bore the reproach of being a friend of publicans and sinners, and
offered itself as a _refugium peccatorum_, thus holding many in some
sort of relation to the kingdom of Christ who would otherwise have
lapsed into sheer infidelity.

In all this the Episcopal Church was affected by the Awakening only by
way of reaction. But it owes a debt to the direct influence of the
Awakening which it has not always been careful to acknowledge. We have
already seen that the requickening of the asphyxiated church of Virginia
was part of the great revival, and this character remains impressed on
that church to this day. The best of those traits by which the American
Episcopal Church is distinguished from the Church of England, as, for
instance, the greater purity of the ministry and of the membership, are
family traits of the revival churches; the most venerated of its early
bishops, White and Griswold, bore the same family likeness; and the
"Evangelical party," for a time so influential in its counsels, was a
tardy and mild afterglow from the setting of the Great Awakening.[179:1]

An incident of the revival, failing which it would have lacked an
essential token of the presence of the Spirit of Christ, was the
kindling of zeal for communicating the gospel to the ignorant, the
neglected, and the heathen. Among the first-fruits of Whitefield's
preaching at the South was a practical movement among the planters for
the instruction of their slaves--devotees, most of them, of the most
abject fetich-worship of their native continent. Of the evangelists and
pastors most active in the revival, there were few, either North or
South, whose letters or journals do not report the drawing into the
churches of large numbers of negroes and Indians, whose daily lives
witnessed to the sincerity of their profession of repentance and
Christian faith. The Indian population of the southeastern corner of
Connecticut with such accord received the gospel at the hands of the
evangelists that heathenism seemed extinct among them.[179:2]

Among the first trophies of the revival at Norwich was a Mohegan boy
named Samson Occum. Wheelock, pastor at Lebanon, one of the most ardent
of the revival preachers, took him into his family as a student. This
was the beginning of that school for the training of Indian preachers
which, endowed in part with funds gathered by Occum in England, grew at
last into Dartmouth College. The choicest spiritual gifts at the
disposal of