CHAPTER three
CHAPTER three
The Voice That Shook a Continent
The Great Awakening in America
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I stepped off the ship in Philadelphia in the autumn of 1739, and I knew immediately that I had arrived in a different world. Not different in its need — every port city in the British Atlantic world had its quota of the lost and the hungry and the spiritually destitute — but different in its readiness. Something had been stirring in the American colonies for years before I arrived, a divine restlessness, a hunger that the existing religious culture had not yet been able to satisfy. The Great Awakening, as history would come to call it, had been building like a storm gathering on the horizon. I did not bring it with me across the Atlantic. I stepped into it, and God was pleased to use me as one of the instruments through which it broke.
Philadelphia in 1739 was one of the great cities of the colonial world — busthng, prosperous, diverse, and spiritually complex in the way that all prosperous cities tend to be. It had churches of many denominations. It had Benjamin Franklin printing newspapers and cultivating the kind of Enlightenment skepticism that was fashionable among educated men. It had Quakers and Presbyterians and Anglicans and German Reformed settlers and a great mass of ordinary working people who occupied no particular theological position and had no particular religious community to call their own. It had, in short, all the elements of a city that was thriving materially and spiritually uncertain — a city that needed the Gospel and was, whether it knew it or not, ready to hear it.
The Presbyterian churches opened their doors to me immediately, and the crowds that filled them — and quickly spilled out of them into the streets and the commons — were unlike anything I had seen even in the Bristol revival. The Americans were hungry in a way that was distinctive, urgent, almost desperate. They had come to this new world, many of their grandparents and great-grandparents, for the sake of religious freedom, for the right to worship God according to their conscience. That founding hunger had not died, but it had, in many cases, calcified into a formal religion that honored the form of godliness while having lost its power. And when the power returned — when the Gospel was preached with the urgency and the conviction that those founding generations had felt in their bones — the response was electric.
I wrote to my friends in England from Philadelphia in November of 1739, and the letters crackle with the energy of what I was witnessing. "The harvest is very great," I told them. "I am ashamed I can do no more for him who hath done so much for me." Every day brought fresh evidence of the Spirit's work. I wrote that I was "about to attack Satan in one of his strong-holds" — referring to a site where a horse race was to be held — and that my Master was strengthening me for the work. This was not bravado. It was the simple confidence of a man who had learned, in the Kingswood fields and the Bristol commons, that Jesus does not send His servants into battle without going before them. (Deuteronomy 31:8 KJV): "And the LORD, he it is that doth go before thee; he will be with thee, he will not fail thee, neither forsake thee: fear not, neither be dismayed." He was before me in Philadelphia. He would be before me in every city and town and open field of those colonial years. He never failed. Not once.
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Philadelphia: The Fire Ignites
The Philadelphia meetings very quickly outgrew every building that could be offered to them. I preached in Presbyterian churches until the churches could no longer contain the crowds, and then I preached outside the churches, in the churchyards and in the streets. The people came in numbers that astonished even me — a man who had stood before tens of thousands in the Bristol fields and had long since stopped being surprised by large crowds. There was something about the American response that was different in quality, not merely in quantity. These people were not coming as observers or out of idle curiosity. They were coming with a need that was written on their faces, a hunger that you could feel in the attention of the crowd the way you can feel the stillness before a storm.
Benjamin Franklin was in Philadelphia, and he became one of the most fascinating and significant of my American relationships — not because he was a convert, for he never professed faith, but because he was an honest and perceptive observer who had no stake in exaggerating my influence and every intellectual interest in understanding it clearly. Franklin attended my outdoor meetings with the methodology of a scientist. He paced off distances, calculated angles, measured the reach of my voice against the geometry of the street and the square. His conclusion — that I could be heard clearly by approximately thirty thousand people in the open air — was not promotional material. It was the careful measurement of a man who would not have inflated a number for anyone's benefit.
What Franklin could not measure, and honestly admitted he could not explain, was the effect of the preaching on the people who heard it. He described, in his own account, how on one occasion I was collecting an offering for the Bethesda Orphanage and he had come to the meeting having firmly resolved not to give a penny. He had his doubts about the orphanage project and no interest in having his pocket lightened by a preacher's appeal. But as he listened, he found his resolution softening. First, he thought he might spare some copper coins. Then, as I continued, he found himself willing to give silver. By the time I concluded the appeal, he had emptied his pockets entirely — gold, silver, and copper — into the collection. He told this story on himself with obvious amusement and something I always read as a kind of reluctant wonder. He could not explain what had happened to his resolve. I can explain it very simply: it was not my eloquence that did it. It was the Gospel, which is, as Paul wrote, the power of God — and that power does not stop at the boundary of a skeptic's intellectual defenses.
Franklin and I became genuine friends, and our friendship was one of the great unexpected gifts of those American years. He printed my sermons and my journals. He helped me find speaking locations. He was honest with me about his own spiritual state — he did not pretend to a conversion he had not experienced, and I respected him for that honesty even as I prayed, always, that the same Gospel that had emptied his pockets might one day empty his heart of everything that stood between him and Jesus Christ. I loved the man. The love of a Christian for an unconverted friend is a particular kind of love — patient, urgent, never giving up, never pretending the stakes are lower than they are. I never pretended with Franklin. He knew where I stood. And our friendship held across decades and across the divisions that would eventually come between Britain and its American colonies.
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The Campaign Through the Colonies
From Philadelphia, I moved. That is perhaps the most accurate single word for what I did in those colonial years — I moved. Not restlessly, not without direction, but with the purposeful momentum of a man who has more ground to cover than any single lifetime can comfortably hold and is at peace with that fact. In the space of roughly one year — from November 1739 to the autumn of 1740 — I covered approximately five thousand miles of colonial territory and preached more than three hundred and fifty times. I preached from Georgia to Maine, in cities and in crossroads settlements, to crowds of thousands and to handfuls of people in country churches that could seat thirty. Every time I opened my mouth, I preached the same message. You must be born again.
New York received me with a warmth that was genuinely moving. The Dutch Reformed and Presbyterian communities there had been prepared by earlier stirrings of revival, and they came to the meetings with an expectancy that fed my own. I preached in fields outside the city when the churches could not hold the crowds. I preached to crowds that stretched back beyond my ability to see their edges. And the Spirit moved — not uniformly, not in a way that could be predicted or programmed, but with the sovereign, purposeful freedom that is the mark of God's work rather than man's. Some people were broken immediately, weeping and crying out within the first few minutes of the sermon. Others sat in perfect stillness for an hour and then came to me afterward, days or weeks later, with the news that something had been planted in them during that meeting that had been quietly growing into a genuine transformation.
I traveled through New Jersey, where the work of the Tennent family — Gilbert Tennent and his brothers, Presbyterian ministers of remarkable fire and deep theological seriousness — had already prepared the ground magnificently. Gilbert Tennent was one of the most faithful and courageous ministers I encountered in all of America, a man who preached the new birth with a directness that rivaled my own and whose influence in the middle colonies had been laying foundations for years. When our ministries overlapped and reinforced each other in those 1739 and 1740 months, the effect was compounded. Two voices crying the same message from different platforms, with different styles but identical substance, confirmed in the minds of the people that what they were hearing was not one man's peculiar emphasis but the whole counsel of God bearing down upon them from every direction.
I wrote of those New Jersey days with barely contained astonishment at what God was doing. The fields were, as Jesus had described them, white unto harvest — so ready, so primed, that the word seemed to fall into prepared soil at every stop. (John 4:35 KJV): "Say not ye, There are yet four months, and then cometh harvest? behold, I say unto you, Lift up your eyes, and look on the fields; for they are white already to harvest." White already. Not in four months. Now. God had been at work in those colonies for years through the faithful ministry of godly pastors and through the private devotions of seeking souls, and what I found when I arrived was not raw, unprepared ground but fields so full that the harvest almost seemed to happen of its own weight. I was not planting. I was reaping. And the reaping was glorious.
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New England and the Meeting With Jonathan Edwards
I arrived in New England in September of 1740, and what followed in those autumn weeks was, by any honest accounting, among the most remarkable seasons of ministry in the history of the English-speaking world. New England was, in some ways, the most spiritually prepared ground I had encountered anywhere on either side of the Atlantic. It was the region whose founders had come seeking God's purposes in a new world with a seriousness that had produced extraordinary religious culture and an equally extraordinary tendency, in subsequent generations, toward the dry, formal, intellectualized religion that was the natural decay product of a faith that had lost its fire.
The name of Jonathan Edwards had preceded my arrival there. Edwards was the greatest theological mind in colonial America — a man of extraordinary intellectual gifts, a philosopher and theologian who could lay out the architecture of the Christian faith with a precision and depth that no one in the English-speaking world could match. He had been the instrument of a significant local revival in Northampton, Massachusetts, in 1735, and his account of that revival — published in his famous Narrative — had circulated widely and had prepared many in New England for the possibility that God might move in large and dramatic ways. When I arrived, Edwards received me with a warmth and a humility that was entirely characteristic of the man.
I preached at Northampton, in Edwards's own church, and something happened there that I have never been able to describe without emotion. Edwards himself wept. This was not a man given to displays of sentiment — he was, by nature and by discipline, a careful, measured, intellectually rigorous man who had spent his whole adult life training his mind to see clearly and his emotions to follow only where truth led. But as I preached the new birth and the free mercy of Jesus Christ to his congregation, he sat in his pew with tears running down his face. Not from any artifice or emotional manipulation — there was none in my preaching — but from the sheer, overwhelming reality of what he knew to be true and was hearing proclaimed with a directness and urgency that matched the weight of the truth itself.
Edwards and I talked at length during my stay in Northampton. Our theological perspectives aligned closely — we were both Reformed, both convinced of the sovereignty of God in salvation, both deeply committed to the necessity of genuine, experiential conversion as the only valid foundation for Christian life. But we were very different men. Edwards was a scholar, a systematic thinker, a man who would go on to write the greatest treatise on the freedom of the will in the English language and the most careful analysis of genuine religious affections that anyone had yet produced. I was a preacher — a man of the open air, of the spoken word, of the immediate moment of encounter between a living Gospel and a living soul. We complemented each other in ways that I think only God could have arranged, and our mutual regard in those Northampton days was one of the most sustaining relationships of my American ministry.
I asked Edwards, at one point, how he accounted for the unusual readiness of the American congregations to respond to the Gospel. His answer was characteristic — measured, theologically grounded, and deeply wise. He spoke of God's sovereignty in choosing the times and places of revival. He spoke of the particular hungers that life in a new world, a world being built from scratch with all its attendant insecurities and uncertainties, created in human souls. And he spoke of prayer — the decades of faithful intercessory prayer that godly men and women in New England had been offering, often without seeing any particular fruit, for the spiritual awakening of their communities. (James 5:16 KJV): "The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much." Those prayers had been availing. They had been accumulating in the treasury of God's purposes, and the time had come for the answer to break through. I was not the cause of the Great Awakening. I was one of the instruments through which the answer to decades of faithful prayer was being poured out. That thought humbled me then, and it humbles me still.
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Boston and the Commons: A Nation Stirred
Boston was the crown of the New England tour, and what happened there surpassed everything that had preceded it. Boston in 1740 was the largest and most culturally sophisticated city in the American colonies — a city with a long history of Puritan theological seriousness, a city full of educated clergy and educated laypeople who were perfectly capable of engaging a preacher on intellectual as well as spiritual terms. It was not a city that could be easily moved by mere emotion or theatrical performance. And it was not moved by either of those things. It was moved by the Gospel.
The meetings at Boston Commons drew crowds so large that they became dangerous in their very size. I preached on the Common — that great open space in the heart of the city — and the crowds that assembled stretched back so far that those at the edges could barely hear. In one notorious incident, the crush of people pressing forward to hear became so severe that several people were killed in the press — not from any violence, but from the sheer desperation of thousands of souls simultaneously trying to get close enough to hear a word they felt, in their bones, was the most important word they had ever had the opportunity to hear. That fact alone — that people died trying to get within earshot of a sermon — tells you something about the spiritual atmosphere of New England in the autumn of 1740 that no statistical account can fully convey.
I preached six times in Boston in the course of a few days, and the cumulative effect on the city was visible and palpable. Ministers who had been suspicious of me before I arrived came to the meetings and stayed, and several of them wrote to me afterward with the confession that what they had witnessed had changed their understanding of what preaching could and should be. Laypeople who had been nominal Christians for twenty years came forward in tears and sought counsel. Some who had been openly skeptical — men of the Franklin type, educated and self-sufficient, comfortable with their skepticism — found themselves undone.
I estimated that approximately eighty percent of the colonial population heard me preach during those years — a figure that is staggering even by modern standards, when a preacher with radio and television and internet can reach comparable percentages. I had none of those tools. I had a voice, a horse, and the uncontainable momentum of a Spirit-filled revival. And God moved through those simple instruments with a power and a reach that no amount of modern technology can replicate, because technology can distribute words but only the Holy Spirit can carry them into the depths of a human heart and make them live.
Approximately eighty percent. Think about what that means. In a nation — not yet a nation, but a cluster of colonies on their way to becoming one — with a total population of perhaps one and a half million people, something in the neighborhood of one million two hundred thousand souls had heard the Gospel preached with the full force of the Spirit's anointing. They had heard, at minimum, that Jesus Christ is Lord, that every soul stands in need of regeneration, and that the door of mercy stands open to all who will come. The seed had been sown at a depth and on a scale that had no precedent in American history. (Romans 10:17 KJV): "So then faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God." A continent had heard. What the harvest would look like in the decades and centuries that followed — the revivals, the denominations, the missionary movements, the individual lives transformed — only eternity will fully reveal.
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The Preaching That Changed a People: What Was Actually Said
I want to pause here and give you a more detailed account of what the preaching actually contained in those American meetings, because the effect was inseparable from the content, and I want you to understand not merely that people were moved but why they were moved, and by what.
Every sermon I preached in America, as in England, had the new birth at its center. I was not willing to preach anything else as the primary message, because nothing else was primary. The question of whether a soul had been genuinely regenerated by the Holy Spirit of God — whether it had experienced that fundamental transformation of nature that Scougal had described and that I had experienced in my Oxford room — was, I was absolutely convinced, the most important question any human being could face. Everything else — moral improvement, social respectability, doctrinal knowledge, religious activity — was secondary at best and dangerously misleading at worst, when it was substituted for the real thing.
I preached what I called the three stages of the soul's journey toward God. First, conviction of sin — the genuine, Spirit-worked awakening of a soul to the reality of its own condition before a holy God. Not a vague feeling of unease or moral regret, but the specific, particular recognition of what sin is, what it deserves, and what it has done to the relationship between the soul and its Maker. I pressed this hard in every sermon, because I had found that the greatest obstacle to genuine conversion was not wickedness but comfort — the comfortable assumption that one was, on the whole, a decent enough person, that God was not particularly displeased with one, and that whatever adjustments might eventually be needed could safely be deferred to a more convenient season.
Second, I preached justification — the great Reformation doctrine that a sinful soul is declared righteous before God not on the basis of its own merit or moral performance but on the basis of the righteousness of Jesus Christ, imputed to the believer through faith alone. This was the heart of the Gospel, the article on which the Church stands or falls. I did not preach it coldly or abstractly. I preached it with the urgency of a man who had once been lost and had been found — who knew from the inside of his own experience what it felt like to be on the wrong side of the gap between human sinfulness and divine holiness, and what it felt like when that gap was bridged by grace alone.
Third, I preached the new birth itself — the necessity and the nature of genuine regeneration. Here I drew on Scougal and on my own experience and on the full weight of the New Testament's witness to the transforming power of the Holy Spirit. I told people that God was not interested in cosmetic improvements. He was not in the business of making bad people better. He was in the business of making dead people alive — and that the evidence of that new life, when it was real, was unmistakable: a changed orientation of desire, a genuine love for God and for other people, a hunger for His Word and His presence, and an obedience that was not the reluctant performance of duty but the natural fruit of a heart that had been remade.
I was unflinching about the conditional nature of salvation. I told every American audience, as I told every English audience, that God's grace was free but not forced, that the invitation was universal but the response was required. (Acts 17:30 KJV): "And the times of this ignorance God winked at; but now commandeth all men every where to repent." Commandeth. Not suggests. Not invites. Commands. The Gospel is not an offer to be politely considered and filed away for future reference. It is a royal command from the King of the universe — repent and believe, now, while there is still time. I pressed that urgency in every sermon. I pressed it because I believed it, not as an abstract doctrine but as an immediate and pressing reality. Every person in every crowd I addressed was one breath away from eternity. The urgency was not manufactured. It was simply honest.
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Reaching Across Every Line
One of the most remarkable and, to my mind, most beautiful aspects of the Great Awakening in America was the way in which the Gospel refused to respect the social and racial lines that the colonial world had drawn so carefully and maintained so defensively. I preached to everyone. Not as a policy, not as a deliberate social statement, but simply because the Gospel is for everyone — because Jesus Christ died for every soul regardless of its color, its social standing, its education, its gender, or its legal status. That conviction was not complicated for me. It came directly from the Word of God, and I held it without apology.
I preached to enslaved people, and they came to the meetings in numbers that surprised even the colonial whites who organized those meetings. I saw enslaved men and women weep at the Gospel in exactly the same way I had seen English coal miners weep at it — with the tears of people who have suddenly been told that they matter, that the God of the universe sees them and loves them and sent His Son to die for them specifically, that their souls are of infinite worth regardless of what their masters or the law of the land might say about the worth of their bodies. I did not regard people of darker color as inferior in any way, and I made no secret of that conviction. The image of God in which all human beings are made does not come in grades of quality. Every soul bears it equally.
I also preached to Native Americans wherever I had opportunity, and to the German-speaking settlers of Pennsylvania who had come to the new world from the Reformed traditions of the Continent and who responded to a Gospel that was clearly grounded in the same Reformed theological heritage their own communities honored. I preached to the wealthy and the destitute, to the educated and the illiterate, to the old and to the young. I preached, on one occasion, to a man who had come to the meeting specifically to heckle me and found himself on his knees instead. The Gospel makes no apologies about the company it keeps.
The trans-denominational character of my American ministry was also something entirely new in that world, and it became one of its most lasting legacies. I was an ordained Anglican minister, but I preached in Presbyterian churches and Congregational meeting houses and Reformed chapels and open fields where no denomination had any particular claim. I cared only about one thing: whether the people before me knew Jesus Christ. If they did, they were my brothers and sisters regardless of what name was on the door of their building. If they did not, they were my mission field regardless of their theological labels.
I wrote to a Scottish minister in those American years about what I called a "catholic spirit" — not Roman Catholic, but catholic in the original sense of universal, embracing all genuine believers across every denominational line. I told him that "if I see a man who loves the LORD JESUS in sincerity, I am not very solicitous to what outward communion he belongs. The kingdom of GOD does not consist in any such thing." That conviction — that genuine faith in Jesus Christ is the one essential thing, and everything else is secondary — was not theological compromise. It was simple obedience to the prayer of Jesus Himself in (John 17:21 KJV): "That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us: that the world may believe that thou hast sent me." The unity of genuine believers in Christ was not a political goal for me. It was a Gospel witness. When the world sees Christians who genuinely love each other across the lines of denomination and tradition and background, it sees evidence that what we preach is real. That testimony mattered to me then, and it matters still.
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The Political Seed: How the Awakening Shaped a Revolution
I did not go to America to start a revolution. I went to America to preach the Gospel. But the Gospel, when it does its work in a community, has consequences that extend far beyond the individual soul — and the consequences of the Great Awakening in colonial America were, in retrospect, among the most politically transformative in human history.
Here is what I observed, and what thoughtful men and women in those colonies observed alongside me: when a people is told, with the full authority of Scripture and the full force of Spirit-empowered proclamation, that every soul is equal before God — that the coal miner and the plantation owner, the enslaved and the free, the educated and the unlettered, all stand on exactly the same ground at the foot of the cross — something happens to their understanding of human dignity and human authority that does not stop at the church door.
I watched it happen. I watched the language of the revival — liberty, equality, the individual soul's direct access to God without the mediation of priests or bishops or magistrates — migrate from the religious sphere into the political. I watched colonial preachers begin to speak of liberty and justice and individual rights in terms that drew directly on the theology of the Awakening. The idea that no human institution, no human authority, had the right to stand between an individual soul and its Creator — that idea, once planted in the minds of a million people, becomes a very powerful argument against the authority of a king who rules from three thousand miles away.
I do not claim that I intended any of this. I was preaching the Gospel, not drafting a political philosophy. But I have always believed that God, who works all things together for the accomplishment of His purposes, was doing something in those colonial years that was larger than any of us could see. He was not merely saving individual souls — though He was doing that, and no other work could be more important. He was also shaping a people and a culture and a political imagination that would, within a generation, produce the most remarkable experiment in self-governance the modern world had ever seen. The American Revolution did not come from nowhere. It came, in significant part, from the theological seed that was planted in those revival years — the seed of human dignity, individual conscience, and the irreducible worth of every soul before God.
Approximately eighty percent of the colonial population heard Whitefield preach. The battle cry of the Revolution — "No king but King Jesus" — did not arise in a vacuum. It arose from a people who had been told, again and again, by the most famous voice in the colonies, that Jesus Christ is Lord of every soul and that no earthly power has the right to usurp that Lordship. (Acts 5:29 KJV): "We ought to obey God rather than men." That principle, carried out of the revival meetings and into the political imagination of a generation, lit a fire that seven years of war would not extinguish. I am not a revolutionary. I am a preacher of the Gospel. But I serve a King whose kingdom includes all others, and when His people have truly understood that, the implications for every other kind of kingship have always been profound.
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Education, Institutions, and the Lasting Infrastructure of Revival
The Great Awakening did not merely change individual souls — though that was its primary and most important work. It also built institutions, and those institutions became part of the lasting infrastructure of American spiritual and intellectual life.
I raised funds during my American tours for institutions that are still thriving today. I helped raise money for what would become Princeton University — then the College of New Jersey, founded in significant part as a training ground for ministers who could sustain the revival's fruit in the next generation. I promoted the development of Dartmouth College as a school with an explicit mission to Native Americans. I took up collections for the victims of fires and floods and other disasters in communities I visited. I helped create networks of correspondence and mutual support among ministers of different denominations who had been shaped by the Awakening and who wanted to keep its fires burning.
My friend Benjamin Franklin took over premises that I had purchased in Philadelphia and founded on that site a college that would eventually become the University of Pennsylvania. Franklin and I had very different philosophies about education — he was a thoroughgoing pragmatist and I was a man of the Gospel — but we both believed that the formation of the mind mattered, and we were both willing to put significant resources toward making education accessible in a new world that was building its institutions from scratch.
I also helped reshape the denominational landscape of colonial America in ways that are still visible today. The Great Awakening strengthened the Baptist and Methodist denominations enormously — denominations that were more flexible in their polity, more open to lay participation, more willing to follow the revival wherever it led, than the older Congregational and Anglican establishments. It reshaped the Presbyterian church and the Dutch and German Reformed denominations. It created new fellowships and new networks that crossed the old boundaries and established the pattern of voluntary, interdenominational, experience-centered Christianity that has been the dominant form of American evangelical faith ever since.
When I think about those years — the miles covered, the sermons preached, the souls reached, the institutions begun — I am overwhelmed, not with any sense of personal accomplishment, but with awe at what God can do through one willing, flawed, ordinary human being when he says yes to the calling and refuses to stop. (1 Corinthians 15:10 KJV): "But by the grace of God I am what I am: and his grace which was bestowed upon me was not in vain; but I laboured more abundantly than they all: yet not I, but the grace of God which was with me." Not I. The grace of God which was with me. That is the only honest accounting of those colonial years. Whatever was accomplished — and something was accomplished, something large and lasting and still echoing in the spiritual identity of a nation — it was the grace of God, working through a voice, working through a message, working through the unstoppable momentum of the Holy Spirit poured out on a people that was ready to receive Him.
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The Sermon That Became a Movement: On the New Birth
Among all the sermons I preached in America — and there were hundreds of them across those years — one above all others became the signature of my ministry and the theological heart of the Great Awakening. It was titled On the Necessity and Nature of our New Birth in Christ Jesus, in Order to Salvation, and it was the sermon that had first electrified London audiences in 1737 and that I carried with me across the Atlantic like a torch that refused to go out in the wind.
I want to walk you through the essential substance of that sermon here, because it was not simply one sermon among many. It was my theological statement — my declaration of what the Gospel requires and what it promises — and understanding it is understanding everything about the Great Awakening. Every crowd that gathered in every city and every field of colonial America heard, in one form or another, the essential content of this message. It was the word that God chose to use to shake a continent.
I began by establishing the universality of the problem. I asked my audiences to consider the condition of the human race after the Fall — not as a distant theological abstraction but as the immediate, present reality of every person standing before me. By nature, every human being is born spiritually dead — not ill, not damaged, not impaired, but dead. Dead to God. Deaf to the voice of the Spirit. Blind to the realities of eternity. Alive in every physical and intellectual sense, but utterly without the divine life that alone can satisfy the deepest hunger of the soul or prepare it for the presence of a holy God. This was not my opinion. This was the teaching of Jesus Himself, of Paul, of every apostolic voice in the New Testament. The diagnosis was not encouraging, but it was honest — and honest diagnoses, however uncomfortable, are the only diagnoses that can lead to genuine treatment.
From the diagnosis I moved to the prescription. The new birth — what Jesus described to Nicodemus as being born again of water and of Spirit — is not an experience reserved for the especially devout or the particularly broken. It is not the next step on a religious ladder that the basically decent person can eventually climb. It is the first step. It is the only foundation. Without it, all subsequent religious activity is built on sand. With it, even the most stumbling and imperfect faith has a foundation that no storm can undermine. The new birth is God's work in the soul of a person who has come to the end of their own resources and opened themselves, in genuine repentance and genuine faith, to the transforming power of the Holy Spirit.
I pressed the application hard. I asked my audiences — I ask you, reading these pages now — to consider not what they believed about the new birth but whether they had experienced it. Not whether they had been baptized. Not whether they attended church. Not whether they were decent people who had avoided the grosser sins. Whether they had been born again. Whether the life of God was genuinely present and active in their souls. Whether, if they were honest with themselves in the silence of their own hearts, they knew the living Jesus Christ in the way that a man knows his closest friend — personally, intimately, with the kind of knowledge that transforms not just the mind but the whole orientation of the person. (2 Corinthians 13:5 KJV): "Examine yourselves, whether ye be in the faith; prove your own selves. Know ye not your own selves, how that Jesus Christ is in you, except ye be reprobates?" Examine yourselves. That is what I asked every crowd in America, as I ask every reader now. Not as an exercise in morbid self-doubt, but as the most important question any human being can face. Know ye not your own selves? The tragedy of the almost-Christian is precisely that he does not know himself — does not see the gap between the form of religion he has and the life of God he lacks. Honest self-examination, in the light of God's Word and in the mercy of God's grace, is not destructive. It is the beginning of everything real.
The response to this sermon, wherever I preached it in America, was consistently and repeatedly what it had been in London — disruption. Not disruption in the sense of chaos, but disruption in the sense of something comfortable being made uncomfortable, something settled being unsettled, something asleep being woken up. People who had sat in church pews for twenty years without ever once being asked the question I was asking them now heard it, and the hearing of it was, for many of them, like the first ray of light reaching a room that had been dark for a long time. Some were frightened. Some were resistant. But many — far more than I could count, far more than I ever had any right to expect — were ready. The word fell on prepared soil, and the harvest was real.
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A Catholic Spirit: Whitefield's Vision of Christian Unity
One of the most frequently misunderstood aspects of my American ministry — and of my ministry generally — was my relationship to the various denominations and ecclesiastical structures through which the colonial religious world organized itself. Let me speak plainly about it here, because it is a matter of continuing relevance and because I want to be clearly understood.
I was an ordained minister of the Church of England. I remained so until the day I died. I honored the Anglican tradition in which I had been formed, I honored the doctrinal standards of the Thirty-Nine Articles, and I had no interest in tearing down the institutional church or leading any kind of ecclesiastical revolution. But I was equally clear about something that made many in the Anglican establishment deeply uncomfortable: the Church of England did not have a monopoly on the Holy Spirit, and genuine Christians were to be found in every denomination that held to the essentials of the faith.
When I preached in Presbyterian churches in New England and New Jersey, I was not defecting from Anglicanism. I was following the Gospel where God had prepared an audience for it. When I took offerings in Congregational meeting houses in Boston and Dutch Reformed chapels in New York, I was not endorsing every point of those denominations' polity and theology. I was recognizing that the people in those pews were, many of them, genuine believers in Jesus Christ — and that their genuine belief in Him made them my brothers and sisters in a fellowship that transcended the institutional divisions of the ecclesiastical world.
I preached this vision explicitly. I called it a "catholic spirit" — using the word in its original meaning of universal, all-embracing, not confined to one particular tradition or expression. I said publicly, and I meant it with my whole heart, that if I saw a man who loved the Lord Jesus in sincerity, I did not trouble myself much about what church building he went into on a Sunday morning. The kingdom of God does not consist in denominations or forms of worship or styles of governance. It consists in the life of God in the souls of men and women who have been born again by His Spirit and who love Him genuinely.
This was radical in 1740. The colonial religious world was deeply, sometimes bitterly, divided along denominational lines. Congregationalists distrusted Presbyterians. Presbyterians looked down on Baptists. Anglicans regarded all of them with the particular condescension of people who believed they held the authentic form of the English church. And all of them had their own internal divisions — the Old Side and the New Side Presbyterians, the various factions of the Congregational tradition, the establishment Anglicans and the evangelical Anglicans. Into this world of division and mutual suspicion I walked, preaching in everyone's pulpit, partnering with everyone who loved Jesus, and refusing to acknowledge any denominational boundary as a barrier to the Gospel.
The effect was not uniform. Many ministers and congregations welcomed the trans-denominational spirit of the Awakening with joy — it was, for them, a liberation from a narrowness that had always felt spiritually constricting. But some resisted. In Scotland, particularly, where the associate presbytery demanded that I preach only for them and subscribe to their specific ecclesiastical positions, I declined firmly and cheerfully. I told them I was willing to preach the Gospel to anyone anywhere, including in the Pope's pulpit if he would lend it to me — by which I meant only that the righteousness of Jesus Christ deserved to be proclaimed wherever human souls could hear it, and no institutional gate ought to stand between the message and the people who needed it.
There is a lesson here that I believe is as urgent in any era as it was in mine: the Gospel is bigger than any single tradition's expression of it. This does not mean all traditions are equally faithful or equally healthy — they are not. It does not mean that doctrine is unimportant — it is enormously important. It means that the one essential thing, the one mark by which Jesus said His disciples would be known, is not their denominational affiliation. It is their love for one another. (John 13:35 KJV): "By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another." When I preached in a Presbyterian church and an Anglican and a Congregational meeting house in the same week, and when the people in all three came forward in tears at the same Gospel preached by the same voice, they were demonstrating that love in the most practical possible way. They were showing the world that the thing that united them — Jesus Christ and Him crucified — was infinitely larger than the things that divided them. That demonstration, repeated ten thousand times across the colonial landscape of 1739 and 1740, was itself a proclamation of the Gospel. It was the visible proof that the message was real.
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The Fruit That Remained: Changed Lives Across the Colonies
Numbers are useful — five thousand miles covered, three hundred and fifty sermons preached, eighty percent of the colonial population reached — but numbers do not tell the full story of the Great Awakening. The full story is told in lives. Individual human lives, with names and faces and histories, that were bent in a different direction by the encounter with a living Gospel and have never been the same since.
I received letters from those colonial years for decades afterward — letters that arrived at Bethesda or were delivered to me on the road in England or Scotland from men and women who had heard me preach in Philadelphia in 1739, in Boston in 1740, in Georgia or the Carolinas or New Jersey or New York in the years that followed. They wrote to tell me what had happened to them. A man who had been a drunkard for fifteen years and who had come to one of my Philadelphia meetings, initially with no particular religious intention, and who had been so struck by the message of the new birth that he had gone home and spent the night in prayer and had not touched drink since. A woman from Boston who had been, by her own account, as cold and formal a churchgoer as New England produced, who had heard me preach on the Common and had wept for two hours and had spent the months since in what she described as the first genuine spiritual life she had ever experienced. A young man who had been preparing to enter the ministry with no particular sense of calling and who, after hearing the Awakening preaching, had gone to his knees and not risen until he knew, with certainty, that God had genuinely called him — and who went on to build one of the most effective Gospel ministries in colonial Virginia.
These were not dramatic stories in the sense of being exotic or unusual. They were the ordinary, everyday, glorious stories of what happens when the Gospel does its work in willing hearts. A man is freed from a habit that has destroyed his family and his self-respect. A woman discovers that the religion she has practiced all her life had been, until now, empty of the one thing that makes it worth practicing. A young minister finds the genuine calling that gives his whole career its foundation and its fire. Multiply those stories by the hundreds of thousands — by the approximate million people who heard the Awakening preaching and felt its effects — and you begin to understand what was actually happening in those years. God was not merely moving in revival meetings. He was rebuilding lives, one soul at a time, in the way that He has always worked and will always work when His word is faithfully proclaimed and His Spirit is free to move.
The fruit of the Great Awakening was not transient. It did not fade when the excitement of the meetings faded. It persisted — in changed individual lives, in new churches and fellowships, in educational institutions, in the political imagination of a generation, and in the spiritual DNA of a nation that would declare, less than forty years after those Awakening years, that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights. That declaration had roots, and some of its deepest roots ran through the soil of the 1740 revival. God had spoken into a continent, and the echo was still reverberating. (Psalm 19:4 KJV): "Their line is gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world." The words of the Gospel, faithfully preached, go to the ends of the earth. They go through time as well as space. They bear fruit in seasons the preacher never lives to see, in souls the preacher never knew, in a world the preacher could not have imagined. The voice that cried in the fields of colonial America has been silent for more than two centuries. But the word it carried is still alive. It is still doing its work. And it will continue until the last soul that was always meant to hear it has heard it and come home.
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A Message That Has Never Grown Old
As I traveled the length and breadth of those colonies in 1739 and 1740 and in the subsequent visits that followed across the next three decades, the message never changed. That is perhaps the most important thing I can say about the Great Awakening in America: it was not a new message. It was the oldest message in the world — the message that God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish but have everlasting life. It was the message that Peter preached on the day of Pentecost, that Paul preached in the Areopagus of Athens, that Augustine preached in North Africa and Luther nailed to the door of a German church. It is always the same message. It is always the same Gospel.
What was new in the Great Awakening was not the message but the method of its delivery, the scale of its reach, and the Spirit's sovereign choice to apply it to an entire generation with unusual power. The open-air meeting, the trans-denominational fellowship, the use of print to spread the revival's reach, the willingness to preach to anyone anywhere — these were adaptations of method to a new context. The substance did not change. You must be born again. You must come to Jesus Christ in genuine repentance and living faith. You must not settle for the almost-Christian life when the altogether-Christian life — the life of genuine transformation, genuine freedom, genuine joy in the Spirit — is available to every soul who will receive it.
That message is still true. It was true in the fields of Kingswood and the squares of Philadelphia and the Boston Commons in 1740, and it is true in whatever place and whatever year you are reading these words. The human condition has not changed. The sinfulness that separates every soul from God has not been cured by the passage of time or the advance of civilization or the accumulation of human knowledge. And the salvation that Jesus Christ accomplished at Calvary has not diminished or expired or become outdated. It is as fresh and as sufficient and as freely available today as it was on the morning of the Resurrection.
Come. That is still the word. It was the word in every field and every square of the Great Awakening years, and it is the word now. (Revelation 22:17 KJV): "And the Spirit and the bride say, Come. And let him that heareth say, Come. And let him that is athirst come. And whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely." Freely. Without price, without merit, without any qualification except the thirst itself. If you are thirsty for what the world has never been able to give you — the deep peace, the real freedom, the genuine life that your soul was made for — come to Jesus Christ and drink. The well that satisfied the Kingswood miners and the Philadelphia merchants and the Boston scholars and the ten million souls that heard this voice across thirty-five years is still full. It will never run dry. Come and drink, and live.
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The Voice of the Great Awakening
— George Whitefield —