Situated as we are now, amidst the movements and agitations of uncertain seas of thought, wondering as to the future, with strong adjurations on every hand to renounce the Word of Life, and to trust ourselves to the filmy rationalism of modern speculation; while we feel that for the future, and for those seas over which we look there are no tide-tables, we may, at least, safely affirm this, that the Bible carries us beyond the highest water-mark; that, as societies have constructed themselves out of its principles they have built safely, not only for eternal hope, but for human and social happiness also; and we may safely ask human thought—which, unaided and unenlightened by revelation, has had a pretty fair field for the exercise and display of its power in the history of the world—to show to us a single chapter in all the ages of its history, which has effected so much for human, spiritual, intellectual, and social well-being, as that which records the results of the Great Revival of the Last Century. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER XIV THE REVIVAL IN THE NEW WORLD. [BY THE EDITOR.] The labours of Whitefield had a remarkable influence upon the extension of the Great Revival in the colonies of America. In these days of mammoth steamships and rapid railways, equipped with drawing-room coaches, travelling has become a pleasant pastime; but a century and a half ago, when the sailing vessel and the old lumbering stage-coach were the most rapid and the chief means of public conveyance, and when these were often uncertain and irregular, subjecting the traveller to frequent and annoying delays, if not disappointments, it must have been a formidable undertaking to cross the Atlantic and to journey through a new country, almost a wilderness, such long distances as from Georgia to Massachusetts. Yet Whitefield, with a zeal and a holy desire in “hunting for souls,” made seven visits to America, crossing the ocean in sailing-vessels thirteen times (“one voyage lasting eleven weeks”), and travelled on his preaching tours almost constantly. In one of these visits he went upwards of 1,100 miles through this then sparsely settled country, and endured hardships and exposures from which a far stronger and more vigorous constitution might well shrink.