into his formal
beliefs, or inquired of what nationality or province he might be. For
the preachers of "vital" religion--whether the Moravian Schnell or the
Methodist Whitefield, whether the Puritan Jonathan Edwards, profoundest
theologian of his generation, or the Presbyterian enthusiasts, such as
Gilbert Tennant and Mr. Davies, who went out from the little Log College
to carry the gospel to the mixed population of the Middle and Southern
colonies--all alike appealed to those instinctive emotions which make
men kin and from which every religion springs. In forming the new spirit
of Americanism, few events were more important than the Great Awakening.
During that sudden up-surging of religious emotionalism, which for a
decade rolled like a tidal wave over the colonies, provincial
boundaries and the distinctions of race and creed were in some measure
forgotten in a new sense of common nature and human brotherhood.

True it is that the Great Awakening was accompanied by no lack of acid
jealousies and unchristian recrimination. In almost every sect "New
Light" separated from "Old Light," "New Side" from "Old Side," in most
unfraternal division. Gilbert Tennant, imitating Whitefield and
out-heroding Herod, exhausted ecclesiastical billingsgate in quest of
terms to characterize those clergymen--Congregational or Presbyterian or
Anglican; those "letter-learned Pharisees," those "moral negroes," those
"plastered hypocrites"--who stood out in stiff-necked opposition to
revivalist methods of inculcating vital religion. Schism divided the
Presbyterians for more than a decade; many congregations in eastern
Connecticut, renouncing the Say brook Platform and the Half-Way
Covenant, "separated" from the Association; and in Massachusetts the
quarrel between revivalists and anti-revivalists only accentuated the
breach between new and old Calvinists. And true it is that the flood
tide was followed by the ebb: the tremendous emotional upheaval, which
began with the Northampton sermons of Jonathan Edwards in 1734, seemed
to cease after 1744 as suddenly as it came. For more than a year
scarcely one person was converted in all Boston, said Thomas Prince in
1754. Jonathan Edwards waited in vain from 1744 to 1748 for a single
applicant for admission to the Northampton Church. And the great
Whitefield himself, returning to America in 1744, 1754, and 1764,
although always gladly heard by thousands, found that the old magic had
unaccountably lost