
 they should have been, and which so far col- 
 ored the whole work as to bring down upon 
 it, in many quarters, strong disapprobation. 
 In fact, I do not know but that in 1745 or 
 1750 a third or perhaps half the ministers of 
 America would have voted the great revival 
 a curse rather than a blessing, a delusion of 
 the devil and a disturber of the peace. 
 
 This, perhaps, is not to be wondered at, 
 when we remember that so many of the 
 clergy were unspiritual men. But still, it 
 must be confessed that many who were, 
 in the judgment of charity, sound Chris- 
 tians, were, on the whole, more opponents 
 than friends of the revival. I have shown 
 how Edwards was dismissed from North- 
 ampton, and how Tennent and the Pres- 
 bytery of New Brunswick were excluded 
 from the Synod of Philadelphia, and you 
 all know how utterly impossible Wesley 
 found it to stay within the Church of 
 England ; and I might have told you how 
 the faculties of Harvard and of Yale issued 
 their protests against Whitefield, and how 
 
112 
 
 the General Association of Massachusetts 
 placed upon its records a condemnation 
 of the abuses of the times without any 
 recognition of the great blessing that had 
 fallen upon the churches within the same 
 period. In fact, for a little it seemed that 
 the Great Awakening would be chronicled 
 in history as nothing but a great, unprofit- 
 able frenzy. Strong and sharp was the 
 battle of opinion for a considerable space. 
 
 But now that the smoke and the heat of 
 the conflict is past, it remains for us of later 
 times to view the whole with a dispassion- 
 ate eye and discern the main elements of 
 truth in the case. I have repeatedly re- 
 minded you, in th/ course of these lectures, 
 , of the fact that Satan uses all manner of 
 methods in the promulgation of his king- 
 dom. Whatever he cannot prevent, that 
 he seeks to control. When, therefore, he 
 found that he could not prevent the Great 
 Awakening, he sought to push it into the 
 wildest fanaticism and folly. Just the ex- 
 act point, however, where he, in such cases, 
 steps in and gains control, it is very diffi- 
 cult to determine. The Scripture tells us 
 that Satan himself is transformed into an 
 angel of light. In the wonder and amaze- 
 ment of the vision it is not easy to discern 
 
113 
 
 the exact point where the counterfeit takes 
 the place of the real. None but the most 
 practiced eye can, at first sight, discern 
 counterfeit money ; and the case is not 
 much different with religion. So, doubt- 
 less, much that is considered genuine is 
 really counterfeit, and much that is consid- 
 ered counterfeit is really genuine. Time, 
 however, sets all in clearest light. 
 
 Man is a complex creature. He has a 
 body, a mind, and a spirit, and when each 
 of these is fallen and diseased, it is no easy 
 thing to keep them in proper equilibrium. 
 If the first, the body, is unduly stimulated, 
 the man becomes sensual ; if the second, 
 he becomes rationalistic ; if the third, he 
 becomes fanatical. Satan always watches 
 the predisposition of the individual, or the 
 drift of the times, to push men into one or 
 the other of these errors. The Great Awak- 
 ening — the great stimulating of the spirit- 
 ual part of humanity — was Satan's grand 
 opportunity to make fanatics. He tried the 
 leaders, but with indifferent success. Wes- 
 ley's good sense gave the enemy only a 
 temporary and trifling advantage ; Ed- 
 wards' strong intellectuality saved him ; 
 Tennent discovered his own undue vehe- 
 mence in time to prevent its proceeding to 
 H 
 
114 
 
 disastrous length ; Whitefield, though some- 
 times betrayed into injudicious remarks, 
 was wonderfully controlled, as it would 
 seem, by divine watchcare. 
 
 But with some of the lesser lights the 
 enemy was more successful ; and it is of 
 one of these, James Davenport, that I am 
 to speak somewhat briefly in this lecture 
 as illustrating the disorders of the times. 
 And I, personally, have had the more inter- 
 est in the matter because some of his wild- 
 est extravagances were enacted in the place 
 of my boyhood, and one of the most serious 
 of the separations which he caused was from 
 the stanch old church which I used to attend 
 at New London, Connecticut. 
 
 James Davenport was a descendant of 
 the famous John Davenport, the first min- 
 ister of New Haven, and was, therefore, 
 intimately connected with some of the first 
 families of that city. He was graduated at 
 Yale in 1732, and settled at Southhold, 
 Long Island. He had, therefore, been some 
 seven or eight years a pastor when the re- 
 vival wave came to its height. He entered 
 largely and successfully into it both at home 
 and abroad, and was esteemed a man of 
 great sanctity and effectiveness. Whitefield 
 regarded him as one of the most zealous and 
 
11$ 
 
 godly men that he met with in his travels, 
 and spoke of him in the highest terms in 
 his journal. He was also a great friend of 
 Tennent, whom he was accustomed to visit 
 in New Jersey, and by others he was es- 
 teemed almost an apostle. 
 
 He was, however, an unbalanced man, 
 and was not altogether sound in health, 
 which seems to have had an influence 
 on his mind. About 1740 he received the 
 impression that he was to be the Lord's 
 prophet, with extraordinary gifts and pow- 
 ers. He called some of his people together 
 at his own house and exhorted them in an 
 excited strain for twenty-four hours to- 
 gether. Having, as he thought, the power 
 of discerning spirits, he made distinctions 
 as to who was converted and who was not, 
 and forbade the latter to come to the com- 
 munion. He attempted furthermore to 
 work a miracle of healing on a dumb, 
 insane woman, and claimed that he suc- 
 ceeded, as the patient died on the day on 
 which he had predicted that she would re- 
 cover. This release from pain he regarded 
 as an answer to his prayer. 
 
 His people, as a whole, could not endure 
 him, but one of his members especially be- 
 lieved in him, and proposed that they two 
 
ii6 
 
 should go abroad among the churches with 
 their extraordinary powers. Just then Dav- 
 enport read in his Bible of Jonathan and 
 his armor-bearer going to smite the garri- 
 son of the Philistines, and he applied the 
 passage to himself and his devoted assist- 
 ant. But Jonathan did not go against the 
 Philistines till they challenged him to come, 
 and so Davenport could not go to any out- 
 side places till some one challenged or in- 
 vited him to come. Soon, however, the 
 people at East Hampton, on the other side 
 of the island, said they would like to have 
 Mr. Davenport visit them. This was, to 
 his mind, the "challenge*' he had been 
 waiting for, and so he and his '* armor- 
 bearer " waded knee deep in snow over to 
 East Hampton, just as, according to their 
 vivid imagination, Jonathan and his ar- 
 mor-bearer climbed on their hands and 
 knees up to the garrison of the Philistines. 
 Here at East Hampton it would seem that 
 Davenport did a good work, having many 
 conversions, which confirmed him in the 
 idea of his mission. 
 
 Accordingly, the next year he set out on 
 an extensive tour through Connecticut. 
 He landed at Stonington, and so great was 
 his power as a preacher that a hundred 
 
117 
 
 persons were struck under conviction by 
 the first sermon, and many conversions 
 occurred which the lapse of years proved 
 to be true and genuine. From Stonington 
 he traveled leisurely westward, visiting all 
 the churches and producing great excite- 
 ment. His method was, as he entered a 
 town, to first visit the minister and *' dis- 
 cern " whether he was converted or not — 
 that is, whether he would yield to him and 
 indorse him in all his ways and give him 
 free use of his church. If he " discerned " 
 him unconverted, and if the minister would 
 not yield to him as a prophet of the Lord, 
 he would pour forth the most violent de- 
 nunciation against him as a blind guide, as 
 a wolf in sheep's clothing, and then pray 
 for, or rather against the "unworthy hire- 
 ling,'' and call upon what people he could 
 influence to separate from the ungodly 
 church and to follow him ** without the 
 camp, bearing the reproach of Jesus." 
 
 By this method of procedure many socie- 
 ties of *' Separatists," as they were called, 
 were organized in eastern Connecticut. 
 At New London, as I have already inti- 
 mated, Mr. Davenport exerted great influ- 
 ence, drawing off a hundred members from 
 the old church on the hill and organizing a 
 
ii8 
 
 new society in the lower part of the town, 
 which was to serve not only as a church, 
 but also as a theological seminary, where 
 true ministers were to be educated and 
 sent forth. This institution was called the 
 ** Shepherd's Tent." From New London 
 he passed on, visiting all the towns till he 
 came to New Haven, where his high family 
 connection and former associations in Yale 
 College procured him a most favorable 
 reception. The minister gave him free use 
 of his pulpit and all went on well for a 
 time. But Davenport soon pronounced the 
 minister '* unconverted " and withdrew, 
 organizing a new society, which still exists 
 as one of the Congregational churches of 
 that city. It was at this time, and partly 
 through Mr. Davenport's influence, that 
 David Brainerd, then a student at Yale, 
 made the unadvised remark about the piety 
 of one of the tutors that procured his ex- 
 pulsion from the college. 
 
 From New Haven Davenport journeyed 
 /on in his accustomed manner to Stratford, 
 where he was arrested as a disturber of the 
 peace and carried to Hartford for trial be- 
 fore the General Assembly. He was con- 
 victed as a disorderly person, but being 
 considered only an enthusiast and partially 
 
119 
 
 insane, his sentence was simply transporta- 
 tion out of Connecticut back to his home 
 in Long Island. This was executed with 
 all due promptness and kindness. But 
 Davenport could view the matter in no 
 other light than as persecution for right- 
 eousness' sake. Therefore he soon started 
 out again on a more extended tour through 
 New England, landing this time near Bos- 
 ton. The clergy of Boston were so much 
 alarmed by his coming that they immedi- 
 ately held a meeting for consultation as to 
 what attitude they should take in reference 
 to him. Their deliberations were published, 
 and were to the effect that though they 
 regarded Mr. Davenport as a true minister 
 of Christ, by whom great good had been 
 wrought, yet such were his disorders and 
 extravagances that they could not admit 
 him to their pulpits. He, of course, took to 
 the Common and preached in his usual ex- 
 cited way and organized a separate society, 
 which, however, never had much vitality. 
 
 Yet while he remained he was so much 
 of a power and a plague that he was in- 
 dicted before the grand jury. One of the 
 witnesses gave this testimony, which shows 
 us the temper of the man. He had heard 
 Mr. Davenport make use of these words, 
 
120 
 
 apparently in prayer: "Good Lord, I will 
 not mince the matter any longer with thee ; 
 thou knowest that I know that most of the 
 ministers of Boston and of the country are 
 unconverted and are leading their people 
 blindfold to hell.*' The result of the trial 
 was that he was declared to be insane and 
 not, therefore, accountable for his words 
 and acts. 
 
 Before long, however, Mr. Davenport, 
 much to the relief of the Boston ministers, 
 felt moved to pass on to eastern Connecti- 
 cut, where he had the most zealous follow- 
 ing. He arrived at New London in the 
 spring of 1743 and proceeded to inspect his 
 work at the " Shepherd's Tent." He was 
 now worked up to a great frenzy, and 
 affairs, even in this stronghold of his, did 
 not suit him. There was too much pride 
 and false doctrine even in the " Shepherd's 
 Tent," and hence he must purify it. 
 Therefore he ordered all his followers there 
 to bring together at his rooms "all their 
 idols" that they might be burned. By 
 their idols he meant all their more showy 
 articles of wearing apparel, such as bon- 
 nets, cloaks, breeches, jewelry, necklaces, 
 etc. To these he added all the books by 
 those authors that he did not approve, 
 
121 
 
 among which were those of Beveridge, 
 Flavel, Mather, etc. It seems that he him- 
 self fell sick so that he could not in person 
 carry out the programme and that his fol- 
 lowers relented at burning such good 
 clothes. But the books they did burn in 
 the public street one Sunday afternoon 
 with much ado, standing around the pile 
 singing " Hallelujah " and *' Glory to God," 
 and declaring, as the smoke went up, that 
 so the smoke of hell went up from the 
 burning where the authors of these books 
 were or would be consigned. 
 
 This outbreak of wild folly seems to have 
 been the means of opening the eyes of Mr. 
 Davenport and many of his followers. The , . 
 ridiculousness and impossibility of burning / 
 all " idols " was seen, one man saying that 
 his wife was his idol and he was not ready 
 to burn her. The fire of the burning books 
 seems to have burned out their inordinate 
 zeal, and from that day Mr. Davenport 
 himself became a wiser and more sober 
 man. In about a year he seemed to be fully 
 restored to good sense, and then he pub- 
 lished to the world a most humble confes- 
 sion of his errors, begging the pardon of 
 Almighty God and of his brethren in the 
 ministry, whom he had so deeply wronged. 
 
122 
 
 Though he personally thus recanted, and 
 though the society of Separatists at New 
 London came to naught, yet in many places 
 his errors were taken up and carried on to 
 most fearful lengths by the excitable, ex- 
 travagant, and unsafe people who had em- 
 braced them. Supposing themselves to be 
 under the immediate direction of the Spirit 
 of the Lord, they could, of course, override 
 not only all rules of church order, but even 
 of decency and morality, so that in some 
 places even licentiousness was practised 
 under the sanction of saintliness and imme- 
 diate inspiration. The reports of these 
 horrid disorders would, of course, travel 
 much farther and faster than those of the 
 real, genuine work of the revival, and by 
 some these things were claimed as the 
 proper results of the revival. What won- 
 der, then, that many staid people said, 
 ^" If such things as these come from the 
 revival, we want nothing to do with it." 
 Hence the movement as a whole came into 
 great disrepute with many, and even the 
 grand leaders in it were looked upon with 
 considerable suspicion. Whitefield had 
 spoken in the highest terms in his pub- 
 lished journal of Davenport, and therefore 
 he was by many supposed to indorse 
 
123 
 
 Davenport's proceedings ; and thus it was 
 with Edwards and Tennent. 
 
 Great confusion existed in the public 
 mind in regard to the whole matter. One 
 man was extolling and thanking God for 
 that which another man regarded as the 
 greatest possible calamity. Moreover, in 
 the work itself it was quite difficult to sepa- 
 rate the chaff from the wheat, and men 
 seemed to forget that chaff is necessary to 
 the production of wheat. Under the preach- 
 ing of Whitefield and Edwards and others 
 there was at times great outward confusion, 
 men and women falling down and crying 
 out and creating a sort of disturbance that 
 seemed to be in the same line with Daven- 
 port's wild meetings, and in many quarters 
 every one who proclaimed himself a revival 
 man was supposed to be in favor of disorder 
 and confusion. 
 
 Although time has corrected many of 
 these wrong impressions and inferences, 
 yet there ever has been, and is to this day, 
 in this country a class of minds that revolts 
 from a revival when it rises to any degree 
 of intensity. There are very many who 
 seem to fear religious excitement above all 
 things else. But bad as religious excite- 
 ment and confusion may be, one thing is 
 
124 
 
 much worse, and that is a cold, dead in- 
 difference to eternal things — an absence of 
 those impressions, revelations and inspira- 
 tions from God that bring everlasting des- 
 tiny before us. What matters it if a few 
 are overcome as to their bodies, or as to 
 their brains even, if the great mass of the 
 people can be awakened to eternal truth ? 
 
 Moses and Daniel and John and Paul 
 and others of the writers of the Bible were 
 overcome by the visions which they saw ; 
 but what matters that, in comparison with 
 the value of the Bible which through 
 them was given to the world ? And many 
 are the times when the uninitiated pro- 
 nounce men mad who are, in fact, more 
 sane than their critics. Festus cried out to 
 the noble apostle, " Paul, thou art beside 
 thyself ; much learning doth make thee 
 mad,'* but the apostle replied, ** I am not 
 mad, most noble Festus ; but speak forth 
 the words of truth and soberness.'* On the 
 day of Pentecost some cried out, "These 
 men are full of new wine," but Peter re- 
 plied, ** These are not drunken, but this is 
 that which the prophet promised." 
 
 The evils of religious excitement are noth- 
 ing in comparison with the evils of religious 
 insensibility. 
 
Even the excesses of such a man as 
 Davenport were of short duration, and 
 there was much of permanent value in his 
 work. A considerable number of the Bap- 
 tist churches of eastern Connecticut are 
 the final shape which these Separatist or- 
 ganizations of the Great Awakening finally 
 took. And I am not sure but that I, as an 
 individual, owe something to the labors of 
 Davenport. There were, in the days of 
 my boyhood in that region about New 
 London, the two types of piety which those 
 former centuries engendered — one, the cold 
 intellectual, that would chill a fervent soul, 
 and the other the fervid demonstrative, 
 that needs intelligent foundation. Neither 
 is my model, but I owe something to the 
 latter as well as to the former. 
 
 All parts of our nature need to be touched 
 by the Holy Ghost. 
 
 But there is one special lesson yi:o be 
 learned from the career of Davenport, and 
 that is as to the necessity of having a 
 sound and sanctified body, as well as mind 
 and spirit. Fanaticism and insanity come 
 quite as much from an imperfect body as 
 they do from what we call an unbalanced 
 mind. Only when we attain the glorified 
 body shall we be fully free from the pos- 
 
 / 
 
126 
 
 sibility of fanaticism. But even now we 
 may claim that help of the Spirit that shall 
 restore and balance the several parts of our 
 triune personality, so that our whole spirit, 
 soul, and body may be preserved blame- 
 less in the day of the Lord Jesus. And let 
 us see well to it that the enemy does not 
 gain ascendancy over us as to either part of 
 our nature, and may we ever have wisdom 
 in times of great religious interest to dis- 
 cern between true and false enthusiasm in 
 the Lord's work. 
 
 VII 
 
 IResults anD %c66on6 ot tbe 
 <5ccat Bwaftcning 
 
 AVING now given a brief outline of 
 the facts of the Great Awakening of 
 1740, it remains for me to sum up 
 the results and to state the more important 
 lessons taught by this wonderful historical 
 movement. The chief value of a revival 
 of religion is seen in its permanent results, 
 that live on long after the first excitement 
 has passed away. God has promised that 
 his Spirit ** shall come down like rain upon 
 the mown grass." Now the value of the 
 
 M 
 
127 
 
 rain is not merely in the freshness which it 
 sheds abroad while it is falling, but in the 
 springing growth and maturity of the vege- 
 tation that results therefrom^ Bearing this 
 in mind, let us see : \ 
 
 I. IVhat were the results of the Great 
 Awakening? i. The first thing that we 
 naturally think of is the number of con- 
 verts. As I stated in one of the preceding 
 lectures, fifty thousand is a very moderate 
 estimate for those in America ; and there 
 surely must have been an equal number in 
 Great Britain. Much, of course, depends 
 on the length of the period we include ; but 
 it is quite difficult to say exactly when we 
 may consider that the Great Awakening 
 ceased. It has in fact never ceased. The 
 church has never since that time fallen 
 into quite such a spiritual slumber as pre- 
 ceded it. Yet there have been since then 
 times when spiritual life waned, and when 
 the popular mind has been chiefly absorbed 
 in other than religious themes. The time 
 from 1775 to 181 5 was such a period — a time 
 of great political excitement, embracing the 
 American Revolution, the French Revolu- 
 tion, and the Napoleonic wars. These 
 things kept the attention of men largely 
 centered on worldly things. Yet about the 
 
 ' P * o i 
 
128 
 
 year 1800 there was a powerful revival in 
 the Middle States, and shortly after this the 
 great missionary enterprises of the church 
 produced an enkindling fervor in the public 
 mind. But taking all things into account, 
 I think we may as well fix on 1770, the 
 year of Whitefield's death, as the terminus 
 of the Great Awakening. At that time the 
 membership of the Wesleyan Methodist 
 societies in Great Britain was thirty thou- 
 sand, and to these we may, without doubt, 
 add twenty thousand to be found among 
 the Calvinistic Methodists, the Independ- 
 ents, and the Church of England. So that 
 I think we may safely say that a hundred 
 thousand souls were converted in Great 
 ^^4^ Britain and America during the period of 
 ^ ' .» '' the Great Awakening. And these conver- 
 " sions, you must remember, were for the 
 
 most part somewhat of the Pauline stamp — 
 vivid, thorough, deep — not mere easy and 
 natural acknowledgments of the claims of 
 Christ such as we have now-a-days, but 
 agonizing experiences that made wonderful 
 impressions upon their subjects. These 
 were conversions that were seen and felt 
 and known, in many cases reclaiming men 
 from a life of hardened vice or strong infi- 
 delity and opposition to God. A hundred 
 
 .0 
 
129 
 
 thousand so converted, at a time when the 
 world had almost forgotten what conversion 
 was, or doubted the power of religion to 
 create any such change in the human heart 
 — I say, a hundred thousand such conver- 
 sions at such a time was simply tremen- 
 dous, a sublime spectacle before the world. 
 2. So I mention as a second result the 
 change of opinion that came over the world 
 with regard to Christianity as a power. 
 Spiritual religion had been supposed by 
 skeptics to be an effete superstition. But 
 lo ! it arises in might, sways the masses, 
 claims its thousands, counts its martyrs, 
 and walks forth as the great power of the 
 times. Men began to see a meaning in 
 the words of the old Book, when it said, 
 *' Awake ! awake ! put on thy strength, O 
 Zion." They might still be unbelievers as 
 to the claims of the source of the power, 
 but they could no longer ignore the fact of 
 the power. And although the blind mad- 
 ness of infidelity in France, where the 
 power of the revival was not seen, marched 
 on to its frantic and fanatical work of ex- 
 terminating the name of Christianity from 
 that portion of the earth, yet the truly 
 great minds of the time saw plainly enough 
 that Christianity was a power, and that it 
 
130 
 
 could neither be crushed nor ignored. The 
 deep-thinking Napoleon restored Christi- 
 anity, nominally, as the religion of the em- 
 pire, because he saw that it was a power 
 in the earth. And all common-sense men 
 feel and believe that to be a fact to this 
 day. Some special pleaders and narrowly 
 wise men in some particular branch of 
 thought may conceive that there is really 
 no power in Christianity aside from men's 
 own fancies. But whoever reads history, 
 or at least whoever keeps in sympathy 
 with these old days we have been consid- 
 ering, knows and feels in his inmost soul 
 that there is strength in Zion. 
 
 3. Another result of the Great Awaken- 
 ing was the change of sentiment which was 
 wrought within the church herself as to the 
 real nature of true religion. For, as I have 
 shown you, many in her ranks and in her 
 ministry, educated in her forms and doc- 
 trines, but never having felt the power, 
 had begun to consider Christianity merely 
 a form and a faith. To learn the catechism 
 and to submit to the ordinances many 
 thought was to be a Christian. To have 
 the form merely, without the power, was 
 the height of many an honest ambition. 
 Yea, many did not know that there was 
 
131 
 
 any power. Like certain disciples of old, 
 they had not so much as heard whether 
 there was any Holy Ghost. But when he 
 came like a rushing mighty wind, bending 
 the tall cedar of the mountain as well as 
 the tender grass of the valley, old pro- 
 fessors opened their eyes and said : " Alas, 
 alas, we have never known the power of 
 God before ! This is that which is written 
 in the Book, but we never understood it 
 before. It is not enough to profess to know 
 Christ. We must be in living communi- 
 cation with him." The fact and necessity 
 of the new birth dawned like a new truth 
 on many a heart that had ecclesiastically 
 and formally supposed itself to be Chris- 
 tian. It was one of the converts of the 
 Great Awakening who wrote that vivid 
 and graphic hymn : 
 
 Awaked by Sinai's awful sound, 
 My soul in bonds of guilt 1 found, 
 
 And knew not where to go ; 
 One solemn truth increased my pain, 
 " The sinner must be born again," 
 
 Or sink to endless woe. 
 
 Many of the clergy confessed that now, 
 for the first time, had they themselves 
 known the real essence of religion. The 
 tone of preaching changed and the aim and 
 
132 
 
 endeavor of the ministry changed. And 
 from that day to this a change of heart, a 
 real experience, has been insisted on in 
 most of the Protestant denominations. 
 
 4. This brings me to speak, in the fourth 
 place, of the change that was wrought in 
 church organisation, or church practice, 
 rather. The Congregational and Presby- 
 terian denominations were practically reor- 
 ganized on the Baptist principle of con- 
 verted church-membership. Stoddardism, 
 or the Half-way Covenant, received for a 
 time at least its deathblow. The theory 
 that there was no objection to an uncon- 
 verted ministry was overthrown. The 
 Methodist denomination, the vital power in 
 which has been experimental godliness, 
 sprang into existence and has taken the 
 forefront of all denominations in point of 
 numbers. The Baptists also received a 
 mighty impulse and increase, and from that 
 day to this have been recognized as a 
 power in the religious world. 
 
 In fact, the Great Awakening secured a 
 grand triumph of Baptist principles, or, at 
 least, Baptist practices. The corner-stone 
 of the Baptist faith is a professedly con- 
 verted church-membership. Before the 
 Great Awakening none except Baptists 
 
133 
 
 acknowledged this principle. Since the 
 Great Awakening none have dared to 
 ignore it. Methodists, Presbyterians, Con- 
 gregationalists are in large degree Baptist 
 in their practice. And although the old 
 creeds stand with their erroneous ideas, 
 formed and acted upon before the Great 
 Awakening, the practice of the churches 
 since that time has been chiefly in favor of 
 experimental religion. No one can intelli- 
 gently perceive the value of Baptist doc- 
 trine without understanding this historical 
 period. The dark days that preceded the 
 Great Awakening will come again unless 
 somebody stands firmly and clearly and 
 decidedly by the doctrine of a converted 
 church-membership. 
 
 5. But I pass on to note another result 
 of the Great Awakening, namely, the great 
 impulse given to evangelical education and 
 intelligence. Education without regenera- 
 tion has, in past ages, produced a vast 
 amount of formalism and death in religion. 
 Consequently, some short-sighted zealots 
 have regarded it as an enemy rather than 
 as a friend of true piety. Hence, some 
 enthusiasts have gloried in their ignorance 
 of book learning and vaunted themselves 
 on the inspiration of the Spirit alone. But 
 
134 
 
 the Great Awakening was conducted chiefly 
 by men of education, and it has left its 
 decided record and invaluable monuments 
 in the way of institutions of learning and 
 religious literature. I have shown how 
 the Coljege of New Jersey and the Theo- 
 logical Seminary at Princeton grew out of 
 Tennent's Log College at Neshaminy, and 
 how those notable institutions were con- 
 ducted for a time almost wholly in the 
 interest of the great revival, thus starting 
 the educational system of the Presbyterian 
 church. Harvard and Yale received a 
 great impulse from the revival, though they 
 at first set themselves against it. Dart- 
 mouth College, in New Hampshire, was a 
 direct outgrowth of the Great Awakening, 
 funds for its establishment being solicited 
 in England by Occom, the converted Mo- 
 hegan Indian, who wrote the hymn I have 
 already quoted, *' Awaked by Sinai's awful 
 sound." Lord Dartmouth, a zealous Metho- 
 dist, gave so largely to its funds that the 
 institution was named after him. Brown 
 University, at Providence, the parent of all 
 the Baptist colleges, was founded during 
 the Great Awakening. Lady Huntingdon 
 also planted an institution in her own life- 
 time for the education of her preachers, and 
 
135 
 
 the regular Methodists followed in due time 
 with theirs. So, very many of the colleges 
 and seminaries of the present day largely 
 owe their existence, or their influence as 
 healthful fountains of truth, directly to the 
 Great Awakening. 
 
 Some people have claimed the Sunday- 
 school as an outgrowth of this same period ; 
 so doubtless it was in some sense, though it 
 more properly belongs to a season a little 
 later. Yet it is a fact worthy of record that 
 the first Sunday-school in Great Britain V 
 was planted at Gloucester where White- 
 field was born, and the first Sunday-school 
 in America was at Newburyport, Mass., 
 where Whitefield died and was buried. 
 
 It is, I believe, generally conceded that 
 the first religious newspaper ever published 
 was the '* Christian History," printed in 
 Boston for the express purpose of report- 
 ing the progress of the revival, and so we 
 may consider this the parent of the innu- 
 merable progeny of religious periodicals 
 that now throng our pathway. 
 
 6. But one of the grandest, most appro- 
 priate, and sweetest results, or monuments 
 of the Great Awakening, was its invaluable 
 contribution to Christian song. God has 
 promised that whenever his Spirit is poured 
 
136 
 
 out there will be grand outbursts of song. 
 As the prophet says : *' Even the mountains 
 and the hills shall break forth into singing, 
 and all thQ- trees of the field shall clap their 
 hands." In all ages the people of God 
 have sung when conscious of great deliver- 
 ances or blessings : Miriam on the bank of 
 the Red Sea ; David when the people were 
 firmly established in the land ; the angels 
 when the Saviour was born, with whom 
 Zacharias and Mary chimed in ; the early 
 Christians in their feasts of love ; Gregory 
 with his stately chants upon the establish- 
 ment of the church ; Adolphus and Luther 
 in the battles and successes of the Refor- 
 mation. But I doubt if such a wealth 
 and variety of Christian song was ever 
 poured forth in so short a time as during 
 the years of the Great Awakening. What 
 a blessed list of singers ! The Wesleys — 
 Charles, a chief of the whole company, 
 aided by his father and his brothers ; Addi- 
 son, of literary fame ; the graceful Mont- 
 gomery, a poet indeed ; Doctor Watts, 
 known the world over ; and Doddridge and 
 Toplady and Olivers, and Anne Steele and 
 Lady Huntingdon, and Robinson and Faw- 
 cett, and Occom, Hervey, and Hart — all of 
 whom have sent their productions down 
 
137 
 
 to our day, besides so very many, true 
 and glowing in their time, that have been 
 somewhat crowded aside by the rush Oi 
 other aspirants. 
 
 A hundred years make many changes, 
 push aside very much as obsolete in thought 
 or in expression. Many sweet singers have 
 since arisen, and the records of medieval 
 and ancient song have recently been ex- 
 plored and put in new dress before the 
 world. Yet on looking hastily over the 
 index of our ordinary church hymn book, I 
 count three hundred and sixty-eight hymns 
 as the product of the Great Awakening, and 
 doubtless a better knowledge of authors 
 would reveal more than that number. And 
 how fervent and solid and sweet many of 
 them are ! Listen to some of the first lines 
 and see if you ever heard them before : 
 
 1. Rock of Ages deft for me, by Toplady. 2. 
 Jesus, lover of my soul, by C. Wesley. 3. Come, 
 thou fount of every blessing, by Robinson. 4. Am 
 1 a solder of the cross, by Watts. 5. Blest be the 
 tie that binds, by Fawcett. 6. Awaked by Sinai's 
 awful sound, by Occom. 7- Come, ye sinners, poor 
 and wretched, by Hart. 8. When thou, my right- 
 eous Judge, shalt come, by Lady Huntingdon, g. 
 Jesus, I love thy charming name, by Doddridge. 
 10. Oh, where shall rest be found, by Montgomery. 
 u. Dear Refuge of my weary soul, by Anne Steele. 
 
J_ 
 
 138 
 
 And so if I were to give more than one 
 from each author, I could report scores of 
 our most familiar hymns as the results of 
 the outburst of Christian song more than a 
 hundred years ago. This is a kind of testi- 
 mony that cannot be gainsaid. That was 
 no mean or unworthy period of the church 
 which begat all these blessed hymns. 
 
 7. And last, 1 must once more name that 
 which I have several times mentioned in 
 the course of the lectures : The influence 
 of the revival on social and political history. 
 It is difficult, I know, to say just how much 
 of the prosperity of Great Britain and 
 America is due to these religious influences. 
 But who can compare fairly the history of 
 France and England, and not be impressed 
 with the fact that some mighty power has 
 preserved the latter from those social and 
 political volcanoes with which the former 
 is repeatedly upheaved. We are continu- 
 ally saying, " poor France," " poor Spain," 
 ** poor Italy." Why poor } Have they not 
 a sunnier climate, more venerable associ- 
 ations and treasures } Why, then, poor } 
 Poor, because the revival waves of true 
 spiritual religion have not passed over 
 them. Because they know only the relig- 
 ion of form that does not, and never can, 
 
139 
 
 satisfy the heart. " Godliness is profitable 
 unto all things, having promise of the life 
 that now is, and of that which is to come." 
 
 Thus, to review, we see that almost all 
 things that we prize as dearest and best in 
 our lives, are in some sense the results of 
 the Great Awakening. Our churches, our 
 doctrines, our customs, our literature, our 
 colleges, our songs, yea, the whole current 
 of our political history, all have been differ- 
 ent because of the Great Awakening, to say 
 nothing of the myriad souls gathered safe 
 home to heaven through its influence. 
 
 II. The Lessons of the Great Awakening. 
 And now as to the lessons. They are many. 
 Only a few of them can I mention here. 
 
 I. The first that I mention is that ///s- 
 tory is a grand witness to the truth of the 
 Bible, and the reality of religion. Sometimes 
 people get bewildered among the mists of 
 the speculatively inclined, as for example, 
 the evolutionists. They follow some 
 plausible theory till it seems to sap the 
 foundations of the Bible, and they become 
 disturbed in their faith. But turn a 
 moment and look at these grand facts of 
 history ; see these trophies of grace. Take 
 a glance at Northampton or Moorfield, 
 where the power of the Lord rolled down 
 
140 
 
 as a mighty torrent, sweeping all before it, 
 and you can doubt no longer. These 
 things were not done in a corner, they are 
 grand, open-air, noonday, modern-time 
 facts, worth ten thousand tons of finely 
 spun theory. The old Bible is true and all 
 men will find it so. 
 
 2. Another lesson which we should keep 
 in mind is that Christianity, when rightly 
 believed in and heartily worked^ is a power. 
 The power resides not in the truth alone, 
 nor in the Spirit alone, but in the truth and 
 the Spirit working together. The truth alone 
 educates, and the Spirit alone stimulates ; 
 but the truth and the Spirit working together 
 conquer the head and the heart, and bring all 
 into captivity to the mind of Christ. And the 
 man who believes the truth and is accom- 
 panied by the Spirit, is the true preacher 
 with power. Let us never forget the power 
 of Christianity. It seemed like madness 
 for Whitefield to attack Moorfield on the 
 Whitsun holiday ; but what a grand demon- 
 stration of power it was ! And any one 
 who will go forth in the power of the Lord, 
 may in like manner win victories. We 
 should be less occupied with theories and 
 more immersed in practice. Instead of 
 having so many apologies for Christianity, 
 
MI 
 
 we should say with Paul, I am not 
 ashamed of the gospel of Christ : for it is 
 the power of God unto salvation to every 
 one that believeth." We should use it 
 too with boldness. It will cut sometimes 
 where we least expect it. 
 / 3. Another lesson that we learn is that 
 ^ the hope of the church is in revivals of religion. 
 But, says one, we ought to be steadily alive 
 in the cause of God, and not to have these 
 periodic excitements. So too, all men ought 
 to be Christians ; so too, the earth ought 
 to be a heaven. But unhappily, none of 
 these things are as yet. All things here at 
 present are out of joint. A fierce battle 
 rages. The enemy gains an advantage, 
 comes in like a flood, but then the Spirit of 
 the Lord lifts up a standard against him, 
 drives him back and gains the ground. 
 Thus it ever has been, and thus no doubt 
 it will be till the Lord shall come to reign. 
 So, then, I say, revivals of religion are the 
 hope of our times. And those churches that 
 believe in them and work for them are the 
 churches that will live and grow, while those 
 that trust to their creed, or their dignity, or 
 their culture, or their standing, or their tal- 
 ent, will lose their spiritual power and be- 
 come mere human and earthly institutions. 
 
142 
 
 /' 4- But again, we should learn that true re- 
 fvivals come down from above in answer to 
 prayer. They are not man-made excitements. 
 No one can impartially read the history of the 
 Great Awakening without seeing that the 
 moving power was not in man, but in God. 
 There was no concert between Wesley and 
 Edwards and Tennent and Whitefield to 
 stir up the world. But God sent them 
 every one, and through them and others 
 like them moved the multitudes. 
 
 5. Another thing that we learn is that 
 powerful revivals will awaken a great amount 
 of oppositiony and very likely some will run 
 into unprofitable excitement and extremes^ 
 but that the chaff will soon blow awav 
 leaving the precious grain. The good re- 
 sults of the Great Awakening remained 
 long after the follies of the time had passed. 
 Moreover, we of this day with our pre- 
 ponderance of head-culture, need not fear 
 a too fervid state of the heart. The danger 
 of our time is not from excitement, but 
 from cold indifferentism. No church can 
 indeed live on excitement, but any church 
 with a stable and able ministry need not 
 fear too much excitement. The mill never 
 gets too hot when there is grain in the 
 hopper. 
 
143 
 
 6. And lastly, let us learn from a review 
 of this' period how easily and unconsciously 
 men intending to do right may be allured into 
 an unsafe slumber. Scores of ministers 
 and church officials and church-members 
 were, before this mighty arousement, sleep- 
 ing in a state of spiritual deadness that was 
 fatal to any true Christian life. We would 
 not judge them, but they themselves con- 
 fessed that they were without hope and 
 without God in the world, living a mere 
 formal life, and having no real communion 
 with God. Yet they supposed themselves 
 to be model Christians, and were greatly 
 disturbed when zealous men, moved by the 
 Spirit, began to hold up the requirements 
 of God instead of the old customs and 
 standards of fossilized churches. 
 
 Nor should we of to-day forget that dur- 
 ing the last thirty-five or forty years re- 
 vivals have greatly declined in power, that 
 is, in the depth of the experience which 
 they engender. Moreover, the best relig- 
 ious life of modern days does not at all 
 compare with that of the apostolic day. 
 So without doubt the churches of our day 
 will need some great awakening in order 
 to prepare those who will be ready for the 
 coming of the Lord. 
 
144 
 
 But let us ever remember that while the 
 Lord's power is sufficient for any emer- 
 gency, he has a right to expect from his 
 people, enlightened as they may be by the 
 word and the lessons of history, an intelli- 
 gent co-operation in the workings of his 
 Holy Spirit. 
 
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