Of the religion of America Whitefield writes: “I am more and more in love with the good old Puritans. I am pleased at the thought of sitting down hereafter with the venerable Cotton, Norton, Eliot, and that great cloud of witnesses who first crossed the western ocean for the sake of the sacred gospel and the faith once delivered to the saints. At present my soul is so filled that I can scarce proceed.” Again he writes: “It is too much for one man to be received as I have been by thousands. The thoughts of it lay me low but I cannot get low enough. I would willingly sink into nothing before the blessed Jesus—my all in all.” And again, “I love those that thunder out the Word. The Christian world is in a deep sleep, nothing but a loud voice can awaken them out of it. Had we a thousand hands and tongues there is employment enough for them all. People are everywhere ready to perish for lack of knowledge.” To an aged veteran he writes from North Carolina, “I am here hunting in the woods—these ungospelized wilds—for sinners. It is pleasant work, though my body is weak and crazy. But after a short fermentation in the grave, it will be fashioned like unto Christ’s glorious body. The thought of this rejoices my soul and makes me long to leap my seventy years. I sometimes think all will go to heaven before me. Pray for me as a dying man, but, oh, pray that I may not go off as a snuff. I would fain die blazing—not with human glory, but with the love of Jesus.” Such was the spirit filling the great souls of those who were God’s instruments in spreading the revival in America. Mr. Whitefield died at Newburyport, Massachusetts, Sept. 30, 1770, having preached the day before at Exeter, and his body rests in a crypt or tomb beneath the Presbyterian church at that place.
Of the effects of the Great Revival in America, Dr. Abel Stevens says, “The Congregational churches of New England, the Presbyterians and Baptists of the Middle States, and the mixed colonies of the South, owe their late religious life and energy mostly to the impulse given by his [Whitefield’s] powerful ministrations.” * * * In Pennsylvania and New Jersey, where Frelinghuysen, Blair, Rowland, and the two Tennents had been labouring with evangelistic zeal, he was received as a prophet of God, and it was then that the Presbyterian Church took that attitude of evangelical power and aggression which has ever since characterized it.
A single incident will illustrate the effect of the Revival upon unbelievers and skeptics. A noted officer of Philadelphia, who had long been almost an atheist, crept into the crowd one night to hear a sermon on the visit of Nicodemus to Christ. When he came home, his wife not knowing where he had been, wished he had heard what she had been hearing. He said nothing. Another and another of his family came in and made a similar remark till he burst into tears and said, “I have been hearing him and approve of his sermon.” He afterwards became a sincere Christian with the spirit of a martyr.
These etchings of a few scenes and fewer facts indicate the scope, the depth, and the sweep of the Great Revival of the 18th century in America. No attempt has been made to sum up its results, nor has it come within the purpose of this work to give an inward history of the movement, nor to explain the philosophy of it. These intricate questions may be left to philosophers; the Christian delights to know the facts; he will cheerfully wait for the future life to unfold all the mystery and philosophy of the plan and work of salvation. Then, as Whitefield exclaims, “What amazing mysteries will be unfolded when each link in the golden chain of providence and grace shall be seen and scanned by beatified spirits in the kingdom of heaven! Then all will appear symmetry and harmony, and even the most intricate and seemingly most contrary dispensations, will be evidenced to be the result of infinite and consummate wisdom, power, and love. Above all, there the believer will see the infinite depths of that mystery of godliness, ‘God manifested in the flesh,’ and join with that blessed choir, who, with a restless unweariedness, are ever singing the song of Moses and the Lamb.”
APPENDIX A (Pages [9] and [97]).
The Puritans were men whose minds had derived a peculiar character from the daily contemplation of superior beings and eternal interests. Not content with acknowledging, in general terms, an overruling Providence, they habitually ascribed every event to the will of the Great Being, for whose power nothing was too vast, for whose inspection nothing was too minute. To know him, to serve him, to enjoy him, was, with them, the great end of existence. They rejected, with contempt, the ceremonious homage which other sects substituted for the pure worship of the soul. Instead of catching occasional glimpses of the Deity through an obscuring veil, they aspired to gaze full on his intolerable brightness, and to commune with him face to face. Hence originated their contempt for terrestrial distinctions. The difference between the greatest and the meanest of mankind seemed to vanish, when compared with the boundless interval which separated the whole race from Him on whom their own eyes were constantly fixed. They recognized no title to superiority but His favor; and, confident of that favor, they despised all the accomplishments and all the dignities of the world. If they were unacquainted with the works of philosophers and poets, they were deeply read in the oracles of God. If their names were not found in the registers of heralds, they were recorded in the Book of Life. If their steps were not accompanied by a splendid train of menials, legions of ministering angels had charge over them. Their palaces were houses not made with hands; their diadems crowns of glory which should never fade away. On the rich and the eloquent, on nobles or priests they looked down with contempt, for they esteemed themselves rich in a more precious measure, and eloquent in a more sublime language—nobles by right of an earlier creation, and priests by the imposition of a mightier hand. The very meanest of them was a being to whose fate a mysterious and terrible importance belonged, on whose slightest action the spirits of light and darkness looked with anxious interest, who had been destined, before Heaven and earth were created, to enjoy a felicity which should continue when heaven and earth should have passed away. Events which short-sighted politicians ascribed to earthly causes, had been ordained on his account. For his sake empires had risen, and flourished, and decayed. For his sake the Almighty had proclaimed His will by the pen of the Evangelist, and the harp of the prophet. He had been wrested by no common deliverer from the grasp of no common foe. He had been ransomed by the sweat of no vulgar agony, by the blood of no earthly sacrifice. It was for him that the sun had been darkened, that the rocks had been rent, that the dead had risen, that all nature had shuddered at the sufferings of her expiring God.
Thus the Puritan was made up of two different men: the one all self-abasement, penitence, gratitude, passion; the other proud, calm, inflexible, sagacious. He prostrated himself in the dust before his Maker, but he set his foot on the neck of his king. In his devotional retirement, he prayed with convulsions, and groans and tears. He was half maddened by glorious or terrible illusions. He heard the lyres of angels or the tempting whispers of fiends. He caught a gleam of the Beatific Vision, or woke screaming from dreams of everlasting fire. Like Vane, he thought himself entrusted with the sceptre of the millennial year. Like Fleetwood, he cried in the bitterness of his soul that God had hid His face from him. But when he took his seat in the council, or girt on his sword for war, these tempestuous workings of the soul had left no perceptible trace behind them. People who saw nothing of the godly but their uncouth visages, and heard nothing from them but their groans and their whining hymns, might laugh at them. But those had little reason to laugh who encountered them in the hall of debate, or on the field of battle. These fanatics brought to civil and military affairs a coolness of judgment and an immutability of purpose which some writers have thought inconsistent with their religious zeal, but which were in fact the necessary effects of it. The intensity of their feelings on one subject made them tranquil on every other. One overpowering sentiment had subjected to itself pity and hatred, ambition and fear. Death had lost its terrors and pleasure its charms. They had their smiles and their tears, their raptures and their sorrows, but not for the things of this world. Enthusiasm had made them stoics, had cleared their minds from every vulgar passion and prejudice, and raised them above the influence of danger and of corruption. It sometimes might lead them to pursue unwise ends, but never to choose unwise means. They went through the world, like Sir Artegal’s iron man Talus with his flail, crushing and trampling down oppressors, mingling with human beings, but having neither part nor lot in human infirmities, insensible to fatigue, to pleasure, and to pain, not to be pierced by any weapon, not to be withstood by any barrier.—Macaulay’s Essay on Milton.