Awakening the sole organ of fellowship reaching
through the whole chain of the British colonies was the correspondence
of the Quaker meetings and missionaries. In the glow of the revival the
continent awoke to the consciousness of a common spiritual life. Ranging
the continent literally from Georgia to Maine, with all his weaknesses
and indiscretions, and with his incomparable eloquence, welcomed by
every sect, yet refusing an exclusive allegiance to any, Whitefield
exercised a true apostolate, bearing daily the care of all the churches,
and becoming a messenger of mutual fellowship not only between the ends
of the continent, but between the Christians of two hemispheres. Remote
churches exchanged offices of service. Tennent came from New Jersey to
labor in New England; Dickinson and Burr and Edwards were the gift of
the northern colonies to the college at Princeton. The quickened sense
of a common religious life and duty and destiny was no small part of the
preparation for the birth of the future nation.

Whether for good or for evil, the few years from 1740 to 1750 were
destined to impress upon the American church in its various orders, for
a hundred years to come, the character of _Methodism_.[176:1]

In New England, the idea, into which the first pastors had been trained
by their experience as parish ministers in the English established
church, of the parochial church holding correlative rights and duties
toward the community in all its families, succumbed at last, after a
hundred years of more or less conscious antagonism, to the incompatible
principle, adopted from the Separatists of Plymouth, of the church
formed according to elective affinity by the "social compact" of persons
of the age of discretion who could give account to themselves and to one
another of the conscious act and experience of conversion. This view,
subject to important mitigations or aggravations in actual
administration, held almost unquestioned dominance in the New England
churches until boldly challenged by Horace Bushnell, in his
"epoch-making" volume on "Christian Nurture" (1846), as a departure from
the orthodoxy of the fathers.

In the Presbyterian Church, revivalism as a principle of church life had
to contend with rules distinctly articulated in its constitutional
documents. So exclusively does the Westminster institute contemplate the
church as an established parish that its "Directory for Worship"
contains no provision for so abn