The Great Awakening in the Middle Colonies

This historic book may have numerous typos, missing text, images, or index. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1920. Not illustrated. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER IX TRIUMPHANT EVANGELISM IN AN AGE OF UNBELIEF The eighteenth century was an age of unbelief, for the passionless orthodoxy of nominal and apologetic believers was nearly akin to the negations of deists. The world-wide religious awakening was a countermovement, sometimes threatening to sweep away all opposition but never really changing the trend of the age. The new evangel, however, changed the lives of thousands and called into being a church within the church, a saving nucleus in almost every communion, composed of divinely illuminated men. They set themselves to square their lives by the new pattern and to win their churches and society to the ideals of experimental religion. It is my immediate task to show how this minority, working against the drift of the age, became a majority in most communions and gave to American Protestantism its dominant characteristics. The successive journeys of the great Whitefield, outlined in the preceding chapter, won successive generations to a boundless admiration of the man and of the cause of which he was the most conspicuous exponent. Multitudes were converted in his later itinerations, yet never again after 1740 did he set whole colonies afire by his preaching. He contributed, it is true, to movements inaugurated in Virginia by Presbyterians and in the Carolinas by Baptists, which were quite as intense, if not as widely extended, as the revival of 1740. He also prepared the way for the Methodist preachers whom Wesley sent to America. In spite of the diverting of public attention in the Northern Colonies to war and political debate, there were local revivals in New England and more of them in the Middle Colonies, while the South became peculiarly the field of successful evangelism. All these evangelizing ...