stness of
his preaching, unwonted in that age, wakened a religious feeling in his
own congregation, which overflowed the limits of a single parish and
became as one of the streams that make glad the city of God.

In the year 1718 there arrived at the port of Philadelphia an Irishman,
William Tennent, with his four sons, the eldest a boy of fifteen. He was
not a Scotch-Irishman, but an English-Irishman--a clergyman of the
established Protestant Episcopal Church of Ireland. He lost no time in
connecting himself with the Presbyterian synod of Philadelphia, and
after a few years of pastoral service in the colony of New York became
pastor of the Presbyterian church at Neshaminy, in Pennsylvania, twenty
miles north of Philadelphia. Here his zeal for Christian education moved
him to begin a school, which, called from the humble building in which
it was held, became famous in American Presbyterian history as the Log
College. Here were educated many men who became eminent in the ministry
of the gospel, and among them the four boys who had come with their
father from Ireland. Gilbert, the eldest and most distinguished of them,
came in 1727, from his temporary position as tutor in the Log College,
to be pastor to the Presbyterian church in New Brunswick, where
Frelinghuysen, in the face of opposition from his own brethren in the
ministry, had for seven years pursued his deeply spiritual and fruitful
work as pastor to the Dutch church. Whatever debate there may be over
the question of an official and tactual succession in the church, the
existence of a vital and spiritual succession, binding "the generations
each to each," need not be disputed by any. Sometimes, as here, the
succession is distinctly traceable. Gilbert Tennent was own son in the
ministry to Theodore Frelinghuysen as truly as Timothy to Paul, but he
became spiritual father to a great multitude.

* * * * *

In the year 1730 the total population of Pennsylvania was estimated by
Governor Gordon at forty-nine thousand. In the less than fifty years
since the colony was settled it had outstripped all the older colonies,
and Philadelphia, its chief town, continued to be by far the most
important port for the landing of immigrants. The original Quaker
influence was still dominant in the colony, but the very large majority
of the population was German; and presently the Quakers were to find
their political supremacy departing, and were to acqu