A History of the Episcopal Church (Third Revised Edition). Robert W. Prichard

both supporters and opponents of the Awakening, would soon begin to sing hymns.

      As the 1770s approached, members of the Church of England in North America had, on the whole, cause for thanksgiving. The Great Awakening had led to disagreements among church members but (with the formation of a separate Methodist Church still a decade off) to none of the formal divisions that marked the Old-New splits of the Congregational and Presbyterian churches. The established Church of England was losing some ground in the South to the awakened Presbyterian and Baptist congregations, but the church was growing in the middle colonies and New England. Indeed, the church was participating in a spurt of growth that doubled the number of American congregations in the four decades after 1740. Much of that expansion may have been the result of the swelling immigration to America, but it gave members of the colonial Church of England a sense of progress and growth.⁶³ This sense of security would, however, soon be shattered by events of the American Revolution.

       NOTES

1. William Howland Kenney, III, “George Whitefield and Colonial Revivalism: The Social Sources of Charismatic Authority, 1737–1770” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1966), 85; Stuart C. Henry, George Whitefield, Wayfaring Witness (New York; Abingdon Press, 1957), 200–10.

2. Sydney E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), 349–50.

3. William Stevens Perry, ed., Massachusetts, vol. 3 of Historical Collections Relating to the American Colonial Church (Hartford, 1873; reprint, New York: AMS Press, 1969), 346; George Whitefield, George Whitefield’s Journals, a new edition, ed. Iain Murray (London: Banner of Truth Trust, 1965), 457. It was in this conversation that Whitefield rejected the necessity of episcopal succession for a valid ministry.

4. Whitefield, Journals, 356; Kenney, “George Whitefield,” 68–70, 89–91.

5. Perry, Virginia, vol. 1 of Historical Collections, 364.

6. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Alexander Campbell Fraser, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1894), 1:5.

7. Eighteenth-century Congregational clergyman Jonathan Edwards defined affections as “the more vigorous and sensible exercises of the inclination and will,” which were “the springs which set us to work in all the affairs of life, and stimulate us in all our pursuits, especially in all affairs pursued with vigor.” While Edwards noted that “all affections have in some respects or degree an effect on the body,” he distinguished the affections from such bodily sensations (pp. 57–61). In contemporary English, “deep personal conviction” conveys something of the same meaning that “affection” conveyed to eighteenth-century English speakers. See Jonathan Edwards, A Treatise on Religious Affections (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1982), 12, 17, 57–61.

8. Harry S. Stout, The New England Soul (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 187.

9. There were multiple intermediate steps between acknowledging one’s inability to gain salvation and “laying hold of Christ,” which generally involved alternation between doubt in the possibility of salvation and increasing confidence in Christ. In the following century Episcopal theologian Daniel R. Goodwin of the Philadelphia Divinity School would list eight different ways of understanding these intermediate steps. See Daniel R. Goodwin, Syllabus of Lectures on Systematic Divinity, on Apologetics, and on the Canon, Inspiration, and Sufficiency of Holy Scripture (Philadelphia: Caxton Press, 1875), 131–32.

10. Whitefield, Journals, 37–38.

11. Henry, George Whitefield, Wayfaring Witness, 24.

12. J.C. Ryle, “George Whitefield and His Ministry,” in Select Sermons of George Whitefield with an account of his life by J.C. Ryle and a summary of his doctrine by R. Elliot (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1985), 13–17.

13. Ryle, “George Whitefield,” 18 and 27.

14. George Whitefield, Select Sermons of George Whitefield, 85.

15. Whitefield used the Jeremiah passage as the basis for his oft delivered sermon titled, “The Method of Grace.” See Whitefield, Select Sermons, 75–95 or John Gillies, Memoirs of the Rev. George Whitefield, rev. and cor. (New Haven: Whitemore and Buckingham, 1934), 473–88.

16. For a discussion of legal fear, see Stephen R. Yarbrough and John C. Adams, Delightful Conviction: Jonathan Edwards and the Rhetoric of Conversion (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1993), 7–10. Yarbrough and Adams note wide agreement among evangelical Americans on the importance of legal fear by the end of the 17th century but suggest that Jonathan Edwards placed less emphasis on the concept than did some other preachers of the era. Charles Wesley recognized the term as descriptive of Whitefield’s teaching and used it as an elegy that he wrote on the death of the evangelist: “Fruits of repentance first, and legal fear/they now the genuine marks of grace appear.” See: George Osborn (ed.), The Poetical Works of John and Charles Wesley, 10 vols. (London: Wesleyan-Methodist Conference Office, 1870), 7:428. [emphasis added].

17. George Whitefield, Sermons on Important Subjects; by the Rev. George Whitefield, A. M. with a memoir of the author by Samuel Drew and a Dissertation on his Character, Preaching, etc. by the Rev. Joseph Smith (London: Thomas Tegg, & Son, 1836), 735–36.

18. Whitefield, Sermons on Important Subjects, 735–36.

19. Howard A. Snyder, The Radical Wesley (Downer’s Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1981), 14–16.

20. Henry D. Rack, Reasonable Enthusiast: John Wesley and the Rise of Methodism (Philadelphia: Trinity Press International, 1989), 85, 186.

21. Williston Walker, Richard Norris, David Lotz, and Robert Handy, A History of the Christian Church, 4th ed. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1985), 602–3.

22. Historian Perry Miller first suggested in a 1935 essay that Jonathan Edwards and other New England New Light clergy rejected covenant theology. That claim has been the subject of a continuing debate. For Miller’s essay, see “The Marrow of Puritan Divinity,” in Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1956). For