In the 1763 British political cartoon to the right, “Dr. Although his hands are raised in exultation or entreaty, he does not look particularly roused or rousing. In the 1774 portrait of George Whitefield by engraver Elisha Gallaudet (a), Whitefield appears with a gentle expression on his face. The glittering sword is whet, and held over them, and the pit hath opened her mouth under them.” Edwards’s revival spread along the Connecticut River Valley, and news of the event spread rapidly through the frequent reprinting of his famous sermon. One passage reads: “The wrath of God burns against them, their damnation don’t slumber, the pit is prepared, the fire is made ready, the furnace is now hot, ready to receive them, the flames do now rage and glow. Edwards’s best-known sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” used powerful word imagery to describe the terrors of hell and the possibilities of avoiding damnation by personal conversion ( ).
In Northampton, Massachusetts, Jonathan Edwards led still another explosion of evangelical fervor. New Lights also founded colleges in Rhode Island and New Hampshire that would later become Brown University and Dartmouth College. Tennant helped to spark a Presbyterian revival in the Middle Colonies (Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey), in part by founding a seminary to train other evangelical clergyman. Frelinghuysen’s example inspired other ministers, including Gilbert Tennent, a Presbyterian. He then took off his own pants and threw them into the fire, but a woman saved them and tossed them back to Davenport, telling him he had gone too far.Īnother outburst of Protestant revivalism began in New Jersey, led by a minister of the Dutch Reformed Church named Theodorus Frelinghuysen. The next day, he told them to burn their clothes as a sign of their casting off the sinful trappings of the world. In one notorious incident in 1743, an influential New Light minister named James Davenport urged his listeners to burn books. Indeed, the revivals did sometimes lead to excess. The elite ministers in British America were firmly Old Lights, and they censured the new revivalism as chaos. The Great Awakening caused a split between those who followed the evangelical message (the “New Lights”) and those who rejected it (the “Old Lights”). Individuals could bring about their own salvation by accepting Christ, an especially welcome message for those who had felt excluded by traditional Protestantism: women, the young, and people at the lower end of the social spectrum. Whereas Martin Luther and John Calvin had preached a doctrine of predestination and close reading of scripture, new evangelical ministers spread a message of personal and experiential faith that rose above mere book learning. They rejected what appeared to be sterile, formal modes of worship in favor of a vigorous emotional religiosity. (A Second Great Awakening would take place in the 1800s.) During the First Great Awakening, evangelists came from the ranks of several Protestant denominations: Congregationalists, Anglicans (members of the Church of England), and Presbyterians.
During the eighteenth century, the British Atlantic experienced an outburst of Protestant revivalism known as the First Great Awakening.
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