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As George Whitefield, England’s John Wesley, and other evangelical ministers read Edwards’ narrative, they realized they were part of a series of religious revivals that began in the colonies and spanned the Atlantic. In London, Edwards published a compelling account of this revival, A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God. Under Edwards’ preaching, a town-wide revival broke out in Northampton from 1734 to 1735. Most famously, he delivered a 1741 sermon titled Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. Possibly the greatest theologian the colonies had ever produced, Edwards was a master of rhetoric who preached on human sinfulness and the need for divine grace. Just a few years earlier, Jonathan Edwards, a minister in Northampton, Massachusetts, had led a series of awakenings too. Whitefield was not America’s first revival preacher.
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The youthful, twenty-five-year-old English minister held the crowd at Middletown spellbound with his masterful, emotional pleas that each person receive God’s gift of salvation and be “born again.” Countless listeners, including Nathan Cole, were converted.
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Each individual must be converted by the Holy Spirit of God through a personal, wrenching examination of his or her own corruption and sinfulness.
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Whitefield’s message was simple: It was not enough to be baptized or go to church. What details can you find each in image that indicate the artists’ respective views of the preacher? Squintum was a nickname for Whitefield, who was cross-eyed. Squintum’s Exaltation or the Reformation.” Dr. “My hearing him preach,” he wrote in his diary, “gave me a heart wound.”Ĭompare the two images of George Whitefield: (a) a 1774 portrait by engraver Elisha Gallaudet and (b) a 1763 British political cartoon entitled “Dr. Watching the celebrated preacher begin, Cole began to tremble. Many people in the audience experienced the “new birth” of evangelical conversion. For weeks, Nathan Cole had heard reports that Whitefield’s preaching tour of the colonies was drawing huge crowds numbering in the tens of thousands. Rather than expounding on the intricacies of Christian doctrine, he appealed to the emotions of his listeners at home in England, and now, still only twenty-five years old, he had brought his new style to the American colonies. He and his wife joined a throng of others hurrying along the roads to Middletown, afraid they would arrive too late to hear the famous preacher.Īfter receiving his degree from Oxford University, Whitefield had begun a life of itinerant preaching and evangelism. Nathan immediately dropped his tools in the field, ran to fetch his wife, and saddled his horse. Suddenly his labor was interrupted by a passing messenger’s shouts: at 10 o’clock the evangelist George Whitefield was going to preach in nearby Middletown. This Narrative should be followed by the What Was the Great Awakening? Point-Counterpoint.ĭuring a cool October 1740 morning in Kensington, Connecticut, Nathan Cole was hard at work in his field, as he had been since sunrise. Before reading this Narrative, students should be familiar with the role of religion and challenges to religious authority in the New England colonies ( Anne Hutchinson and Religious Dissent and The Salem Witch Trials Narratives).