rs on Long Island, Barber and Davenport,
had received divine assurance of a return of power, and held themselves
in anxious waiting. At last, brilliant flashes began to play athwart the
sky, and instead of the meteoric glare which some feared, it indicated
the purer sunbeam, in whose genial power the church was to rejoice for
more than a third of a century. Whitefield's advent sent a thrill
through all New England. He sailed from Charleston to Newport, where
venerable parson Clapp, tottering with age, welcomed him as though he
had been an angel of God. Whitefield's power was comparable to the
supernatural, and it was in this view John Foster, at a later day, found
the only solution of his success. In the pulpit his appearance and
manners exceeded the dreams of apostolic grace--a youth of elegant form,
with voice of enchanting melody, clear blue eyes, an endurance which
knew no exhaustion--a fancy which ranged both worlds--were all fused by
a burning zeal for the salvation of souls. Such was Whitefield at
twenty-five, and as such he was worthy of that ovation which he received
at Boston, when governor and council went out in form to welcome him.
The evangelist bore his honors meekly, and hospitality did not weaken
the vials of wrath which he poured upon the unfaithful. He found, as he
said, in New England 'a darkness which might be felt.' At Cambridge, he
thundered at the deadness of Harvard and its faculty, and electrified
the land by striking at its glory. The hearers alternately wept and
shivered, and the professors, headed by old Dr. Holyoke (who afterwards
lived to celebrate his hundredth birthday), levelled a defensive and
aggressive pamphlet at their castigator; but Governor Belcher kissed the
dauntless preacher, and bade him 'cry aloud and spare not, but show the
people their sins.'

The second century, like the first, opened with fierce ecclesiastical
tumult. Whitefield's itineracy, like the blazing cross in the Lady of
the Lake, was the signal for an uprising. Fired by his passionate
oratory, the masses revolted from the chill formalism of a dead
ministry. The effect of the excitement which pervaded New England, when
considered merely as an appetizer of the intellect, can not be
over-estimated, and the vigor which the colonial mind thus acquired
astonished in an after day the dullards of the British Parliament. The
chief throb was felt in Connecticut, where strolling preachers of a new
order held forth in barns