19. Trans-Atlantic Awakenings: Revivals in England and America

Some years ago on a weekday afternoon I stood on a gravestone outside an Anglican Church in Epworth, England, and preached to an audience of one—my husband. The tomb in the cemetery alongside the church was that of Samuel Wesley, and the gravestone the very one on which his son John stood to preach when he was barred from preaching inside the church itself.

In that same town of Epworth is the Wesley manse, where Susanna held forth as the now-famous Mother of the Wesleys. As we toured her home, I imagined her—this feisty woman who stood up to her abusive husband—as my sister, brought together over the span of three centuries. But she and I are far removed from each other. Hers was a very different culture from mine.

I was reminded of that last night after returning home from seeing Mama Mia!—a lively filmed production of a Broadway musical with a southern European setting and lots of frivolity and dancing. Less than an hour later, my husband was back into his usual nighttime reading to me, in this case George Marsden’s biography, Jonathan Edwards. The cultural milieu in that book could hardly have been more different from what we had just seen at the theatre.

Edwards, a dutiful son of the Puritans, was a minister in Northampton, Massachusetts, and was determined to stamp out any signs of silliness and mirth in the town. In Mama Mia! Meryl Streep and her middle-aged girlfriends are jumping on the bed and dancing down the stairs and laughing themselves sick. For my husband and me, the movie was a feel-good flick—an escape from all the bad network news of Baghdad and bank failures and floods and fires. For Edwards—or for Susanna Wesley—it would have been a shocking symbol of the evil times we live in when professing Christians are enjoying such entertainment.

History challenges us as we identify role models, but we should not fool ourselves in imagining that we could easily reach across the centuries and find cultural—or even religious—commonality. For Edwards and Whitefield and John Wesley and his mother, the “worldliness” of twentieth-first-century evangelicalism would be anathema.

We can learn from history how past generations thought and acted, how they responded to the demands of their time and how they solved their problems. We can learn by analogy, not by example, for our circumstances will always be different than theirs were. The main thing history can teach us is that human actions have consequences and that certain choices, once made, cannot be undone.

GERDA LERNER, WHY HISTORY MATTERS

It is true that we learn more by analogy than by example when we look back over history—especially those of us who imagine that we would resonate with noted evangelicals of the past were they to be suddenly resurrected in the twenty-first century. Because our worldview is so much a part of us, we do not easily see it for what it is, and we sometimes imagine that our circumstances and our responses to circumstances would be similar to those who lived long ago. The main thing history offers us is the knowledge that actions have consequences that cannot be undone. For good and for ill, the actions of our evangelical forbearers had consequences that could not be undone.

Revival leaders of this era were a breed apart from those who would make headlines in the twentieth century. They were well educated and theologically astute, concerned more about correct doctrine than about making a quick convert. Among them are Susanna Wesley, John Wesley, George Whitefield, and Jonathan Edwards.

The eighteenth-century evangelical revivals in England and America were in many respects distinct and separate. Both, however, were the step-children of Puritanism, linked together through the person of George Whitefield and also through a long, rich heritage of Pietism that had its beginnings on the Continent. The historical roots of Pietism go back to seventeenth-century Germany where Philip Jakob Spener (1635–1705) called for a warm personal religious faith that would supercede the cold formalism of the Lutheran state church. His classic Pia Desideria (Pious Longings), published in 1675, laid out the prerequisites and principles for renewal and reform. His focus was on personal piety and the “new birth” that manifested itself in good works and social action. The movement spread through conventicles that offered opportunity for Bible study, prayer, and personal testimonies.

Spener’s “dutiful son in the faith” was Auguste Hermann Francke (1663–1727). At Spener’s encouragement, Francke became a pastor and professor at the University of Halle, where he also established a community to aid ministers in spiritual development. His aim was to bring renewal to the church and stimulate evangelism at home and abroad. His motto was “a life changed, a church revived, a nation reformed, and a world evangelized.” He was a preacher, scholar, and tireless humanitarian worker. Among his outreach endeavors were homes for widows, an orphanage, a hospital, a rescue mission, a school for poor children, and food and medicine for the needy.

PARADE OF HISTORY

As the tour of church history reaches the eighteenth century, popular revivalists leave behind settled congregations and march from town to town stirring sinners. Some, like Wesley and Edwards, slowly rise to the occasion. Others, like Whitefield, are natural-born actors who revel in an outdoor pulpit with nature’s dramatic backdrop. Rumors that a Whitefield show is coming to town often spurs a frantic procession like one that occurred in Middletown, Connecticut, in 1740. Dusty roads were jammed with horses and buggies and runners on foot as though “fleeing for our lives,” wrote a contemporary, “all the while fearing we should be too late to hear the sermon.”

The German Pietism of Spener and Francke spawned Lutheran mission outreach to India as well as a worldwide Moravian evangelistic movement founded by Nicolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf (1700–1760), a Lutheran nobleman. Raised by his Pietist grandmother, Zinzendorf was educated under the guidance of Franke at the University of Halle, where he joined with other students in spiritual disciplines. Several years later, while visiting a museum, he saw the painting Ecco Homo by Domenico Feti, portraying Jesus crowned with thorns. The inscription read, “I have done this for you; what have you done for me?” The work of art had a profound impact on him. “I have loved Him for a long time,” he said, “but I have never actually done anything for Him. From now on I will do whatever He leads me to do.”

In the following years, Zinzendorf turned his grandmother’s vast estate into a spiritual retreat and a refuge for Christians fleeing persecution. Named Herrnhut (meaning “the Lord’s watch”), the center attracted many refugees who were descendants of the Unitas Fratrum (United Brethren), followers of John Hus. Lutheran Pietists and Anabaptists also moved to the community. In 1727, five years after the community was formed, there was a spiritual awakening that launched an around-the-clock “prayer watch” that lasted more than one hundred years.

The revival also set the stage for the worldwide Moravian mission venture. Prior to this time the land-locked Protestants—with the exception of certain German Pietists—had focused very little attention on overseas evangelistic outreach. But the Herrnhut revival changed that, and Zinzendorf offered his own theological foundation, believing that Christ’s presence permeated the whole world through the Holy Spirit and that individuals were thus prepared to receive the gospel message. Missionaries were merely the agents who presented Jesus with no doctrinal defense of the faith. Zinzendorf argued that missionaries should not “be blinded by reason as if people had to … first learn to believe in God, after that in Jesus.” Nor should missionaries be concerned for their own physical well-being. They were to live on the same socioeconomic level as that of the people they served—including becoming slaves to bring the gospel to slaves, as Leonard Dober, who served on the island of St. Thomas, wrote in a letter:

When the gracious count [Zinzendorf] came back from his trip to Denmark and told me about the slaves, it gripped me so that I could not get free of it. I vowed to myself that if one other brother would go with me, I would become a slave…. The word of the cross in its lowliness shows a special strength to souls. As for me, I thought: even if helpful to no one in it, I could still give witness through it of obedience to our Savior! … On the island there still are souls who cannot believe because they have not heard.

In the decades that followed, Moravian missionaries faced persecution, largely from other Christians, as they spread out over the world. But they also profoundly influenced other Christians by their unflagging faith. So it was when John Wesley encountered Moravians—men and women who demonstrated no fear of death—onboard ship. Of them he wrote: “In the midst of the psalm, wherewith their service began … the sea broke over, split the mainsail in pieces, covered the ship, and poured in between the decks, as if the great deep had already swallowed us up. A terrible screaming began among the English. The Germans looked up, and without intermission calmly sang on.”

EVERYDAY LIFE

Midwifery and Childbirth

Teenage brides were not the norm in the seventeenth century. Susanna Wesley married at nineteen (her husband at twenty-six), but most brides were in their mid-twenties. The first baby typically was born within a year. If a woman did not conceive, the blame was placed on her; it was her failure to properly incubate her husband’s seed.

Because childbirth was such a dangerous endeavor, women of means sought out the most competent midwife available. German midwives of the era were trained and paid by local municipalities. In other regions a form of licensing was available. But most midwives operated by reputation alone, often having been trained by a mother or grandmother. Training involved years of assisting the older experienced woman. Books, however, were available. The first such volume written by a woman appeared in the early seventeenth century. Written by Louise Bourgeois, a midwife for the French royalty, it became a bestseller and was soon translated into English and other languages.

London midwives of the seventeenth century were expected to obtain a license for which they paid substantial fees to Anglican officials. However, Quakers who gained a reputation as capable midwives did not seek church sanction because they refused to baptize the infant if it were stillborn and to carry out the tradition of bringing ribbons for the baby’s adornment.

Although there were some male midwives, typically childbirth was attended by women only. Sometimes the bedchamber would be filled with female relatives and neighbors, all encouraging the woman in her often-arduous labor. In England most women gave birth lying in bed. In Holland a birthing chair was brought in by the midwife, a tradition that made its way to the New World. Massachusetts Judge Samuel Sewall notes in his diary that a collapsible “birth stool” was used for the birthing mother. This “portable ladies’ solace” featured a hole like that of a toilet seat, allowing the midwife to catch the baby from below.

FOUR WEEKS OF LYING-IN

In the seventeenth century the new mother could expect a lying-in period of four weeks when she would be free from the demands of domestic and other responsibilities. If the family could not afford the expense of providing the necessary domestic help, the parish would often pay a poor parish woman to attend the new mother during her four-week recovery period. In some cases, the parish paid for the woman’s delivery and four weeks’ room and board at approved parish homes such as widow Bull’s of St Olave Jewry or “nurse” James’ and “nurse” Ray’s of St Bride’s. Midwives, however, avoided carrying out deliveries in their own homes lest they be accused of performing abortions.

Dorene Evenden, The Midwives of Seventeenth-Century London

There were many old wives’ tales that offered counsel for difficult labor. Indeed, the tricks of the trade were endless. The mother-to-be needed strength, so the women filling the room busied themselves by bringing broth or mutton or toast and eggs. Wine was the beverage of choice, particularly for calming down an excitable new mother. Some midwives were accused of getting the birthing mother drunk in order to make their work easier. Another trick was “sneezing powder.” Inserting a quill-full of such powder up a woman’s nose caused her to sneeze and thus “dislodge” the baby in a difficult birth. Such an infant was called a “quilled baby.”

This encounter with the Moravians was one in a series of influences that would influence John Wesley in his becoming the most influential Christian leader of the eighteenth century. The outlook for renewal in the decades before the revival was bleak. According to a contemporary observer, the very continuation of Christianity was in jeopardy: “A new century was dawning, but it seemed as if in the spiritual sky of England the very light of Christianity was being turned by some strange and evil force into darkness.” Yet it is a mistake to characterize the eighteenth century as an era devoid of religion. Loyalty to a particular perspective—be it Anglican, Puritan, Catholic, or sectarian—was alive and well.

An understanding of John Wesley is not complete without some knowledge of his mother—the person who offered the most formative spiritual influence in his life—including her reading to him and his siblings the stories of Moravian missionaries.

Susanna Wesley: Mother of John and Charles

Susanna Wesley, the mother of John and Charles (and seventeen other children) is perhaps rightly regarded as the “mother” of Methodism—not because she was an active Methodist herself but because of her enormous influence over her two sons. Indeed, it was John’s mother who had the most formative influence on his character and ministry. Though not strictly speaking a Puritan, hers was a Puritan mentality, especially as it related to family issues. Born in 1703 at the Epworth rectory in Lincolnshire, England, John was her fifteenth child.

Susanna is often viewed as the ultimate Christian mother, whose strict standards of child discipline have been more often praised than emulated. Her time-consuming commitment to her children was not a sacrifice most women were able or willing to make. “No one can, without renouncing the world, in the most literal sense, observe my method,” she later wrote. “There are few, if any, that would entirely devote above twenty years of the prime of life in hopes to save the souls of their children, which they think may be saved without so much ado; for that was my principal intention, however unskillfully and unsuccessfully managed.”

Susanna Wesley

Despite her sacrifice and devotion, Susanna’s method had mixed results at best. Her children, one after another, had problems in their relationships and struggled in failed marriages. Such problems were no doubt exacerbated by her own rocky marriage to an erratic and authoritarian minister. Samuel Wesley abandoned the family and his parish on one occasion when he took offense at her lack of wifely submission—her failure to say “amen” to his prayer for King William of Orange, whom Susanna regarded as a usurper of the throne. In his absence, Susanna conducted Sunday services that overflowed the parsonage. This time of worship began with her own children, and word quickly spread until the crowds exceeded two hundred. When her husband, who was away in London, vehemently objected, her response was matter-of-fact: “I cannot conceive why any should reflect upon you, because your wife endeavors to draw people to church, and to restrain them from profaning the Lord’s day…. As to it looking peculiar, I grant it does. And so does almost any thing that is serious, or that may in any way advance the glory of God, or the salvation of souls.”

That she was forced to defend her ministry illustrates the continuing constraints placed on any woman who sought ministry beyond the family circle. But her example influenced her son and set the stage for women’s active involvement in Methodist ministry. John later referred to his mother as a “preacher of righteousness,” a description that aptly fits many of the early Methodist women. Margaret Davidson, Sarah Crosby, Sarah Mallet and others all preached in front of large crowds, though they were often admonished to step down from the pulpit, or to break their sermons into short exhortations with hymns interspersed, or to avoid speaking in a high, shrill voice. Many of these women grew up in poor working-class neighborhoods. Others, like Lady Selina, Countess of Huntingdon, easily mixed with royalty and the upper classes of society. She donated large sums for the training of Methodist ministers and became actively involved in theological issues and ministry placement, showing favor to those who supported George Whitefield’s Calvinism as opposed to Wesley’s Arminian stance. For decades the “Huntingdon Connection” was a power to be reckoned with.

JACOB ARMINIUS

Born more than a century before John Wesley, Jacob Arminius (1559–1609) was a Dutch minister, theologian, and professor at the University of Leiden, who challenged Calvinistic beliefs, especially as they were filtered through Theodore Beza. Arminius emphasized God’s foreknowledge in the work of election. “God decreed to save and damn certain particular persons,” he wrote. “This decree has its foundation in the foreknowledge of God, by which he knew from all eternity those individuals who would, through his … grace, believe, and, through his subsequent grace would persevere by which foreknowledge, he likewise knew those who would not believe and persevere.” The most noted proponent of Arminianism was John Wesley.

John Wesley: Founder of Methodism

By the time of his death, John Wesley (1703–1791) was recognized for his important contribution not only to the religious atmosphere of England but to the social and economic milieu as well. After he died, the Gentleman’s Magazine eulogized him by underscoring his having done “infinite good to the lower classes of the people.” For Wesley, social involvement was intrinsically tied to evangelistic outreach, and thus prison reform, employment assistance, poverty relief, and antislavery were a natural aspect of early Methodist ministry.

Both of Wesley’s grandfathers were religious dissenters who had opposed the form and ritual of the Church of England. His parents, however, independently returned to the Anglican Church before they married. The most often-repeated tale of Wesley’s childhood has been the story of the Epworth rectory fire and the miraculous rescue of the five-year-old John. The incident became legendary and was depicted in paintings, copies of which were hung in people’s homes. Wesley’s journal entry offers his own recollection.

This was a Thursday night, February 9, 1709, I believe between 11:00 and midnight, which completely destroyed the building. All were quickly evacuated except for me. As my rescue came none too soon, I have frequently thought of myself (to use those words of the prophets) as a “brand plucked from the burning.” From that moment on, my mother seemed to take special pains to see that I was wholly committed to God.

In his early twenties, he began to seriously contemplate entering the ministry. In preparation, he radically changed his life style: “I began to alter the whole form of my conversation, and to set in earnest upon a new life. I set apart an hour or two a day for religious retirement…. I watched against all sin, whether in word or deed. I began to aim at, and pray for, inward holiness.” But at Oxford he is shocked to find those preparing for holy orders living a frivolous and degraded lifestyle. Out of this worldly atmosphere is born the “Holy Club,” an accountability group that includes his brother Charles and friend George Whitefield. Like similar small groups among German Pietists, they commit themselves to spiritual disciplines and good works.

When his aging father pleads with him to come home and serve as his successor at Epworth, Wesley declines: “The question is not whether I could do more good to others there or here; but whether I could do more good to myself; seeing wherever I can be most holy myself, there I can most promote holiness in others.” His later decision to journey to Georgia to minister to the colonists and Indians is made on similar grounds. To his father he writes: “My chief motive, to which all the rest are subordinate, is the hope of saving my own soul…. But you will perhaps ask: ‘Cannot you save your own soul in England as well as in Georgia?’ I answer, No; neither can I hope to attain the same degree of holiness here which I may there.”

Despite his good intentions, however, Wesley does not attain holiness during his mission to America. He had come to Georgia with high hopes of evangelizing the “poor heathens,” but his hopes are soon dashed when he realizes they are not interested in the words of an Anglican priest. He finds the nearby Indians to be “implacable” and “unmerciful,” and when he asks permission to make an expedition to a more distant tribe, Governor Oglethorpe insists that he work among the colonists in Savannah and the neighboring settlements. But his mission to the settlers fails as well. He appears to them to be self-righteous, aloof, and authoritarian. “I like nothing you do,” complained a village magistrate. “All the people are of my mind, for we won’t hear ourselves abused.” Others express similar sentiments, and on one occasion Wesley is physically assaulted by an angry woman.

In the midst of these problems, he becomes embroiled in a personal matter. In 1737, a year after he arrives, he finds himself consumed by “an unholy desire” for Sophy Hopkey, the wealthy eighteen-year-old niece of a colonial official. In his estimation, her “soul appeared to be wholly made up of mildness, gentleness, longsuffering,” He apparently makes a feeble marriage proposal but later vacillates, convinced that he is “not strong enough to bear the complicated temptations of a married state.” In the meantime, Sophy agrees to marry another man. Wesley is dumbstruck. Then the couple elopes without the customary publishing of banns. When they return, Wesley denies her communion. She and her husband sue him on the grounds that he has defamed her and denied her the Lord’s Supper. Wesley defends himself but then decides to get out of town. “The hour has come for me to fly for my life, leaving this place; and as soon as evening prayers were over, about eight o’clock, the tide then serving, I shook off the dust of my feet, and left Georgia, after having preached the Gospel there … not as I ought, but as I was able, one year and nearly nine months.”

Wesley left Georgia an utter failure. On his voyage home he wrote, “I went to America to convert the Indians; but oh! who shall convert me!” An understandable rhetorical question asked in the midst of depression and self-doubt, it was also a timely question, considering what happens next. Back home in London, he is thirty-five, single, and not in a good mood. He would have rather stayed home from the church meeting that spring evening in 1738. “I went very unwillingly to a society in Aldersgate Street, where one was reading Luther’s preface to the Romans,” he later confessed. “About a quarter before nine, while he was describing the change God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ alone, for salvation; and an assurance was given me, that He had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.”

Exactly what this experience entailed has been the subject of much debate. Some historians and theologians characterize it as one of many turning points in Wesley’s pilgrimage of faith. Others view it with far greater significance. His own family, except for Charles, is confused by his experience. His older brother Samuel writes: “What Jack means by his not being a Christian till last month I understand not…. I do not hold it at all unlikely, that a perpetual intenseness of thought, and want of sleep, may have disordered my brother.”

Wesley’s seeking after holiness is offset by struggles in his personal life. In November of 1738, only six months after the Aldersgate Street experience, he is despairing that his heart is “cold and senseless” with “no love or joy in the Holy Ghost.” These ups and downs continue in the following years. Then, in 1749, more than ten years after his muddled affair with Sophy, he is again seriously contemplating marriage—this time to Grace Murray, a Methodist class leader. John Bennett, however, is also interested in Grace, and Charles Wesley—fearing his brother will be distracted from the ministry—meets privately with the couple and convinces them to marry before his brother John finds out. When John discover’s his brother’s duplicity, he is devastated. His relationship with Charles might have been permanently severed had it not been for the intervention of George Whitefield, weeping in great distress and pleading they not let this matter ruin the ministry. Charles, after all, holds a key role in the new movement as the writer of thousands of hymns that have great public appeal.

Just a year after this wrenching ordeal, Wesley is again contemplating marriage—this time without his brother’s knowledge. He hastily marries widow Molly Vazeille before giving proper notice. But the marriage does not last. They live together “only occasionally,” by his own account, for the next twenty years. After that Molly moves away to live with her daughter, “never to return.” Wesley is indifferent: “I did not desert her; I did not send her away; I will never recall her.”

In light of the strife he encounters on a personal level, Wesley’s doctrinal focus on “entire sanctification” may seem unusual. He strongly objects to Whitefield’s claim that a truly converted person is eternally secure. Such a position, Wesley believes, is a license to sin. He insists that justification is not a blanket forgiveness of sins: “If a justified person does not do good, as he has opportunity, he will lose the grace he has received, and,” he adamantly insists, will perish eternally. A person who is justified is to “go on unto perfection.” He is certain that believers can reach a state of sinless perfection—a conviction based in part on testimonies of those who claim to have attained it. “Nothing is sin,” he argues, “but a voluntary transgression of a known law of God.”

John Wesley

The doctrine of perfection—that Wesley made the “grand depositum” of the Wesleyan movement—is the most controversial of Wesley’s beliefs. It created conflict throughout his ministry, and certain followers took the doctrine to an extreme. In fact, this controversy virtually tore the whole movement apart. Either it was neglected or it was carried too far, but rarely was it preached to his satisfaction. Perfection simply did not work on a practical level. Even after he had published The Plain Account of Christian Perfection (1766), he frequently confronted preachers who refused to preach the doctrine.

One of the questions frequently raised concerning Wesley and perfectionism has been whether he experienced entire sanctification himself. He never publicly claimed the experience, and in private correspondence he was vague at best. In 1763, he wrote to Charles, “I often cry out ‘Give me back my former life!’ Let me be again an Oxford Methodist! I am often in doubt whether it would not be best for me to resume all my Oxford rules, great and small. I did then walk closely with God and redeemed the time. But what have I been doing these thirty years?” Some years later he confesses, “I tell you flat I have not attained the character I draw.”

METHODIST MARY FLETCHER

Early Methodism grew out of Wesley’s tight organizational genius and discipline. The basic unit was the Society, consisting of a large group that gathered to listen to preaching and sing hymns. Societies were subdivided into small groups or classes. It was within this system that women found meaningful ministry. Mary Bosanquet Fletcher (1739–1815) actively served in the ministry from age eighteen until her death at seventy-six. Born into wealth, she used her inheritance to found an orphanage, where she served for two decades while preaching and leading societies on the side. At the age of forty-two she married John Fletcher (the most esteemed theologian in the movement), only to be widowed four years later. A powerful preacher, she sometimes spoke to crowds numbering in the thousands. Wesley did not approve of women preachers, but was convinced that “Methodism is an extraordinary dispensation” and thus did “not fall under the ordinary rules of discipline.” To Mary Fletcher, whose ministry was often criticized, Wesley had written: “I think the strength of the cause rests there—on your having an extraordinary call.”

On June 28, 1788, as he celebrated his eighty-fifth birthday, he reflected on how little he had suffered amid “the rush of numerous years!” He was remarkably alert, despite some short-term memory loss: “I find likewise some decay in my memory, with regard to names and things lately past; but not at all with regard to what I have read or heard twenty, forty, or sixty years ago … nor do I feel any such thing as weariness, either in traveling or preaching. I am not conscious of any decay in writing sermons which I do as readily, and I believe as correctly, as ever.” The day after his birthday is Sunday, and he holds to his preaching schedule of three sermons at three different locations: “At eight I preached at Misterton, as usual; about one to a numerous congregation at Newby, near Haxey; and about four at my old stand in Epworth market place, to the great congregation.” This is how he had carried out his ministry for almost a half century.

George Whitefield: Trans-Atlantic Revivalist

The names Wesley and Whitefield are inseparably linked in the eighteenth-century English revival movement—in cooperation and later in conflict. Wesley is the organizer, Whitefield the flamboyant speaker and international traveler. But it is theology that separates them the most. Wesley’s Arminian views of perfectionism and free will clash with Whitefield’s Calvinism. “No living preacher ever possessed such a combination of excellences,” writes Whitefield’s contemporary biographer J. C. Ryle—excellences “of pure doctrine, simple and lucid style, boldness and directness, earnestness and fervor, descriptiveness and picture-drawing, pathos and feeling—united with a perfect voice, perfect delivery, and perfect command of words. Whitefield, I repeat, stands alone. No man, dead or alive, I believe, ever came alongside of him.”

The son of prosperous innkeepers, George Whitefield (1714–1770) was the youngest of seven children (eleven years younger than Wesley). Two years after he was born, his father died, and his widowed mother was left to rear the children alone. It was an arduous task, and he was a difficult child, as he later recalls: “Lying, filthy talking, and foolish jesting I was much addicted to, even when very young. Sometimes I used to curse, if not swear. Stealing from my mother I thought no theft at all, and used to make no scruple of taking money out of her pocket before she was up.” From his youth, he imitated ministers and dreamed of being in the pulpit himself. But play-acting was his foremost ambition: “I was very fond of reading plays, and have kept from school for days together to prepare myself for acting them. My master seeing how mine and my schoolfellows’ vein ran, composed something of this kind for himself, and caused me to dress myself in girls’ clothes, which I had often done, to act a part before the corporation.”

George Whitefield

At seventeen his life takes a different turn as he makes plans to enroll at Oxford. He is “delivered out of the snare of the Devil,” he recalls, and “resolved to prepare … for the holy sacrament.” Entering academic life as a “servitor,” the lowliest of students, he meets the Wesleys and becomes a member of the Holy Club. Ordained to the Anglican ministry at twenty-two, he is such a dynamic preacher that he reportedly “drove fifteen mad.” (Anglicans and others often equated religious enthusiasm with madness.) He is the biggest show in town, bringing all his emotions to the pulpit. “I hardly ever knew him go through a sermon without weeping,” writes an observer. “I could hardly bear such unreserved use of tears, and the scope he gave to his feelings, for sometimes he exceedingly wept, stamped loudly and passionately, and was frequently so overcome, that, for a few seconds, you would suspect he never could recover, and when he did, nature required some little time to compose himself.”

Appearing to take great pleasure in his growing fame, he records an important breakthrough in 1737: “My name was first put into the public papers.” No less satisfying is his reception in public: “I could no longer walk on foot as usual, but was constrained to go in a coach, from place to place, to avoid the hosannas of the multitude.” His critics are many, but news—good or bad—only adds to his fame. Then, in 1738, he seems to turn his back on his celebrity to serve as a missionary in the remote colonial outpost of Georgia, following in the footsteps of John Wesley. Unlike Wesley (who had already left Georgia), Whitefield becomes the darling of the colonists. “I looked for persecution, but lo! I am received as an angel of God.” He preaches, organizes schools, and supports economic endeavors. But his most illustrious efforts are in behalf of orphans. His vision to establish an orphanage will become a lifelong focus of his travel and preaching, always tied to charitable fund-raising. In September he sails back to England, vowing to return to his newfound friends.

On returning to England, Whitefield discovers that his star has risen, and with every fiery sermon against the established clerics, his popularity only increases. When barred from churches, he preaches outdoors—often using the elements to enhance his dramatic oratory. On one occasion, when a storm is approaching, he does not let the incident pass unnoticed: “And where will you be, my hearers, when your lives have passed away like that dark cloud?” His deep voice booms with no need of a megaphone. “Let not the wrath of God be awakened! Let not the fires of eternity be kindled against you! See there!” he exclaims, as lightening flashed across the sky, “it is a glance from the angry eye of Jehovah!” “Hark!” he cries out, as a crack of thunder roars over his words, “it was the voice of the Almighty as He passed by in His anger!.”

The popularity of Whitefield as an open-air evangelist on both sides of the Atlantic is illustrated by the account of Nathan Cole. On October 23, 1740, a man on horseback gallops through the countryside spreading word that Whitefield will be preaching in the nearby town of Middletown, Connecticut. Cole’s response is typical:

I was in my field at work. I dropped my tool … and ran home to my wife, telling her to make ready quickly to go on and hear Mr. Whitefield preach at Middletown, then ran to my horse with all my might, fearing that I should be too late. Having my horse, I with my wife soon mounted…. We improved every moment to get along as if we were fleeing for our lives, all the while fearing we should be too late to hear the sermon, for we had twelve miles to ride.

As they approach Middletown, they realize they are not alone in their frenzied effort to hear the famous preacher:

I saw before me a cloud of fog arising. I first thought it came from the great river, but as I came nearer the road I heard a noise of horses’ feet coming down the road, and this cloud was a cloud of dust made by the horses’ feet…. When I came within about 20 rods of the road, I could see men and horses slipping along in the cloud like shadows, and as I drew nearer it seemed like a steady stream of horses and their riders, scarcely a horse more than his length behind another, all of a lather and foam with sweat, their breath rolling out of the nostrils every jump. Every horse seemed to go with all his might for the saving of souls. It made me tremble to see the sight.

Whitefield’s sermon meets all of Cole’s expectations and pricks his conscience: “I saw that my righteousness would not save me.”

In the following years, Whitefield’s popularity in America increases, and he regards the colonies his second home, making a total of thirteen trans-Atlantic voyages before he dies. He plays a key role in what becomes known as the Great Awakening and is credited with helping to unify colonies. His friendship with Ben Franklin is legendary, as Franklin acknowledged with his typical touch of humor.

I happened soon afterwards to attend one of his sermons, in the course of which I perceived he intended to finish with a collection, and I silently resolved he should get nothing from me. I had in my pocket a handful of copper money, three or four silver dollars, and five in gold. As he proceeded I began to soften and concluded to give the copper. Another stroke of his oratory made me ashamed of that and determined me to give the silver, and he finished so admirably that I emptied my pocket into the collection dish, gold and all.

Unlike Wesley, Whitefield does not leave behind a tightly organized following. He is a preacher far more than an organizer. But he does have a powerful patron in Selina, Countess of Huntingdon, who erects chapels with her ample finances. In addition, she purchases theatres and halls and other buildings and refurbishes them for Christians who desire evangelical preaching. She also establishes a college to train preachers for the chapels and to ride the circuit. Indeed, she divides England into six circuit districts and maps out the routes for her young preachers. She is also deeply involved in doctrinal affairs, particularly the Calvinist-Arminian controversy that separates Whitefield and the Wesleys. Although she is not a preacher herself (as were many other women in Wesley’s Methodism), in her role as the chief administrator of the “connection” and as the arbiter of doctrinal disputes, she serves essentially as a bishop and wields extraordinary control over church-related matters.

When Whitefield came, it was like an appearance of Billy Graham, Garth Brooks, and Bill Clinton all rolled into one.

Nathan O. Hatch

Whitefield’s spectacular oratory in an age before electronic recording has been lost to succeeding generations. But he did leave behind a physical presence that lived on for decades: his corpse. In fact, his decaying body became such an object of veneration that in 1775, five years after his death, a chaplain accompanied by military officers (including American traitor Benedict Arnold) went inside his tomb in Newburyport, Massachusetts, and removed some of his clothing for souvenirs.

When Methodist Jesse Lee and two fellow clerics entered his tomb in 1789, they were not disappointed. Lee left a record of their visit: “Removing the coffin lid, [we] beheld the awful ravages of ‘the last enemy of man.’ How quiet the repose, how changed the features.” When another Methodist minister visited the tomb in the 1820s, he took Whitefield’s skull into his hands and “examined it with great interest.” By the 1830s, the viewings were becoming less frequent and less interesting. A Freewill Baptist minister wrote of his visit in 1834: “The coffin was about one third full of black earth, out of which projected a few bones. The skull bone was detached from the rest, and was turned over.”

A NOT-SO-GREAT “GREAT AWAKENING”

In the 1970s and 1980s, various historians have seen in it nothing less than the first unifying event of the colonial experience, the origins of the American evangelical tradition…. This emphasis on the “Great Awakening” may say more about subsequent times than about its own. The term was not contemporary, nor was it known to the historians of the revolutionary and early national periods…. Internal descriptive and analytical inconsistencies belie the event’s importance and even its existence; it is difficult to date, for example, because revivals linked to it started in New England long before 1730 yet did not appear with force in Virginia until the 1760s…. It missed most colonies, and even in New England its long-term effects have been greatly exaggerated. On reflection, it might better be thought of as an interpretive fiction.

Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith

Jonathan Edwards: New England Preacher and Theologian

Whether the last of the Puritans or the first American intellectual of the modern age, Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) is a controversial historical figure even as he was a controversial minister and theologian in his own era. Most often associated with the Great Awakening and revivals in his own church in Northampton, Massachusetts, he was also well known for his extensive writings on revivals. Decades before the awakenings in his own church, his grandfather, Solomon Stoddard (who served the same church for sixty years), had reaped five “harvests” between 1679 and 1718. The number of conversions exceeded that of any other parish in New England.

Edwards descended from a long line of Puritan preachers on both sides of the family and grew up in a pious home filled with women—ten sisters of nearly his height, prompting his father to joke about his sixty feet of daughters. From his earliest childhood he was home-schooled by his parents and older sisters. Deeply religious and studious, he kept detailed notebooks on scientific and philosophical and religious topics. At thirteen, he entered Yale, graduating four years later as valedictorian. After further independent study, he accepted a short-term pastoral position in New York City, followed by a position as tutor at Yale. His next career move was to Northampton to serve as an assistant minister under his renowned grandfather, Solomon Stoddard.

As a youth Edwards had struggled with the “horrible doctrine” of election that predestines some to eternal life and others to eternal damnation. But in his final year at Yale he comes to see the doctrine as “exceedingly pleasant, bright and sweet.” Ever striving for holiness, he also records his spiritual progress in his journal, later published in his Personal Narrative:

As I was walking there, and looking up on the sky and clouds, there came into my mind so sweet a sense of the glorious majesty and grace of God, that I know not how to express. [It was] an awful sweetness; a high, and great, and holy gentleness…. After this my sense of divine things gradually increased, and became more and more lively, and had more of that inward sweetness…. My longings after God and holiness, were much increased.

SINNERS AND SPIDERS

The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked. His wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else but to be cast into the fire…. It is nothing but his hand that holds you from falling into the fire every moment…. And there is no other reason to be given, why you have not dropped into hell since you arose in the morning, but that God’s hand has held you up. There is no other reason to be given why you have not gone to hell, since you have sat here in the house of God, provoking his pure eyes by your sinful wicked manner of attending his solemn worship. Yea, there is nothing else that is to be given as a reason why you do not this very moment drop down into hell…. You hang by a slender thread, with the flames of divine wrath.

Jonathan Edwards, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.”

At twenty-four he marries seventeen-year-old Sarah Pierpont, who also comes from a distinguished Puritan line. He is smitten most by her spirituality: “God comes to her and fills her mind with exceeding sweet delight, and she hardly cares for anything, except to meditate on him…. She is of a wonderful sweetness, calmness and universal benevolence of mind; especially after this Great God has manifested himself to her mind.” But they are in many ways polar opposites: she vivacious and optimistic; he awkward, studious, and stern. She immediately steps into the role of assistant pastor’s wife in Northampton. But two years later, when Stoddard dies, they are on their own with a congregation that looks back with great fondness on the nearly sixty-year tenure of their beloved pastor.

Studying sometimes thirteen hours a day, Edwards is not popular among the townspeople who support him with their tax dollars whether they frequent church regularly or not. Yet ten years into his ministry, in this very church under his scholarly preaching, a revival suddenly breaks out. Within a year all of Northampton seems to have abandoned its “dullness in religion,” and some three hundred souls are converted. Edwards documents the awakening in A Faithful Narrative (1737), which helps spread the revival to other areas through its dozens of printings. Conscious of critics, he seeks to stifle emotional outbursts. In less than a year the excitement in Northampton subsides, but it continues to spread as he travels to other churches.

The American Colonies

The sermon for which he is best remembered, “Sinners in the Hand of an Angry God,” was first delivered at Enfield, Connecticut, where it created a considerable stir. Although he read the sermon with composure, an observer reported: “There was such a breathing of distress and weeping, that the preacher was obliged to speak to the people and desire silence, that he might be heard.” Edwards laments the criticism and scoffing, especially from the Boston elitists, most specifically his nemesis, the Reverend Charles Chauncey, who spurns enthusiasm. “Is it not a shame to New England that such a work should be much doubted of here?” Edwards asks his readers. “We have a rule near at hand, a sacred book that God himself has put into our hands, with clear and infallible marks, sufficient to resolve us in things of this nature; which book I think we must reject … if we reject such a work as has now been described.”

BUNDLING IN NEW ENGLAND

There was a curious New England custom in those days called Bundling, which was love-making under peculiar circumstances…. Boys and girls who bundled went to bed together, with their clothes on, and stayed until morning. Sometimes they got married afterward. And sometimes they didn’t…. Hardly anybody thought it was wrong—except the Reverend Jonathan Edwards and his cultured associates…. But after Mr. Edwards’ first “hell-fire and conniption-fit sermon,” his colleagues took up the subject. And one of them wrote a poem with twenty-seven verses dedicated to “Ye Youth of Both Sexes,” that ended like this:

Should you go on, the day will come

When Christ your judge will say,

“In bundles bind each of this kind,

And cast them all away.

“Down deep in hell there let them dwell,

And bundle on that bed.

There burn and roll without control

‘Till all their lust are fed.”

Eleanor Early, A New England Sampler

As more revivals are reported throughout New England, ministers and theological professors begin to split into two warring camps. The followers of Edwards and others who support awakenings are referred to as “New Side” (or “New Lights”), and those opposed (including most of the teachers at Harvard and Yale), “Old Side” (or “Old Lights”). Opponents criticize Edwards for purposely stirring up emotion and causing unnecessary distress. In fact, during the height of a revival season, Edwards’ uncle, Joseph Hawley, a highly respected merchant, takes his own life by slitting his throat. Hawley is depressed in part because he knows he can never be good enough for God. Edwards’ preaching is not designed to spur suicides, but his sermons, if taken seriously, are frightening.

There is no expressing the hatefulness and how hateful you are rendered by it in the sight of God. The odiousness of this filth is beyond all account because ‘tis infinitely odious; you have seen the filthiness of toads and serpents and filthy vermin and creatures that you have loathed and of putrefied flesh … but there was but a finite deformity or odiousness in this…. ‘Tis but a shadow. Your filthiness is not the filthiness of toads and serpents or poisonous vermin, but of devils which is a thousand times worse. ‘Tis impossible to express or conceive or measure how Greatly God detests such defilement.

Edwards is strict and uncompromising, especially in matters of public morality. His campaign against taverns, for example, infuriates many who frequent the local saloon. He himself is too busy to socialize and seems uninterested in the mundane problems and concerns of his parishioners. In some situations he deals with issues in a seeming callous manner. In 1744 stories surface that certain young men in the church are making lewd remarks to young women and are secretly reading a midwives’ manual and passing it on to friends. Shocked by the scandal, he conducts a hasty investigation and then publicly reads a list of those involved, without differentiating between the guilty and those who reported them, creating an uproar in the church and community.

There were other matters that created serious dissention in the church, most notably his opposition to the Half-Way Covenant, a ruling that allowed individuals who had not professed a conversion experience to become members of the church and to have their children baptized. He regards the policy detrimental to the church, even though grandfather Stoddard had helped formulate it. This issue, more than any other, causes turmoil during his long ministry in Northampton. Church attendance decreases, and between 1744 and 1748 no new applications are received for membership. In 1750 two hundred church members sign a petition to have him removed from the pulpit. The matter is taken to the ministerial association, where he is judged by his peers. In a vote of eight to seven he is dismissed from his ministry of twenty-three years. He has no place to go, however, and the church finds no replacement, so he serves as a substitute in his own pulpit.

After some months in limbo, he receives a call to be a missionary to the Housatonic Indians in the frontier settlement of Stockbridge. Though hardly a promotion, it allows for solitude to pursue his writing. “Wife and children are well-pleased with our present situation,” he writes after they have settled. “They like the place much better than they expected. Here, at present, we live in peace; which has of long time been an unusual thing with us. The Indians seem much pleased with my family, especially my wife.” The situation soon deteriorates, however. Those who claim to be responsible for the mission school are some of his own cousins, who (having been influenced by Grandfather Stoddard), had opposed his ministry in Northampton. In the years that follow, many of the natives leave Stockbridge, angry with settlers they do not trust. Natives among the Mohawk and Iroquois, spurred by French traders, view all white settlers as their enemies. In Stockbridge, the Edwards family is terrified especially when they learn of nearby settlers who are set upon and killed—incidents that lead to the French and Indian War of the late 1750s.

REVIVALISM IN THE MIDDLE COLONIES

American revivalism did not begin with Whitefield and Edwards, nor did it begin in New Engand. Of Theodore Frelinghuysen, Whitefield observed: “He is a worthy soldier of Jesus Christ and was the beginner of the great work which I trust the Lord is carrying on.” A Dutch Reformed minister, Frelinghuysen sparks revivals in the Raritan Valley in New Jersey in the 1720s. Reformed Church authorities in Amsterdam are not surprisingly displeased by the reports of “enthusiasm.”

Also serving in the Middle Colonies are Reverend William Tennent and his four minister sons. All “New Side” Presbyterians, they combine “enthusiasm” with great miracles. William, one of the sons, reportedly dies and is “laid out on a board” for three days, after which he is resurrected from the dead. Later, one night when he is sleeping, all his toes on one foot go missing with no explanation other than his having been attacked by the devil. John Tennent is known for his extraordinary weeping—so much so that “even some Strangers … were much affected therewith; the Tears trickling down their Cheeks like Hail.” Another son, Gilbert, with his father, founds the Log College to train evangelical ministers. In some respects the revivals of the Middle Colonies are more spectacular than the revivals of New England, and Edwards, among others, is suspicious of all the miraculous claims.

Despite the threats from neighboring Indian tribes, the family stays put and Edwards continues to write and publish. In his Thoughts on Revivals, Religious Affections, and A Faithful Narrative, he seeks to defend biblically what others have panned as mere “enthusiasm.” In his most substantial work, Freedom of the Will (1754), he makes a case against the Arminian belief that individuals can choose to follow or to disregard Christ. He holds that “the power and grace, and operation of the Holy Spirit, in, or towards, the conversion of the sinner, is immediate (and not mediated by the concurring action of the will).” A person is free to do what he wills; he enjoys freedom of the will in the exercise of this liberty. But Edwards further insists, in what some might regard circular reasoning, that will is not its own cause but is determined by something outside and beyond itself, that being the Holy Spirit.

Edwards departs Stockbridge in 1758. The situation with the natives is dangerous, but more pressing is the need for a new president of the college in New Jersey (that would later become Princeton). The death of the young president, his son-in-law, Rev. Aaron Burr (father of a future vice president), leaves the school floundering, and Edwards is invited to fill the vacuum. Fearing the smallpox epidemic, he volunteers to be inoculated—a procedure still in its early and risky experimental stages. Five weeks after he arrives at Princeton, he dies.

DAVID BRAINERD

The legacy of Jonathan Edwards is closely related to the Protestant missionary movement. That he himself served as a missionary was less significant than his writing The Life of David Brainerd—a book that influenced the cause of missions for generations. Expelled from Yale for an intemperate remark, David Brainerd (1718–1747) went on to serve as a missionary to Native Americans. While on leave, he visited the Edwards home and became engaged to daughter Jerusa, but he died before the wedding took place. His ministry to the natives had been hindered by his own inability to understand or speak the language and by his dark moods, as evident in his journal: “It seemed to me I should never have any success among the Indians. My soul was weary of my life; I longed for death, beyond measure.” He blamed himself for his lack of success, but he also blamed the Indians. He found them “brutishly stupid and ignorant of divine things” and given to asking “frivolous and impertinent questions,” such as why they would want to go to a white man’s heaven when they had a perfectly suitable happy hunting ground of their own.

Brainerd reported revivals, but the emotional outpourings were often short-lived and superficial. How much of his preaching the natives understood—through a sometimes drunk interpreter—is difficult to assess. Edwards’ biography, however, inspired others. John Wesley found a soul mate in the often-depressed young missionary and published an abbreviated version in 1768; and his most prominent ministers in America, Francis Asbury and Thomas Coke, were also profoundly challenged by the book, as were a long succession of missionaries, including Fredrick Schwartz, William Carey, Samuel Mills, Robert Morrison, David Livingstone, and Jim Elliot.

One death follows another, bringing a sudden end to the Edwards story. Only weeks after her husband dies, Sarah receives word that her daughter Esther (wife of Burr) has also died of the smallpox vaccination. Amidst all this sorrow, she now has the responsibility of young orphaned grandchildren. The mother of eleven children, she is no longer young at fifty-one. The emotional strains and added burdens lead to her own death later that year.

What if …

What if Samuel Wesley had not walked out of the house when Susanna refused to say Amen to his prayer for the king? Son John, referred to as the child of his parents’ reconciliation, was conceived shortly after his father returned home from an extended absence. What if young John had not survived the house fire to be a “brand from the burning”? How different would worldwide Christianity be today without John Wesley? What if George Whitefield had become an actor instead of an evangelist? Was he a “flash in the pan” as an exciting preacher, or did his ministry have enduring effects? Without Wesley’s organization, there would be no centuries-old movement that harks back to Whitefield.

What if Jonathan Edwards had been a more moderate pulpit preacher? Would he have the renown he has enjoyed if he had emphasized the sweetness of God’s glory in his sermons more than the odious hatred God has for sinners?

19. Trans-Atlantic Awakenings: Revivals in England and America

19. Trans-Atlantic Awakenings: Revivals in England and America

CHAPTER 19

Trans-Atlantic Awakenings

Revivals in England and America

PARADE OF HISTORY

EVERYDAY LIFE

FOUR WEEKS OF LYING-IN

Susanna Wesley: Mother of John and Charles

JACOB ARMINIUS

John Wesley: Founder of Methodism

METHODIST MARY FLETCHER

George Whitefield: Trans-Atlantic Revivalist

A NOT-SO-GREAT “GREAT AWAKENING”

Jonathan Edwards: New England Preacher and Theologian

SINNERS AND SPIDERS

BUNDLING IN NEW ENGLAND

REVIVALISM IN THE MIDDLE COLONIES

DAVID BRAINERD

What if …

Further Reading