If the first throbbings of the coming Revival were felt in Northampton, in America, in 1734, beneath the truly awful words of the great Jonathan Edwards, it was from England it derived its sustenance, and assumed organisation and shape. The Boston Elm, a venerable tree near the centre of Boston Park, or common, whose decayed limbs are still held together by clamps or rivets of iron, while a railing defends it from rude hands, is an object as sacred to the traditions of Methodism in the United States, as is Gwennap Pit to those of Methodism in Western England. There Jesse Lee, the first founder of Methodism in New England, commenced the work in 1790, which has issued in an organisation even more extensive and gigantic than that which is associated with the Conference in England. As the United States have inherited from the mother country their language, their literature, and their principles of law, so also those great agitations of spiritual life to which we have concisely referred, crossed the Atlantic, and spread themselves with power there.[21] Footnote 21: See Chapter XIV., The Revival in the New World. It is not within our province to attempt to enumerate all the sects, each with its larger or lesser proportion of spiritual power, religious activity, and general acceptance among the people, to which the Revival gave birth;—such as the large body of the Bible Christians of the West of England; the Primitive Methodists of the North, those who called themselves the New Connection Methodists, or the United Free Church Association. All these, and others, are branches from the great central stem. Neither is it in our province to notice how the same universal agitation of religious feeling, at exactly the same time, gave birth to other forms, not regarded with so much complacency;—such as the rugged and faulty faith and following of that curious creature, William Huntington, who, singular to say, found also his best biographer in Robert Southey; or the strangely multifarious works and rationalistic development of Baron Swedenborg, which have, at least, the merit of giving a more spiritual rendering to the Christian system than that which was found in the prevalent Arianism of the period of their publication. Turn wherever we may, it is the same. There was a deeper upheaving of the religious life, and far more widely spread, than perhaps any age of the world since the time of the apostles had known before.