their acquaintance with experimental religion
and good conversation." This bit of pastoral history, in which is
nothing startling or prodigious, was at least five years previous to the
"Surprising Conversions" at Northampton. There must have been generally
throughout the country a preparedness for the Great Awakening.

* * * * *

It was in that year (1735) in which the town of Northampton was all
ablaze with the glory of its first revival under Edwards that George
Whitefield, first among the members of Wesley's "Holy Club" at Oxford,
attained to that "sense of the divine love" from which he was wont to
date his conversion. In May, 1738, when the last reflections from the
Northampton revival had faded out from all around the horizon, the young
clergyman, whose first efforts as a preacher in pulpits of the Church of
England had astonished all hearers by the power of his eloquence,
arrived at Savannah, urged by the importunity of the Wesleys to take up
the work in Georgia in which they had so conspicuously failed. He
entered eagerly into the sanguine schemes for the advantage of the
young colony, and especially into the scheme for building and endowing
an orphan-house in just that corner of the earth where there was less
need of such an institution than anywhere else. After three months' stay
he started on his return to England to seek priest's orders for himself,
and funds for the orphans that might be expected sometime in Georgia. He
was successful in both his errands. He was ordained; he collected more
than one thousand pounds for the orphan-house; and being detained in the
kingdom by an embargo, he began that course of evangelistic preaching
which continued on either side of the ocean until his death, and which
is without a parallel in church history. His incomparable eloquence
thronged the parish churches, until the churches were closed against
him, and the Bishop of London warned the people against him in a
pastoral letter. Then he went out into the open fields, in the service,
as he said, of him "who had a mountain for his pulpit, and the heavens
for his sounding-board, and who, when his gospel was refused by the
Jews, sent his servants into the highways and hedges." Multitudes of
every rank thronged him; but especially the heathenized and embruted
colliers near Bristol listened to the unknown gospel, and their awakened
feelings were revealed to the preacher by his observing the white