Conceived in Liberty Volume 2 - Ludwig von Mises Institute

God is love? To the sinners—and who is not a sinner?—Edwards warned:
"The God that holds you over the pit of hell much as anyone holds a
spider or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you and is dreadfully
provoked; his wrath towards you burns like fire."
It is possible to pinpoint the time when the rapidly growing influence of
this oratory reached a crisis and accelerated and burst into flame: December
1734. Religious concerns swept the people of Northampton: "other discourse
than of the things of religion would scarcely be tolerated in any company."
In an orgy of proclaiming their repentance, over three hundred
people of Northampton soon professed conversion to the true faith. Children
formed prayer groups to repent the monstrousness of their sins, and
Edwards' own uncle committed suicide in remorse. The intense religious
excitement faded in Northampton by the spring, but the precedent had
been set and the revivals of the Great Awakening spread to other towns in
the colonies.
Apart from the content of the creed, the mechanism and strategy of the
revival movement was profoundly reactionary: in contrast to the older
Calvinism, it functioned by whipping up the emotions of the masses rather
than by serving or convincing their intellect. With emotional frenzy and
hysteria suspending sober and rational conviction, the leaders of the revivals
soon reached the point of making this frenzy the acid test of a person's true
Christianity: a man, even a minister of Christ, was still a sinner unless he
too had been born again, and experienced conversion by emotional hysteria.
Meanwhile-, the Great Awakening had begun independently among Calvinists
in New Jersey. It was launched there by the Reverend Theodore J.
Frelinghuysen of the Dutch Reformed Church. Frelinghuysen arrived in
New Jersey from Holland in 1720 and immediately began an evangelistic
revivalism, attacking the sobriety and intellectuality of Dutch Reformed
Orthodoxy. The new revivalism soon split the Dutch churches into pro- and
anti-Frelinghuysen factions, which were battling furiously by 1723. In three
more years, Frelinghuysen's converts were increasing and spreading beyond
New Jersey. A particularly important convert was the Reverend Gilbert
Tennent, a young English-speaking Presbyterian who took up the task of
spreading the revival among Presbyterians in New Jersey. Tennent and
his ministerial brothers soon controlled the New Brunswick Presbytery of
Central New Jersey, and emotional revivalism spread throughout rural New
Jersey and to Newark, and on to Long Island and Pennsylvania. The revival
encountered bitter opposition among the Presbyterian ministry, angry at
the emotionalism of the new movement.
The various trends of the revival movement were soon fused into a
Great Awakening by the first of the continental tours of the famous
English evangelical preacher, the Reverend George Whitefield. Young Whitefield
was one of the first members of the small Holy Club at Oxford
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