the churches of New England or the tenure of their pas

tors.

"At the same time I desire to be humbled and ask public pardon for any rash words I have dropped or anything I have written or done amiss," he concluded, with a plea for forgiveness even as he also had already forgiven.

Harvard eventually was won over to the Whitefield of maturer years. In 1768, responding to Whitefield's gift of a new edition of his journals and raising of contributions for books to replace the library burned in Harvard Hall, President Holyoke and the Fellows of Harvard College voted that "the thanks of the Corporation be given to the Rev. Mr. Whitefield for these instances of candour and generosity."

Whitefield's star was not dimmed for long. And the revival to which he gave his life survived the backfires and left a permanent impress upon the religious, educational, social and political life of America. Parish despotism was ended with the evolving of the individual conscience and its self-assertion. The change in lives brought about by conversion became something to be reckoned with as a source of public reformation as well as the peculiar reliance of evangelical faith in the new nation about to be born.

In the twenty years following 1740, probably fifty thousand members were added to the churches of New England alone. This takes on significance when it is remembered that the population of this corner of the country was then about two hundred and fifty thousand to three hundred thousand. Throughout the Colonies hundreds of new churches were established, some of them Congregational, some Presbyterian, some Baptist, some "separatist" that afterward became Baptist, and some known as

"societies" that were to be the springs of Methodism. The very word of Whitefield's death converted Benjamin Randall, the sailor who went from deck to pulpit and founded the Free Will Baptist Church.

Princeton University and Dartmouth College can be dated from the revival and they with Harvard and Yale were quickened by a spirit of tolerance and liberty of conscience. Religious convictions permeated the entire body politic and implanted the moral strength that carried the country through the Revolution. The Great Awakening was indeed the leaven of American independ

ence.

B

CHAPTER VII

THE WESLEYAN APOSTLES

A charge to keep I have,

A God to glorify;

A never-dying soul to save,
And fit it for the sky.

CHARLES Wesley.

ORN in the revival of religion it initiated among

the English-speaking peoples and dedicated to the perpetuation of this veritable new Reformation through its own manner of functioning ever afterward, Wesleyan Methodism was destined to be a vitalizing yet stabilizing force in the nineteenth-century democracy of Britain and America. Its power was to be felt in the social, industrial and political evolution and its strength was to be found on the side of individual freedom as well as individual responsibility to man and God.

John Wesley drew the spark in experiencing his own conversion on May 24, 1738. Then he knew why he had failed as a preacher to the Indians on his only voyage to America. And then he predicated Methodism upon personal conversion and made it the concern of every Methodist to be a saver of other souls besides his own. The Gospel to Methodists became "a living oracle making very real the relations of the personal soul to the personal God."

Necessarily this exaltation of the individual in the sight

of his God invoked an intense current of emotion. In early Methodism the depth of feeling caused bodily tremors, convulsive throes, utter inertness; groans, tearful cries, victorious shouts. Men and women addressed themselves to God Himself and believed they sensed reply. As Wesley's ministry progressed, these violent manifestations subsided though they were to reappear spontaneously on the American frontier in the decade after his death. He preferred not to condemn them altogether nor yet to regard them as if essential.

Such emotion marks the transition of a life crisis. With or without external indication, it is characteristic of all evangelism, in the individual and in the mass. John Wesley's own conversion is perhaps the best illustration of what this means in Methodism.

Wesley had been Methodistic since his association in November, 1729, with that group which derisive Oxonians called the "Holy Club," originated by his brother Charles and enrolling such memorable names as those of George Whitefield, Robert Kirkham, William Morgan and James Hervey. But it was not till he met Peter Bohler, the ardent Moravian, in the Winter of 1738, that John Wesley, though a priest of the Church of England, was "convinced of unbelief, of want of that faith whereby alone we are saved."

What Wesley meant was that his faith in God hitherto had been incomplete in not comprising a sense of pardon for sin, the evangelical promise of free justification or grace through the mediation of Christ. He felt that he ought to cease preaching, but Bohler told him to preach faith till he got it "and then because you have it you will preach faith."

Wesley went out and preached that for which his own

heart hungered and thirsted most. His Church denied him its pulpits, but he went down to Fetter Lane. He closed his prayerbook and broke into extempore supplication as the months slipped by. In the midst of his pleading for greater faith it was borne in upon his burdened mind that "he that believeth is passed from death unto life-believe and thou shalt be saved, for God so loved the world—.”

Then came his hour. He marked it. It was quarter to nine on the evening of Wednesday, May 24, 1738. The place was the meeting house of the Methodist society in Aldersgate Street where the leader was reading Luther's preface to the Epistle to the Romans describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ. "I felt my heart strangely warmed," Wesley said of his experience. "I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone for salvation; an assurance was given me that He had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death!

"I began to pray with all my might for those who had persecuted me. I then testified openly to all here what now I first felt in my heart."

Examining himself in respect to the change wrought in him, Wesley declared himself "a new creature," new in his judgments of himself, of happiness, of holiness; new in his designs "not to indulge the desires of the flesh but to have the life of God again planted in the soul"; new in his desires and inclinations, love, joy and hope, even sorrow and fear, "all pointing heavenward"; new in his conversation and actions, the whole tenor of his life "singly pointing to the glory of God." And he concludes: "I trust that I am reconciled to God through His Son."

Behold a "new man in a new world" fired with a love for God which immediately manifests itself in love for