A History of American Christianity

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"There was a visible appearance of much soul-concern among
the hearers; so that some burst out with an audible noise into
bitter crying, a thing not known in these parts before.... The
first sermon I preached after my return to them was from
Matthew vi. 33: 'Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his
righteousness.' After opening up and explaining the parts of
the text, when in the improvement I came to press the
injunction in the text upon the unconverted and ungodly, and
offered this as one reason among others why they should now
first of all seek the kingdom and righteousness of God, viz.,
that they had neglected too long to do so already, this
consideration seemed to come and cut like a sword upon several
in the congregation; so that while I was speaking upon it they
could no longer contain, but burst out in the most bitter
mourning. I desired them as much as possible to restrain
themselves from making any noise that would hinder themselves
or others from hearing what was spoken; and often afterward I
had occasion to repeat the same counsel. I still advised
people to endeavor to moderate and bound their passions, but
not so as to resist and stifle their convictions. The number
of the awakened increased very fast. Frequently under sermons
there were some newly convicted and brought into deep distress
of soul about their perishing estate. Our Sabbath assemblies
soon became vastly large, many people from almost all parts
around inclining very much to come where there was such
appearance of the divine power and presence. I think there was
scarcely a sermon or lecture preached here through that whole
summer but there were manifest evidences of impressions on the
hearers, and many times the impressions were very great and
general. Several would be overcome and fainting; others deeply
sobbing, hardly able to contain; others crying in a most
dolorous manner; many others more silently weeping, and a
solemn concern appearing in the countenances of many others.
And sometimes the soul-exercises of some (though comparatively
but very few) would so far affect their bodies as to occasion
some strange, unusual bodily motions. I had opportunities of
speaking particularly with a great many of those who afforded
such outward tokens of inward soul-concern in the time of
public worship and hearing of the Word. Indeed, many came to
me of themselves, in their distress, for private instruction
and counsel; and I found, so far as I can remember, that with
by far the greater part their apparent concern in public was
not just a transient qualm of conscience or merely a floating
commotion of the affections, but a rational, fixed conviction
of their dangerous, perishing estate....

"In some time many of the convinced and distressed afforded
very hopeful, satisfying evidence that the Lord had brought
them to true closure with Jesus Christ, and that their
distresses and fears had been in a great measure removed in a
right gospel way, by believing in the Son of God. Several of
them had very remarkable and sweet deliverances this way. It
was very agreeable to hear their accounts how that when they
were in the deepest perplexity and darkness, distress and
difficulty, seeking God as poor, condemned, hell-deserving
sinners, the scene of recovering grace through a Redeemer has
been opened to their understandings with a surprising beauty
and glory, so that they were enabled to believe in Christ with
joy unspeakable and full of glory."[162:1]

The experience of Gilbert Tennent at New Brunswick had no connection
with the first awakening at Northampton, but had important relations
with later events. He was the eldest of the four sons whom William
Tennent, the Episcopalian minister from Ireland, had brought with him to
America and educated at his Log College. In 1727 he became pastor of a
church at New Brunswick, where he was much impressed with what he saw of
the results of the work of the Rev. Theodore Frelinghuysen, who for
seven years had been pastor of a neighboring Dutch church. The example
and fraternal counsel of this good man made him sensible of the
fruitlessness of his own work, and moved him to more earnest prayers and
labors. Having been brought low with sickness, he prayed to God to grant
him one half-year more in which to "endeavor to promote his kingdom with
all my might at all adventures." Being raised up from sickness, he
devoted himself to earnest personal labors with individuals and to
renewed faithfulness in the pulpit, "which method was sealed by the Holy
Spirit in the conviction and conversion of a considerable number of
persons, at various times and in different places, in that part of the
country, as appeared by their acquaintance with experimental religion
and good conversation." This bit of pastoral history, in which is
nothing startling or prodigious, was at least five years previous to the
"Surprising Conversions" at Northampton. There must have been generally
throughout the country a preparedness for the Great Awakening.

* * * * *

It was in that year (1735) in which the town of Northampton was all
ablaze with the glory of its first revival under Edwards that George
Whitefield, first among the members of Wesley's "Holy Club" at Oxford,
attained to that "sense of the divine love" from which he was wont to
date his conversion. In May, 1738, when the last reflections from the
Northampton revival had faded out from all around the horizon, the young
clergyman, whose first efforts as a preacher in pulpits of the Church of
England had astonished all hearers by the power of his eloquence,
arrived at Savannah, urged by the importunity of the Wesleys to take up
the work in Georgia in which they had so conspicuously failed. He
entered eagerly into the sanguine schemes for the advantage of the
young colony, and especially into the scheme for building and endowing
an orphan-house in just that corner of the earth where there was less
need of such an institution than anywhere else. After three months' stay
he started on his return to England to seek priest's orders for himself,
and funds for the orphans that might be expected sometime in Georgia. He
was successful in both his errands. He was ordained; he collected more
than one thousand pounds for the orphan-house; and being detained in the
kingdom by an embargo, he began that course of evangelistic preaching
which continued on either side of the ocean until his death, and which
is without a parallel in church history. His incomparable eloquence
thronged the parish churches, until the churches were closed against
him, and the Bishop of London warned the people against him in a
pastoral letter. Then he went out into the open fields, in the service,
as he said, of him "who had a mountain for his pulpit, and the heavens
for his sounding-board, and who, when his gospel was refused by the
Jews, sent his servants into the highways and hedges." Multitudes of
every rank thronged him; but especially the heathenized and embruted
colliers near Bristol listened to the unknown gospel, and their awakened
feelings were revealed to the preacher by his observing the white
gutters made by the tears that ran down their grimy faces. At last the
embargo was raised, and committing his work to Wesley, whom he had drawn
into field-preaching, he sailed in August, 1739, for Philadelphia, on
his way to Georgia. His fame had gone before him, and the desire to hear
him was universal. The churches would not contain the throngs. It was
long remembered how, on those summer evenings, he would take his stand
in the balcony of the old court-house in Market Street, and how every
syllable from his wonderful voice would be heard aboard the river-craft
moored at the foot of the street, four hundred feet away.

At New York the Episcopal church was closed against him, but the pastor
of the Presbyterian church, Mr. Pemberton, from Boston, made him
welcome, and the fields were free to him and his hearers. On the way to
New York and back, the tireless man preached at every town. At New
Brunswick he saw and heard with profound admiration Gilbert Tennent,
thenceforth his friend and yokefellow.

Seeing the solemn eagerness of the people everywhere to hear him, he
determined to make the journey to Savannah by land, and again he turned
the long journey into a campaign of preaching. Arriving at Savannah in
January, 1740, he laid the foundation of his orphan-house, "Bethesda,"
and in March was again on his way northward on a tour of preaching and
solicitation of funds. Touching at Charleston, where the bishop's
commissary, Dr. Garden, was at open controversy with him, he preached
five times and received seventy pounds for his charitable work. Landing
at New Castle on a Sunday morning, he preached morning and evening.
Monday morning he preached at Wilmington to a vast assemblage. Tuesday
evening he preached on Society Hill, in Philadelphia, "to about eight
thousand," and at the same place Wednesday morning and evening. Then
once more he made the tour to New York and back, preaching at every
halting-place. A contemporary newspaper contains the following item:

"New Castle, May 15th. This evening Mr. Whitefield went on
board his sloop here in order to sail for Georgia. On Sunday
he preached twice in Philadelphia, and in the evening, when he
preached his farewell sermon, it is supposed he had twenty
thousand hearers. On Monday he preached at Darby and Chester;
on Tuesday at Wilmington and Whiteclay Creek; on Wednesday,
twice at Nottingham; on Thursday at Fog's Manor and New
Castle. The congregations were much increased since his being
here last. The presence of God was much seen in the
assemblies, especially at Nottingham and Fog's Manor, where
the people were under such deep soul-distress that their cries
almost drowned his voice. He has collected in this and the
neighboring provinces about four hundred and fifty pounds
sterling for his orphans in Georgia."

Into the feeble but rapidly growing presbyteries and the one synod of
the American Presbyterian Church the revival had brought, not peace, but
a sword. The collision was inevitable between the fervor and
unrestrained zeal of the evangelists and the sense of order and decorum,
and of the importance of organization and method, into which men are
trained in the ministry of an established church. No man, even at this
day, can read the "standards" of the Presbyterian Church without seeing
that they have had to be strained to admit those "revival methods" which
ever since the days of Whitefield have prevailed in that body. The
conflict that arose was not unlike that which from the beginning of New
England history had subsisted between Separatist and Nationalist. In the
Presbyterian conflict, as so often in religious controversies,
disciplinary and doctrinal questions were complicated with a difference
of race. The "Old Side" was the Scotch and Irish party; the "New Side"
was the New England party, to which many of the old-country ministers
adhered. For successive years the mutual opposition had shown itself in
the synod; and in 1740, at the synod meeting at Philadelphia, soon after
the departure of Whitefield, the real gravamen of the controversy
appeared, in the implied and even express impeachment of the spiritual
character of the Old Side ministers. The impeachment had been implied in
the coming of the evangelists uninvited into other men's parishes, as
if these were mission ground. And now it was expressed in papers read
before the synod by Blair and Gilbert Tennent. The action of the synod
went so far toward sustaining the men of the New Side as to repeal the
rule restraining ministers from preaching outside of their own parishes,
and as to put on record a thanksgiving for the work of God in the land.
Through all the days of the synod's meeting, daily throngs on Society
Hill were addressed by the Tennents and other "hot gospelers" of the
revival, and churches and private houses were resounding with revival
hymns and exhortations. Already the preaching and printing of Gilbert
Tennent's "Nottingham Sermon" had made further fellowship between the
two parties for the time impossible. The sermon flagrantly illustrated
the worst characteristic of the revivalists--their censoriousness. It
was a violent invective on "The Danger of an Unconverted Ministry,"
which so favorable a critic as Dr. Alexander has characterized as "one
of the most severely abusive sermons which was ever penned." The answer
to it came in a form that might have been expected. At the opening of
the synod of 1741 a solemn protestation was presented containing an
indictment in seven grave counts against the men of the New Side, and
declaring them to "have at present no right to sit and vote as members
of this synod, and that if they should sit and vote, the doings of the
synod would be of no force or obligation." The protestation was adopted
by the synod by a bare majority of a small attendance. The presbytery of
New Brunswick found itself exscinded by this short and easy process of
discipline; the presbytery of New York joined with it in organizing a
new synod, and the schism was complete.

It is needless further to follow in detail the amazing career of
Whitefield, "posting o'er land and ocean without rest," and attended at
every movement by such storms of religious agitation as have been
already described. In August, 1740, he made his first visit to New
England. He met with a cordial welcome. At Boston all pulpits were
opened to him, and churches were thronged with eager and excited
hearers.[168:1] He preached on the common in the open air, and the
crowds were doubled. All the surrounding towns, and the coast eastward
to Maine, and the interior as far as Northampton, and the Connecticut
towns along the road to New York, were wonderfully aroused by the
preaching, which, according to the testimony of two nations and all
grades of society, must have been of unequaled power over the feelings.
Not only the clergy, including the few Church of England missionaries,
but the colleges and the magistrates delighted to honor him. Belcher,
the royal governor at Boston, fairly slobbered over him, with tears and
embraces and kisses; and the devout Governor Talcott, at New Haven, gave
God thanks, after listening to the great preacher, "for such refreshings
on the way to our rest." So he was sped on his way back to the South.

Relieved thus of the glamor of his presence, the New England people
began, some of them, to recognize in what an earthen vessel their
treasure had been borne. Already, in his earlier youth, when his vast
powers had been suddenly revealed to him and to the world, he had had
wise counsel from such men as Watts and Doddridge against some of his
perils. Watts warned him against his superstition of trusting to
"impressions" assumed to be divine; and Doddridge pronounced him "an
honest man, but weak, and a little intoxicated with popularity."[169:1]
But no human strength could stand against the adulation that everywhere
attended him. His vain conceit was continually betraying him into
indiscretions, which he was ever quick to expiate by humble
acknowledgment. At Northampton he was deeply impressed with the beauty
of holiness in Edwards and his wife; and he listened with deference to
the cautions of that wise counselor against his faith in "impressions"
and against his censorious judgments of other men as "unconverted"; but
it seemed to the pastor that his guest "liked him not so well for
opposing these things."

The faults of Whitefield were intensified to a hateful degree in some of
his associates and followers. Leaving Boston, he sent, to succeed to his
work, Gilbert Tennent, then glowing with the heat of his noted
Nottingham sermon on "An Unconverted Ministry." At once men's minds
began to be divided. On the one hand, so wise and sober a critic as
Thomas Prince, listening with severe attention, gave his strong and
unreserved approval to the preaching and demeanor of Tennent.[169:2] At
the other extreme, we have such testimony as this from Dr. Timothy
Cutler, the former rector of Yale College, now the Episcopalian minister
of Boston:

"It would be an endless attempt to describe that scene of
confusion and disturbance occasioned by him [Whitefield]: the
division of families, neighborhoods, and towns, the
contrariety of husbands and wives, the undutifulness of
children and servants, the quarrels among teachers, the
disorders of the night, the intermission of labor and
business, the neglect of husbandry and of gathering the
harvest.... In many conventicles and places of rendezvous
there has been checkered work indeed, several preaching and
several exhorting and praying at the same time, the rest
crying or laughing, yelping, sprawling, fainting, and this
revel maintained in some places many days and nights together
without intermission; and then there were the blessed
outpourings of the Spirit!... After him came one Tennent, a
monster! impudent and noisy, and told them they were all
damn'd, damn'd, damn'd; this charmed them, and in the most
dreadful winter I ever saw people wallowed in the snow night
and day for the benefit of his beastly brayings, and many
ended their days under these fatigues. Both of them carried
more money out of these parts than the poor could be thankful
for."[170:1]

This is in a tone of bitter sectarian railing. But, after all, the main
allegations in it are sustained by the ample evidence produced by Dr.
Charles Chauncy, pastor of the First Church in Boston, in his serious
and weighty volume of "Seasonable Thoughts on the State of Religion in
New England," published in 1743, as he sincerely says, "to serve the
interests of Christ's kingdom," and "faithfully pointing out the things
of a bad and dangerous tendency in the late and present religious
appearance in the land." Dr. Chauncy was doubtless included in the
sweeping denunciation of the Christian ministry in general as
"unconverted," "Pharisees," "hypocrites." And yet it does not appear in
historical evidence that Chauncy was not every whit as good a Christian
as Tennent or Whitefield.

The excesses of the revival went on from bad to worse. They culminated,
at last, in the frenzy of poor James Davenport, great-grandson of the
venerable founder of New Haven, who, under the control of "impressions"
and "impulses" and texts of Scripture "borne in upon his mind,"
abandoned his Long Island parish, a true _allotrio-episcopos_, to thrust
himself uninvited into the parishes of other ministers, denouncing the
pastor as "unconverted" and adjuring the people to desert both pastor
and church. Like some other self-appointed itinerants and exhorters of
the time, he seemed bent upon schism, as if this were the great end of
preaching. Being invited to New London to assist in organizing a
Separatist church, he "published the messages which he said he received
from the Spirit in dreams and otherwise, importing the great necessity
of mortification and contempt of the world; and made them believe that
they must put away from them everything that they delighted in, to avoid
the heinous sin of idolatry--that wigs, cloaks and breeches, hoods,
gowns, rings, jewels, and necklaces, must be all brought together into
one heap into his chamber, that they might by his solemn decree be
committed to the flames." On the Sabbath afternoon the pile was publicly
burned amid songs and shouts. In the pile were many favorite books of
devotion, including works of Flavel, Beveridge, Henry, and like
venerated names, and the sentence was announced with a loud voice, "that
the smoke of the torments of such of the authors of the above-said books
as died in the same belief as when they set them out was now ascending
in hell, in like manner as they saw the smoke of these books
arise."[171:1] The public fever and delirium was passing its crisis. A
little more than a year from this time, Davenport, who had been treated
by his brethren with much forbearance and had twice been released from
public process as _non compos mentis_, recovered his reason at the same
time with his bodily health, and published an unreserved and
affectionate acknowledgment of the wrong that he had done under the
influence of a spirit of delusion which he had mistaken for the Spirit
of truth. Those who had gone furthest with him in his excesses returned
to a more sober and brotherly mind, and soon no visible trace remained
of the wild storm of enthusiasm that had swept over New England, except
a few languishing schisms in country towns of Connecticut.

As in the middle colonies, the revival had brought division in New
England. But, after the New England fashion, it was division merely into
ways of thinking, not into sects. Central in the agitated scene is the
calm figure of Edwards, uniting the faith and zeal of an apostle with
the acuteness of a philosopher, and applying the exquisite powers of his
intellect to discriminate between a divine work and its human or Satanic
admixtures, and between true and spurious religious affections. He won
the blessing of the peacemaker. When half a generation had passed there
had not ceased, indeed, to be differences of opinion, but there was none
left to defend the wild extravagances which the very authors of them
lamented, and there was none to deny, in face of the rich and enduring
fruits of the revival, that the power of God had been present in it. In
the twenty years ending in 1760 the number of the New England churches
had been increased by one hundred and fifty.[172:1]

In the middle colonies there had been like progress. The Presbyterian
ministry had increased from forty-five to more than a hundred; and the
increase had been wholly on the "New Side." An early move of the
conservative party, to require a degree from a British or a New England
college as a condition of license to preach, was promptly recognized as
intended to exclude the fervid students from the Log College. It was met
by the organization of Princeton College, whose influence, more New
Englandish than New England, directed by a succession of illustrious
Yale graduates in full sympathy with the advanced theology of the
revival, was counted on to withstand the more cautious orthodoxy of
Yale. In this and other ways the Presbyterian schism fell out to the
furtherance of the gospel.

In Virginia the quickening was as when the wind breathed in the valley
of dry bones. The story of Samuel Morris and his unconscious mission,
although authentic fact, belongs with the very romance of
evangelism.[173:1] Whitefield and "One-eyed Robinson," and at last
Samuel Davies, came to his aid. The deadly exclusiveness of the inert
Virginia establishment was broken up, and the gospel had free course.
The Presbyterian Church, which had at first been looked on as an exotic
sect that might be tolerated out on the western frontier, after a brief
struggle with the Act of Uniformity maintained its right to live and
struck vigorous root in the soil. The effect of the Awakening was felt
in the establishment itself. Devereux Jarratt, a convert of the revival,
went to England for ordination, and returned to labor for the
resuscitation of the Episcopal Church in his native State. "To him, and
such as he, the first workings of the renewed energy of the church in
Virginia are to be traced."[173:2]

An even more important result of the Awakening was the swift and wide
extension of Baptist principles and churches. This was altogether
logical. The revival had come, not so much in the spirit and power of
Elijah, turning to each other the hearts of fathers and of children, as
in the spirit of Ezekiel, the preacher of individual responsibility and
duty. The temper of the revival was wholly congenial with the strong
individualism of the Baptist churches. The Separatist churches formed in
New England by the withdrawal of revival enthusiasts from the parish
churches in many instances became Baptist. Cases of individual
conversion to Baptist views were frequent, and the earnestness with
which the new opinion was held approved itself not only by debating and
proselyting, but by strenuous and useful evangelizing. Especially at the
South, from Virginia to Georgia, the new preachers, entering into the
labors of the annoyed and persecuted pioneers of their communion, won
multitudes of converts to the Christian faith, from the neglected
populations, both black and white, and gave to the Baptist churches a
lasting preeminence in numbers among the churches of the South.

Throughout the country the effect of this vigorous propagation of rival
sects openly, in the face of whatever there was of church establishment,
settled this point: that the law of American States, by whomsoever
administered, must sooner or later be the law of liberty and equality
among the various religious communions. In the southern colonies, the
empty shell of a church establishment had crumbled on contact with the
serious earnestness of the young congregations gathered by the
Presbyterian and Baptist evangelists. In New England, where
establishment was in the form of an attempt by the people of the
commonwealth to confirm the people of each town in the maintenance of
common worship according to their conscience and judgment, the "standing
order" had solid strength; but when it was attempted by public authority
to curb the liberty of a considerable minority conscientiously intent on
secession, the reins were ready to break. It soon came to be recognized
that the only preeminence the parish churches could permanently hold was
that of being "servants of all."

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