of confusion and disturbance occasioned by him: the division of families, neighbourhoods and towns, the contrariety of husbands and wives, the undutifulness of children and servants, the quarrels among teachers, the disorders of the night, the intermission of labour and business, the neglect of husbandry and of gathering the harvest.

"Our presses are forever teeming with books and our women with bastards, though regeneration and conversion is the whole cry.

"The teachers have, many of them, left their particular cures and strolled about the country. Some have been ordained by them Evangelizers and their Armour-bearers and Exhorters; and in many conventicles and places of rendezvous there has been checkered work indeed, several preaching and several exhorting and praying at the same time, the rest crying or laughing, yelping, sprawling, fainting, and this revel maintained in some places many days and nights together without intermission; and then there were the blessed outpourings of the Spirit!

"When Mr. Whitefield first arrived here the whole town was alarmed. He made his first visit to church on a Friday and conversed first with many of our clergy together, and belied them, me especially, when he had done. Being not invited into our pulpits, the Dissenters were highly pleased and engrossed him; and immediately the bells rung and all hands went to lecture; and this show kept up all the while he was here.

"After him came one Tennent, a monster! impudent and noisy, and told them all they were dam'd, dam'd, dam'd; this charmed them, and in the most dreadful Winter I ever saw people wallowed in the snow night and day for the benefit of his beastly brayings, and many ended their days under these fatigues.

"Both of them [Whitefield and Tennent] carried more money out of these parts than the poor could be thankful for.

"All this turned to the growth of the Church in many places, and its reputation universally; and it suffers no otherwise than as religion in general does, and that is sadly enough."

To all of these accusations Whitefield gave answer, not in a spirit of controversy but with a sincere desire to rectify error and repair injury as a matter of common justice. "Wild fire will necessarily blend itself with the pure fire that comes from God's altar," he said. Admitting "unguarded expressions in the heat of less experienced youth," he ventured that he had "Peter-like cut off too many ears." Still, he insisted that a "pure divine power” had been "transforming people's hearts" despite "some occasions of offence" as he preached up and down the country.

Replying directly to Dr. Chauncy, Whitefield said that he came by invitation or he would never have seen New England, conceded that his judging of unconverted ministers was too inclusive and flatly denied any design to alienate the people from their pastors.

Defending himself against the Harvard charges, he regretted publishing to the world the sins of the colleges but asked if at that time there was not a "declension of religion" in them. He upheld his itinerating as coming under divine command through Scripture and his extempore preaching as not being neglectful of study. (His epitaph credits him with eighteen thousand sermons.) He refused to be held accountable for the "hot men" who came after him and, declaring himself a preacher of the ancient Puritan doctrines, disavowed any intention to meddle with

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