The Great Awakening

Jonathan Edwards was the third minister of Northampton in Massachusetts and the grandson of his predecessor, Mr Stoddard. In a letter of 1736 he described what had happened in his congregation. In 1734 there was alarm in the region about Arminianism, and things were said from the pulpit about justification by faith alone. “And then it was, in the latter part of December, that the Spirit of God began extraordinarily to set in”: five or six people were converted one after another. In the spring and summer of 1735 “the town seemed to be full of the presence of God”. The same concern appeared in neighbouring towns. Edwards hoped that more than three hundred people in Northampton had been converted in half a year (Edwards, Faithful Narrative section 1).

From the latter part of May 1735 the work slackened; a respected townsman, of a family prone to melancholy, cut his own throat, and two people in other towns were “led away with strange enthusiastic delusions” (Edwards, Faithful Narrative section 3, close). The letter was printed with a preface by Isaac Watts and John Guyse (Edwards, Faithful Narrative preface of the first editors).

In the autumn of 1740 the itinerant preacher George Whitefield toured New England. At Boston on 20 September he preached, by his own count, to about 6,000 in a meeting-house and then to about 8,000 on the Common (Whitefield, Journal seventh journal, p. 28), and on 12 October he gave his farewell sermon there to a crowd he put at nearly thirty thousand (Whitefield, Journal seventh journal, p. 43). On 17 October he came to Northampton and over three days held four meetings in Edwards’s church; “Mr. Edwards wept during the whole Time of Exercise”, he noted (Whitefield, Journal seventh journal, pp. 47–49). On 8 July 1741 Edwards preached at Enfield the sermon printed as Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. Its doctrine is that “there is nothing that keeps wicked men at any one moment out of hell, but the mere pleasure of God”, and it closes by urging the hearers to come to Christ while the door of mercy stands open (Edwards, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God heading, doctrine and close).

Others judged differently. Charles Chauncy, pastor of the First Church in Boston, published Seasonable Thoughts on the State of Religion in New-England in 1743 (Chauncy, Seasonable Thoughts title page). He wrote that itinerant preaching had begun in those parts with Whitefield and that he could see no warrant in Scripture or reason for a man’s preaching from parish to parish where the gospel was already preached (Chauncy, Seasonable Thoughts Part I, p. 36). He listed the swoonings, the “bitter Shriekings and Screamings” and the “Convulsion-like Tremblings and Agitations” that went with the preaching (Chauncy, Seasonable Thoughts Part I, p. 77). A good number, he trusted, had been truly wrought upon by the Spirit of God, but in a far greater number he took the terrors to be “a mechanical Impression on animal Nature”, produced by “awful Words and frightful Gestures” (Chauncy, Seasonable Thoughts Part I, pp. 80–81).

See also John Wesley and the Rise of Methodism.