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THE GREAT AWAKENING

What is called the "Great Awakening" in America was contemporaneous with the Methodist revival in England.

There were a large number of unchurched people. Religion had played a prominent part in the settlement of America but interest soon waned. Lack of organized churches and schools, shortage of worthy pastors, the rough frontier life, constant border warfare, and energy needed to settle a new continent had a demoralizing influence on colonial society.

But changes came. The Great Awakening was first noticed among German Mennonites, Dunkers, and Moravians in Pennsylvania. By 1726, through the revivalistic preaching of Theodore J. Frelinghuysen to the Dutch Reformed people of northern New Jersey there were numerous conversions. By 1728 the revival movement had spread to the English and Scotch Presbyterians through the preaching of Gilbert Tennant, a young Presbyterian minister of New Brunswick, New Jersey. In 1734 an awakening started among the people of Northampton, Massachusetts under the ministry of Jonathan Edwards. Edwards preached a series of sermons on justification by faith. The result was a great interest in personal religion. Within a year more than three hundred persons, nearly all the people in town above sixteen years of age, professed conversion. From Northampton the revival spread down the river and along the coast to the Middle and Southern Colonies. In Virginia it had greatest progress among the Baptists. From the Baptists it spread to the Methodists and the German Lutherans were strongly influenced. The Episcopal Church took an attitude of opposition.

The high tide of the Great Awakening came in 1740-1741 during George Whitfield's second visit. Thousands of people came to his meetings and there were many conversions. He visited the other revival preachers from the other areas and brought the various movements together. Jonathan Edwards and other New England ministers joined in the itinerant evangelistic work. Their great appeal was to fear. This is seen in the famous Edwards sermon, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" which he preached at Enfield, Connecticut in July 1741. Meetings included groans, outcries, convulsions, fainting, visions, ecstasies and unbridled denunciation of all who did not agree with the revivalists. There was a reaction against what were considered excesses and the movement lost much force and popularity. However, many important results were registered. There was a general quickening of religious life, a revival of personal religion, a large increase in church membership, and a higher general standard of morality. Missionary and benevolent enterprises were promoted in the colonies and many denominational and religious schools were founded.