A History of American ChristianityBacon, Leonard Woolsey
Religion
A History of American Christianity
Bacon, Leonard Woolsey
United States -- Church history; United States -- Religion
As in the middle colonies, the revival had brought division in New
England. But, after the New England fashion, it was division merely into
ways of thinking, not into sects. Central in the agitated scene is the
calm figure of Edwards, uniting the faith and zeal of an apostle with
the acuteness of a philosopher, and applying the exquisite powers of his
intellect to discriminate between a divine work and its human or Satanic
admixtures, and between true and spurious religious affections. He won
the blessing of the peacemaker. When half a generation had passed there
had not ceased, indeed, to be differences of opinion, but there was none
left to defend the wild extravagances which the very authors of them
lamented, and there was none to deny, in face of the rich and enduring
fruits of the revival, that the power of God had been present in it. In
the twenty years ending in 1760 the number of the New England churches
had been increased by one hundred and fifty.[172:1]
In the middle colonies there had been like progress. The Presbyterian
ministry had increased from forty-five to more than a hundred; and the
increase had been wholly on the "New Side." An early move of the
conservative party, to require a degree from a British or a New England
college as a condition of license to preach, was promptly recognized as
intended to exclude the fervid students from the Log College. It was met
by the organization of Princeton College, whose influence, more New
Englandish than New England, directed by a succession of illustrious
Yale graduates in full sympathy with the advanced theology of the
revival, was counted on to withstand the more cautious orthodoxy of
Yale. In this and other ways the Presbyterian schism fell out to the
furtherance of the gospel.
In Virginia the quickening was as when the wind breathed in the valley
of dry bones. The story of Samuel Morris and his unconscious mission,
although authentic fact, belongs with the very romance of
evangelism.[173:1] Whitefield and "One-eyed Robinson," and at last
Samuel Davies, came to his aid. The deadly exclusiveness of the inert
Virginia establishment was broken up, and the gospel had free course.
The Presbyterian Church, which had at first been looked on as an exotic
sect that might be tolerated out on the western frontier, after a brief
struggle with the Act of Uniformity maintained its right to live and
struck vigorous root in the soil. The effect of the Awakening was felt
in the establishment itself. Devereux Jarratt, a convert of the revival,
went to England for ordination, and returned to labor for the
resuscitation of the Episcopal Church in his native State. "To him, and
such as he, the first workings of the renewed energy of the church in
Virginia are to be traced."[173:2]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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