The Puritan Hope

Iain Murray

‘I believe there is such a work begun, as neither we nor our fathers have heard of. The beginnings are amazing; how unspeakably glorious will the end be! In New England, the Lord takes poor sinners by hundreds, I may say by thousands. In Scotland, the fruits of my poor labours are abiding and apparent. In Wales, the word of the Lord runs and is glorified, as also in many places in England. In London, our Savour is doing great things daily...’

GEORGE WHITEFIELD, April 6, 1742

‘That which was deemed visionary at first, soon came to be regarded in a very different light; one after another of the dissenting ministers began to perceive that the work of reformation begun, was of God, and must prevail; while others felt themselves constrained to abstain from all formal opposition to it, lest haply they should be found fighting against God. In England, Wales, Scotland, and America, the great work of conversion was proceeding with amazing rapidity, and devout lookers-on, of every class, began to feel something like awe in contemplating the wonderful effects produced upon persons in almost every rank in life, from the princes and nobles of the land to the obscurest and most profligate of the people.’

JOHN MORRISON The Fathers and Founders of the London Missionary Society, 1839, vol I, 43

THE notion that the Church advances in the world by a steady and uninterrupted course of progress is one which cannot bear examination in the light of the period which followed Restoration of Charles II in 1660. At that date evangelical Christianity stood on the threshold of some eighty years’ declension. One cause of this was that almost all of the best-known Puritan preachers were now passing into old age; few were to live to see the accession of a Protestant monarch, William III, in 1688. Another reason was the repressive legislation employed by the government, commencing with the Act of Uniformity of 1662 which at one stroke displaced some 2,000 Puritan ministers from parish churches, schools and the two universities. Disorganized, shorn of all political favour and harried by persecution, the Nonconformist churches — as they now became — were soon but a shadow compared with the congregations of earlier years; and when toleration came at last in 1688 it was soon evident that something far more valuable had been in large measure lost, namely, the presence and power of the Spirit of God.

Gilbert Burnet, who became Bishop of Salisbury in 1689 and died in 1715, recorded the opinion of the ‘great men of the Church’ that Nonconformity would die out with the generation then existing. The prophecy was incorrect but there was no gainsaying that Nonconformity was a spent force. Between 1695 and 1730 it appears that only one new Non-conformist Church was erected in London and neighbourhood, while the existing congregations barely managed to hold their own. No more did the common people crowd to hear the preaching of the Word. The spirit of worldliness had done its work and they now ‘far preferred the chatty, easy-going, careless “parson” ‘,says Herbert Skeats, to the ‘severe Presbyterian’ or ‘godly Independent’. In addition to this, the pulpit of these two leading Nonconformist denominations ‘was itself undergoing a change. When a union of the two groups was attempted in London in the 1690’s it foundered on the discovery of the number of churches no longer committed to the old Calvinistic orthodoxy. ‘In less than half a century,’ according to the opinion of Skeats who describes conditions around 1720, ‘the doctrines of the great founders of Presbyterianism could scarcely be heard from any Presbyterian pulpit in England’. Robert Traill, a representative of the old theology, writing in 1692, asks: ‘What can be the reason why the very Parliaments in the reign of James I and Charles I were so alarmed with Arminianism, as may be read in history, and is remembered by old men; and that now for a long time there hath been no talk, no fear of it; as if Arminianism were dead and buried, and no man knows where its grave is? Is not the true reason to be found in its universal prevailing in the nation?’

As is so often the case, this theological change took place in the name of progress. Reason, it was said, must be respected as well as revelation, and charity forbade an imposition upon ministers of the old Confessions and Catechisms. How far this new spirit had gone was illustrated in 1719 when, at a debate at Salters’ Hall, a majority of London Dissenters refused to make it necessary for ministers to subscribe to the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity. At that debate nearly all the Independents were on the side of the large minority, but even in their ranks the coming years were to show a readiness to compromise on the part of several of their leading ministers. Speaking of the aftermath of the Salters’ Hall dispute, Skeats says:

‘If as was undoubtedly the case, breadth of thought and charity of sentiment increased, and, to some extent, settled into a mental habit of the nation, religious activity did not increase. The zeal of Puritanism was almost as unknown as it was unimitated. It seems to have been impossible for the Christian men of this generation to fight with the old force of Christianity while they were being fitted into a new armour of thought.’

This being the case with those who were, by tradition, the custodians of evangelical truth, little need be said of the state of the Established Church. The testimony of one Anglican writer sums up the position in these words:

‘When the Puritans were expelled, they carried with them the spiritual light of the Church of England. . . . Religion in the Church of England was almost extinguished, and in many of her parishes the lamp of God went out. The places of the ejected clergy were supplied with little regard even to the decencies of the sacred office: the voluptuous, the indolent, the ignorant, and even the profane, received episcopal orders, and like a swarm of locusts overspread the Church.

Through the eighty years,1660—1740, the spiritual history of the Establishment was largely one of dreary futility. The flight of James II in 1688 relieved the threat of a returning Roman Catholicism, but thereafter neither party in the Church — the ‘High’ with its sacerdotalism and divine right of king’s theory, and the ‘Low’ with latitudinarian indifference to doctrine and its alliance with the Whigs in politics — could do anything to arrest the carelessness with ‘which all religion soon came to be treated by the nation at large. Scarcely a greater contrast exists in English history than that between the honour publicly paid to Christianity in the mid-seventeenth century and the attitude of the 1730’s when at court Queen Caroline talked politics with her husband, George II, during services in the royal chapel. When the Queen was dying in 1737 the court not surprisingly viewed Archbishop Potter’s prayers at her bed-side as the empty farce that it was. ‘It has come to be taken for granted’, wrote Bishop Butler in 1736, ‘that Christianity is no longer a subject of enquiry; but that it is now at length discovered to be fictitious. And accordingly it is treated as if, in the present age, this was an agreed point among all persons of discernment, and nothing remained but to set it up as a principal subject for mirth and ridicule.’

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North of the Border the train of events following the Restoration was very similar. The men who had been leaders in the revivals of the 1620’s and 1630’s were already passing from the scene when King Charles II betrayed the promises he had made earlier to the Church of Scotland. Rutherford died in 1661; David Dickson in 1662, ‘sure that Jesus Christ would not long sit with such indignities done against his work and people’; and Robert Blair in 1666. John Livingstone, Blair’s fellow-labourer in Ireland in brighter days, died in exile in Holland in 1672. Of the four hundred ministers ejected from their churches in 1662 only ninety survived to see the first General Assembly of the reconstituted Church in 1690. In the intervening years those who stood by the covenanted testimony of the Scottish Church endured the utmost severities; according to John Howie’s figures, some 18,000 Christian people suffered either ‘death, or the utmost hardships and extremities’ until the last leader, the youthful James Renwick, went to the scaffold on February 17, 1688. When the persecution finally passed, many a moor and hillside in south-west Scotland, where an undaunted remnant had been faithful unto death, was marked by a martyr’s grave.

The return of freedom and toleration at the accession of William III found the majority of the Church of Scotland —in which episcopal clergy intruded after 1660 were allowed to remain — ready to pursue a broader policy. The architect of the new policy was William Carstairs, a Christian man but one whom W. G. Blaikie could describe as ‘a courtier and a diplomatist, and the great aim of his policy was to keep things quiet, to avoid commotion, and maintain the status quo.’ The eighteenth century was not far advanced when the fruit of this accommodating spirit began to be seen. In 1712 Parliament passed an Act restoring Patronage in the Church of Scotland; this Act, which was approved by the General Assembly, rendered it possible to place ministers in congregations contrary to the wishes of the people who were in many cases more evangelical than the clergy. Five years later John Simson, Professor of Divinity at Glasgow, and ‘a master in the art of teaching heresy orthodoxly’ was but gently handled by the General Assembly after a charge that he was teaching Arminianism, while on the other side, an old Puritan book, The Marrow of Modern Divinity, reissued through the influence of Thomas Boston, minister in the Selkirk parish of Ettrick, and some of his ministerial friends, was solemnly condemned by an Act of Assembly in 1720. In 1729 Boston stood alone in the General Assembly to protest when, after it was proved that Simson was now teaching Arianism, the decision was taken simply to suspend the professor from his duties and to permit him to continue to receive his salary.

This spirit of laxity had two results. First, it led to the secession of four ministers from the Church of Scotland in 1733 —the year after Boston’s death — and the formation of the Secession Church. By 1766 this church, which kept the gospel alive in many parts of Scotland, possessed 120 churches and 100,000 worshippers. Second, it gradually placed the leadership of the Church into the hands of ‘the Moderates’ whose religion was generally nothing more than dry morality. This was what greatly burdened Thomas Halyburton, Professor of Divinity at St. Andrews, at the time of his death in 1712. Speaking to some around his bed he said: ‘O sirs! I dread mightily that a rational sort of religion is coming in among us; I mean by it, a religion that consists in a bare attendance on outward duties and ordinances, without the power of godliness; and thence people shall fall into a way of serving God which is mere deism, having no relation to Christ Jesus and the Spirit of God.’

James Robe of Kilsyth, writing in 1742 of the state of the Church of Scotland, confirmed how justified Halyburton’s fears had been:

‘While the government, worship and doctrine, established in this church were retained in profession, there hath been an universal corruption of life, reaching even unto the sons and daughters of God. Former strictness as to holiness and tenderness of life was much relaxed among both ministers and people of the better sort: a formal round of professional duties was the religion of the professors, and in this they rested: as to the multitude, they were visibly profane, and without any sense of religion at all. Things were become so bad with us, that there were few whom we, the ministers of the Word, could comfort as believers in Christ, and exhort to rejoice in hope of the glory of God, when we found them a dying.’

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Everywhere in the English-speaking world, including Wales and the American colonies, a similar situation prevailed; formalism, coldness of heart, indifference to religion, and worldliness holding a general sway over the populations. ‘Soul extinct, but stomach well alive’, was Carlyle’s apt description of the scene.

It has not been sufficiently observed, however, that during this period the evangelical ministers who maintained the old Puritan theology, sometimes in lonely and difficult situations, never questioned that a new spring-time of revival would be given from on high. Their inherited view of revivals and unfulfilled prophecy made the future progress and world-wide expansion of Christ’s kingdom a certainty even at a time when, as Montesquieu claimed, the English had no religion at all. According to this Frenchman who visited England in 1729-31, ‘If anyone spoke of religion, everybody laughed’.

Many examples of this attitude of confidence could be given. Matthew Henry ministered at Chester from 1687 to 1712 when he removed to London, where he died in 1714. Through his famous Commentary he was to have a vast influence in propagating the evangelical and Calvinistic faith so powerful in his father’s day. In a sermon entitled ‘England’s hopes,’ preached on January 1, 1707, from Isaiah 63.4, ‘The year of my redeemed is come’, Henry speaks of a coming fulfilment of this prediction:

‘The year of the revival of primitive Christianity in the power of it, will be the year of the redeemed. This we wish we hope, we long to see, both at home and abroad.... When the bounds of the church will be enlarged by the conversion of Pagan and Mahometan nations to the faith of Christ, and the spreading of the gospel in foreign parts... Pray for the pouring out of the Spirit upon us from on high and then the year of the redeemed would soon come... But if the year of the redeemed should not come in our days; if the carcasses of this generation should fall in this wilderness, as justly they may for our unbelief and murmuring, and we should not go over Jordan to see that goodly mountain, and Lebanon: yet let it suffice us, that those who shall come after us shall enter into that rest. Joseph dies in Egypt, but lays his bones in confidence that God will surely visit Israel.’

The faithful witness of Thomas Boston in the unsympathetic General Assembly of the Church of Scotland has already been mentioned. Dr.MacFarlan has observed how, in the Memoirs of Boston and the lives of several of the more faithful men of that period, ‘we have laid open to us many of the hidden springs of a coming change’. Like Matthew Henry, Boston worked on in hope during a dark day, and like him also he fed this hope to his people through the promises of Scripture.

Thus in one sermon, preached in 1716, on ‘Encouragement to Pray for the Conversion of the Jews’, we find the pastor of Ettrick expounding this head of doctrine: ‘There is a day coming in which there shall be a national conversion of the Jews or Israelites. The now blinded and rejected Jews shall at length be converted into the faith of Christ, and join themselves to the Christian Church.’

The application of this doctrine included the following words:

‘Have you any love to, or concern for the Church, for the work of reformation, the reformation of our country, the reformation of the world? Any longing desire for the revival of that work now at a stand; for a flourishing state of the church, that is now under a decay? then pray for the conversion of the Jews.

‘Are you longing for a revival to the churches, now lying like dry bones, would you fain have the Spirit of life enter into them? Then pray for the Jews. “For if the casting away of them be the reconciling of the world; what shall the receiving of them be, but life from the dead.” That will be a lively time, a time of a great outpouring of the Spirit, that will carry reformation to a greater height than yet has been.’

Across the Atlantic in New England the same expectation was kept alive and frequent reference to it is to be found in letters and sermons of the period. Samuel Danforth, minister of Taunton, New England, wrote in 1705, ‘I think sometimes that the time of the pouring out of the Spirit upon all flesh may be at the door. Let us be earnest in prayer, that Christ’s kingdom may come.’ In 1721, after a local revival at Windham, Connecticut, Mr. Adams of New London urged the continuance of pray for the far wider blessing promised of God, ‘Oh! that the Lord would arise and have mercy upon Zion, that the time to favour it, the set time may come, that the whole earth may be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea !’

Though a number, like the Simeons and Annas of another day, thus waited for a divine visitation, when the great revival of the eighteenth century at last began in the late I730’s, it was unexpected by the mass of nominal Christians. And even those who had long prayed for a new out-pouring of the Spirit were to be astonished at both the extent and power of the work. The first signs of the dawn of a new day occurred in places far distant from one another and among ministers who were quite unaware of how the hearts of others in different countries were also being stirred. Congregations in the Middle States of America were roused from slumber by the preaching of the Tennents. At Northampton, in New England, an awakening occurred in 1735 under the ministry of Jonathan Edwards, and the same year in Wales the two main leaders of the coming revival in that country were both converted, Daniel Rowland, a Cardiganshire curate ordained in 1733, and Howell Harris, a schoolmaster of Brecknockshire. 1735 saw also the conversion of George Whitfield while a student at Oxford and it was his preaching in London in 1737 that was the first sign in England that a new work of God was commencing. For nearly three months in the autumn of that year 'there was' says Whitefield ,'no end of the people flocking to hear the Word of God…The sight of the congregations was awful. One might, as it were, walk upon the peoples heads, and thousands went away from the largest churches for want of room.' In 1738, when Whitefield was away at Georgia , John Wesley had his evangelical experience in Aldersgate street, London, and continuing the preaching work of Whitfield he could soon write, 'Great multitudes are everywhere awakened. By 1739 it was beyond question that a great revival had commenced in England. New Years day witnessed the small group of leaders in London, including Whitefield amd Wesley, met in a prayer meeting reminiscent of the private gatherings of ministers in the previous century. In the next five weeks Whitefield preached some thirty times in and about London, then moving to the Bristol area he took the momentous step on February 17 of preaching to some 200 colliers in the open-air at Kingswood, the use of a Church having been denied to him. From this point onwards open-air preaching became an inescapable neccessity as congregations gathered in thousands. In the bleak months of February and March Whitefield estimated that there were as many as ten thousand on one occasion at Kingswood, and in London , on Moorfields and Kennington Common , during the following months still vaster crowds assembled for the preaching of a message which had so recently been generally dismissed with scorn. At a time when the population of the capital was only some 600,000, and when gin and gambling were the great public interests, it was an amazing phenomenon that a Christian preacher could now command far larger gatherings than any of the theatres or entertainments of the day. In July 1739, Whitefield wrote from London, 'A great work of God is doing here. The Lord Jesus gets himself the victory every day'. The Spirit of God is moving on the faces of thousands of souls in England. The word runs very swift, and Satan falls like lightening from heaven'.

Llangeitho, in Cardiganshire, and the adjacent parishes of Llancwnlle and Llandewibrefi, were served by Daniel Rowland who was curate to his absentee elder brother. Until his conversion Rowland was a typical clergyman of the age, serving ‘An easy-going God’. Thereafter the change in his ministry was immense. ‘He proclaimed’, says his biographer, ‘eternal perdition to a sinful world.’ Notwithstanding the message of judgment, his churches were soon crowded and such were the overpowering effects of the Word preached that numbers stricken with conviction of sin lay prostrate on the ground in the churchyard of Llancwnlle. It was at this time, or soon after, that a movement of the Spirit, long to be remembered, occurred in Llangeitho church. One Sunday morning as Rowland read the words of the Litany, ‘By Thine Agony and bloody Sweat; by Thy Cross and Passion; by Thy Precious Death and Burial; by Thy glorious Resurrection and Ascension; and by the coming of the Holy Ghost’, many fell to the floor, suddenly seized by an awareness of their state as sinners, while others gave with tears the appointed response, ‘Good Lord, deliver us.’

Physical side-effects resulting from intense conviction of sin were to follow the evangelical revival throughout its course. Especially was this the case in the American colonies where the local revivals witnessed in a few places during the previous decade became, in 1740, ‘the Great Awakening’. Everywhere the reign of formality seemed to be broken and tears streamed down the faces of thousands under the preaching of the gospel. Before the end of that same year all parts of the eastern seaboard of America, from Boston in the north to Savannah in the south, were expressing a stirring of religious concern exceeding anything remembered from former days. In May, 1740, it was reported, ‘There was never such a general awakening and concern for the things of God known in America before.’ In June, Whitefield, who had returned to America the previous autumn, wrote, ‘O what wonderful things is God doing in America! . . . What the event of the present general awakening will be, I know not.’ In July, amazed at the spread of the work, he exclaimed ‘Surely our Lord intends to set the world in a flame.’

The Great Awakening continued in America until 1743-44, bringing thousands into the kingdom of God and establishing a new spiritual and moral outlook in the colonies as a whole. ‘It was estimated,’ says Turnbull, an American writer who belonged to the generation immediately following the revival, ‘that in two or three years, thirty or forty thousand souls were born into the family of heaven in New England, besides great numbers in New York, New Jersey and the more southern provinces.’ Of the many whom he personally knew as having professed conversion during the Awakening he writes: ‘They were constant and serious in their attendance on public worship, prayerful, righteous, and charitable, strict in the government of their families; and not one of them, so far as he knew, was ever guilty of scandal.’

News of the Awakening in America spread quickly and in Scotland, in particular, it was heard with eager attention by those who had been long praying for a day of visitation from God. John Willison, Church of Scotland minister at Dundee from 1718 until his death in I 750, noted the information with gladness in his book The Balm of Gilead, published in January, 1742. At the same time he lamented over Scotland, ‘How rare is conversion work now, in respect of former times !’

Whitefield’s visit to Edinburgh and Glasgow in the summer of 1741 had brought a quickening of spiritual concern and some, conversions, yet this provided no evidence that a general revival was at hand. Within a month of the publication of Willison’s book, however, an out-pouring of the Holy Spirit had occurred in the parish of Cambuslang, five miles south-east of Glasgow, and this was attended with such spiritual power that it was rightly judged that a new day of blessing had come to Scotland. In January of 1742, ninety heads of families in Cambuslang had requested their minister, William M’Culloch, to hold a week-night service for the exposition of Scripture, this type of address being termed a ‘Lecture’. The night fixed was Thursday. On Thursday, February 18, after several days in which a spirit of prayer had been especially evident, some fifty people detained their minister through the night as they sought spiritual help and relief from conviction of sin. From this point onwards the influence and success which followed the ministry of the Word was such that preaching now became M’Culloch’s daily work. The whole parish with its nine hundred inhabitants was profoundly moved as quarrels, swearing, drunkenness, and all the other characteristics of worldliness gave way visibly to a confession of wrongs, restitution, remorse and prayerfulness ‘The report,’ says a contemporary, ‘spread like fire; vast multitudes were attracted thither.. I believe that, in less than two months from its commencement, there were few parishes within twelve miles that had not more or less of their people awakened by resorting thither; and many who were awakened there came from places greatly more distant.’

By April 28, 1742, M’Culloch believed that about three hundred souls had been awakened; within five months the figure had risen to five hundred, most of whom, he trusted, had ‘been savingly brought home to God’. The testimony of many other ministers who visited Cambuslang was no less striking. John Willison wrote in April, ‘The work at Cambuslang is a most singular and marvellous out-pouring of the Holy Spirit.’ George Whitefield, who returned to Scotland in June, wrote after his first visit to Cambuslang, ‘The awakening here in Scotland is unspeakable…. God seems to awaken scores together. I never was enabled to preach so before.’ A few days later he returned again to Cambuslang ‘to assist at the blessed sacrament’. Of this communion season he reported: ‘On Sabbath day, scarce ever was such a sight seen in Scotland. There were undoubtedly upwards of twenty thousand people.

All night in different companies, you might have heard persons praying to, and praising God. The children of God came from all quarters: it was like the passover in Josiah’s time.’ At a second communion in August, Whitefield judged the numbers to be between thirty and forty thousand. After such a summer as this it is no wonder to find him writing to Howell Harris from Edinburgh in September; ‘We have had most blessed days here. I and the people have been in the suburbs of heaven. Blessed be God! I live in heaven daily.’

The revival had clearly spread far beyond Cambuslang. In May a parallel work had begun in the small parish of Kilsyth where for twenty-nine years, since 1713, James Robe had faithfully ministered. ‘The good man’, says MacFarlan, ‘had long been on the mount, as the prophet was on Carmel, pleading with God; and many a weary look he cast towards the sea, without observing any sign even of clouds. He preached also much and long on the work of the Spirit, as if to bring the people under its power; and yet, so far as for the time appeared, his preaching was only of the work — it wanted evidence of the Worker being himself there.’ On Sunday, May 18, the same extraordinary power seen in Cambuslang appeared in this parish also. A spirit of mourning and conviction came upon multitudes and within a short time upwards of three hundred were said to be awakened — two hundred belonging to the district and others who were strangers. At the sacrament held at Kilsyth on October 3, there were nearly fifteen hundred communicants. Speaking of the increase of unity which revival brings, John Erskine pointed to the evidence this parish, provided:

‘As the Baillie of Kilsyth attests, so much of the Spirit of mildness and friendship prevails among the People in that Place, that there have been no pleas before their Court for these several months past; whereas formerly a great many were brought before it every week.’

James Robe lived until 1753, William M’Culloch until 1771, and both men testified to the permanency of the blessing which had been brought to their parishes. Nine years after 1742, of the two hundred Kilsyth parishioners mentioned above, ‘upwards of a hundred had either died hopefully or continued to walk worthy of their profession’. M’Culloch and his elders gave detailed evidence of the state of Cambuslang in 1751, including mention of ‘about four hundred persons, who were awakened here in 1742, and who, from that time to the time of their death, or till now, have been enabled to behave in a good measure as becometh the gospel’. M’Culloch also compiled two quarto volumes containing the experiences of one hundred and five of these persons in the hope that the material would one day be deemed worthy of publication.

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The revivals which, as we have seen, came to the English-speaking world from the late 1730’s onwards, varied widely in their duration. In New England ‘the Great Awakening’ of 1740 was over by 1743, and not until 1791 did another age of extensive revivals commence in America. In England the same powerful influences which suddenly aroused thousands in London and around Bristol in 1739 were to be subsequently felt in Wiltshire, Cornwall, Yorkshire, Tyne-side and several other areas, though in the main it was in quieter ways that the tide of the gospel rose in the land. Whitefield’s helper, John Syms, wrote to a New England friend in 1743, ‘There are few or no counties in England or Wales where there is not a work begun.... The gospel in this day may be likened to a fire set to well dried fuel: it no sooner touches but a flame arises.’

The most prominent revivals to occur in Scotland after -1742 were those by means of which large areas of the Scottish Highlands were transformed. In this northern area of Britain which until then had been largely a moral wilderness, a succession of
gospel preachers whose lives are told in Dr.John Kennedy’s The Days of the Fathers in Ross-shire, permeated the country with evangelical religion. Another Scottish writer speaking of the same period in the Highlands says: ‘by the blessing of Heaven and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit attending their faithful exhibition of the truth to the consciences of their people, religion was seen to blossom as the rose. Their churches were crowded by arrested and deeply-affected audiences, and for a few years seldom a Sabbath passed without one or more being seriously impressed.’ Under these prolonged revivals, Dr. Kennedy judged the spiritual prosperity of Ross-shire to have reached its height in 1782, though for many years thereafter further times of awakening were known in the county as well as elsewhere in the Highlands.

The history of Wales parallels that of northern Scotland in the frequency and power of the revivals which were common for nearly a century after the voices of Rowland and Harris had broken the general slumber in 1737. From that date until his death in 1791, Rowland witnessed seven revivals in Cardiganshire, including the so-called ‘Great Revival’ of 1762 which seems to have spread throughout South Wales.

Until 1791 the gospel only had a very limited and partial success in North Wales, but in December of that year the sober-minded Thomas Charles wrote of the glorious work then taking place in Bala and its neighbourhood:

‘General concern about eternal things swallowed up all other concerns. And a spirit of conviction spread so rapidly that there was hardly a young person in the neighbourhood but began to enquire, What will become of me? The work has continued to go on ever since with unabated power and glory, spreading from one town to another, all around this part of the country. A dispensation so glorious, I never beheld, nor indeed expected to see in my day. . . . The coming of the Lord amongst us has been with such majesty, glory, and irresistible power that even his avowed enemies would be glad to hide themselves somewhere, from the brightness of his coming. If the Lord God is graciously pleased to continue the work, as it has prevailed for some months past, for some months yet to come, the Devil’s kingdom will be in ruins in our neighbourhood. Those who were foremost in wickedness and rebellion are now amongst the foremost in seeking for mercy and salvation in the blood of the Lamb. It is an easy and delightful work to preach the glorious Gospel here, in these days. Divine truths have their own infinite weight and importance in the minds of the people. Beams of divine light, together with irresistible energy, accompany every truth delivered.... I bless God for these days, and would not have been without seeing what I now see in the land. — No; not for the world.

‘And I am not without hopes, but these are dawning of the promised millennium, and showers that precede the storm which will entirely overturn the kingdom of darkness.’

For the next forty years similar revivals occurred in several parts of North Wales, the preachers most singularly used in them being Ebenezer Morris, Robert Roberts and John Elias.

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The evangelical revival in the English-speaking world two hundred years ago had vast influence in increasing the confidence that all the nations of the earth would yet be turned to the gospel of Christ. The great numbers who then simultaneously entered the kingdom of God, the many more who, though still unconverted, gave outward allegiance to the truth, and the moral change wrought upon the attitude of whole generations, gave Christians to understand that gospel preaching accompanied by future outpourings of the Spirit would be well able to transform the world.

This expectation was certainly based in part upon the extraordinary contrast, in terms of the numerical increase of the Church, between the earlier and later halves of the eighteenth century. We have already noted something of the numbers caught up in the revival but a little more must be said on this point. It was not the practice of any churches in those days to call for a public profession of faith after a sermon and then announce the number of ‘converts’. What numbers we do have were based on quite different calculations. The size of open-air gatherings was estimated, and though the figures given were necessarily of varying degrees of accuracy, the testimony of independent witnesses not infrequently corroborated these estimates. The number of new churches is in many cases more exactly known. The numbers of new communicants and church members were also in many places recorded. These were not simply ‘church-goers’, it needs to be remembered, but those who generally had been carefully examined for a consistent Christian life before they were permitted to approach the Lord’s table. Thus, at the second great communion at Cambuslang in the summer of 1742, when about 3,000 sat at the Lord’s table, we read, ‘if there had been access to get tokens, there would have been a thousand mere communicants’. M’ Culloch and his fellow-ministers knew that a revival was not the time to relax church discipline by admitting persons not previously examined and granted tokens.

In England the influence of the revival was felt in almost all sections of the Church. Alongside but still inside the Established Church there were John Wesley’s ‘Methodist’ Societies, the first of which was formed in 1739. By 1767 there were 25,911 persons in Britain belonging to these societies, the majority of these being located in English counties; in 1783, the number was 45,955 and in 1790 — the year before Wesley’s death —71,568. Wesley’s societies held their meetings in all manner of places, though new meeting-houses became increasingly essential. From one chapel in 1739 the number grew to 359 by 1784, and the later multiplication of buildings was still more phenomenal. By the year 1879 there were in Cornwall alone 385 preaching places able to seat a total of 100,290 people! The Methodist membership in that county was then 23,656.

Inside the Church of England there was also a vast increase of evangelical influence. How small that influence was in the early days of the evangelical revival can be judged by the estimate that in the 1740’s no more than six or seven clergy belonged to the evangelical school; yet this was the same party which in 1788 numbered over 500! As an example of growth on the parish level the case of Haworth in Yorkshire is striking. William Grimshaw had become the incumbent at this moor-land village in 1742; in the same year, he says, ‘our dear Lord was pleased to visit my parish’. Six years later, in 1748, Grimshaw was charged before the Archbishop of York with preaching outside his parish. Part of the interrogation went as follows: ‘How many communicants had you at your quarterly sacraments, when you first came to Haworth?’ ‘Twelve, my Lord.’ ‘How many have you now at such solemnities?’ ‘In the winter from four to five hundred, and sometimes in the summer near twelve hundred.’ This made no reference to the vast throngs which attended the communion seasons for the preaching of the Word. In 1749 Whitefield reckoned the number assembled in Haworth churchyard for this purpose to be about 6000. Not long before his death in 1763, Grimshaw stood with John Newton on a hill near Haworth and gave this testimony to his younger friend:

‘When I first came into this country, if I had gone half a day’s journey on horseback towards the east, west, north, and south, I could not meet with nor hear of one truly serious person: and now, through the blessing of God, besides a considerable number whom I have seen or known to have departed this life rejoicing in the Lord’s salvation, and besides five dissenting congregations of which the ministers, and nearly every one of the members, were first awakened under my ministry, I have still at my sacraments, according to the weather, from three to five hundred communicants, of the far greater part of whom I can give almost as particular an account as I can of myself. By my frequent visits, and converse with them, I am acquainted with their several temptations, trials, and exercises, both personal and domestic, both spiritual and temporal, almost as intimately as if I had lived in their families.’

Grimshaw’s work can be taken as representative of what happened in many other parishes in the Church of England. Of the numbers influenced under Whitefield it is quite impossible to conjecture. His ministry was more diffuse than that of Wesley, and unlike his friend — who rarely worked with him after 1741 on account of his hostility to Calvinism Whitefield laid no foundations for a new church organization. The harvest of revival under his preaching was consequently garnered by many — by Church of England parishes, by new congregations such as his own ‘Tabernacle’ at Moorfields, London, and by a number of the older Nonconformist congregations which came to benefit by the awakening. There is certainly evidence to show that the number of persons thus brought into the kingdom of God and not associated with the Arminian branch of Methodism was very great indeed. In 1742 Whitefield speaks of 350 ‘awakened souls’ being received in one day at the Tabernacle and, after a period of open-air preaching in London in May of the same year, of a thousand notes given him by persons ‘convinced, converted, or comforted’. No wonder he wrote, ‘We have had a glorious Easter, or rather a Pentecost. His letters of later years give many similar details, as the following written from Kendal on June 21, 1750, will indicate:

‘I arrived at Kendal this morning, where I shall preach this evening. An entrance is now made into Westmoreland. Pen cannot well describe the glorious scenes that have opened in Yorkshire, etc. Perhaps, since I saw you, seventy or eighty thousand have attended the word preached, in divers places…’

Six years later Charles Wesley was preaching in Birstal, Yorkshire, and noted, ‘My congregation was less by a thousand or two, through George Whitefield preaching today at Haworth.’

Two preachers on the same day, in the same area of the country, drawing congregations which could be numbered in thousands gives some idea of the percentage of the population affected by the gospel! And these figures, it should be remembered, occurred in a century when, though the population increased from five and a half to over nine million, it was far smaller than at the present day. If the same percentage of today’s population in England were so touched by revival it would be enough to make a majority of the nation attenders at evangelical churches. This is precisely what happened two hundred years ago. We read, for instance, of the Mayor of Liverpool writing to the Home Office in 1792 to urge the building of more Anglican churches in the villages of Merseyside. The reason he gave was this:

‘In all these places are nothing but Methodist and other Meeting houses and as all the people in the country are in general dispos’d to go to some place of worship on the Sunday, they go to these places because there is none other . . .

Similar testimonies could be given to the habit of churchgoing which became characteristic of much of the country after the evangelical revival.

Hardly any figures seem to exist on the numbers reaped in the south and west of Wales during the revivals seen in the days of Rowland and his colleagues. It is said that by 1746 Rowland had three thousand communicants in his small Cardiganshire parishes, and that some hundred ministers owed their conversion to him. Edward Morgan was of the opinion that ‘There are thousands, yea tens of thousands now in heaven, who acknowledge him as their father in Christ.’ As Morgan himself however, tells us, the truth is that though the revivals in South Wales extended generally over several counties, ‘they were not recorded, except in heaven’. The spread of these revivals to North Wales in 1791 has already been noted. For many years thereafter an extraordinary degree of blessing attended the preaching in the North. In August, 1793, Thomas Charles wrote: ‘A very general awakening now prevails through the greatest part of the county of Caernarvon. Some hundreds have been effectually brought to the Lord. In some parts of Anglesey and Denbighshire a great work is going on.’

The effects of preaching in this period read like a page from apostolic history as once more it could often be said that ‘fear came. upon every soul’. The preaching of John Elias at Rhuddlan, Flintshire, in the summer of 1802, which cowed evildoers for many years to come; the revival at Beddgelert in 1818 which gave such an impetus to religion in the Arvon district of Caernarvonshire that existing chapels had to be enlarged and twelve new ones built; the awakening through a sermon of Michael Roberts at Llanidloes in April, 1819, which added a thousand to the churches of Montgomeryshire; the sermon of Elias on ‘Let God arise, let his enemies be scattered’, at Pwllheli in 1832, from which it is said there was a membership increase in the churches of Caernarvonshire of no less than 2,500 persons — all these events and many more were long treasured in the memories of the Christians of North Wales.

In the case of Wales a further evidence exists to show that these numbers represented no mere temporary excitement. When the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge brought out an edition of 10,000 copies of the Welsh Bible they were sold out in six months and it was judged that not one-fourth part of the need had been met! This demand. had considerable influence in leading to the formation of the British and Foreign Bible Society, which in only fifteen years had to print seven editions of the Bible, and seven of the New Testament. Their first edition of the Welsh Bible ran to 20,000 copies, the quantity of the second and third is not recorded. The New Testaments amounted to 45,000 copies. And all these were sold almost as rapidly as they came out! It is no wonder that Thomas Charles could write in 1811, ‘The whole country is in a manner emerging from a state of great ignorance and barbarity, to civilization and piety.’

* * *

Of all the lessons which the eighteenth-century revival taught the Church, none was more important than the practical demonstration that scriptural preaching, accompanied by the power of the Spirit of God, is the divine means for extending the kingdom of Christ. This was to be the significant theme of Rowland Hill’s sermon when he preached at the formation of the first interdenominational missionary society of modern times in 1795. Having spoken of the glorious revivals of the past, he declared: ‘What has been done, shall be done. God will ever stand by his own truth, and if he be for us, who can be against us? Preaching the Gospel of the kingdom does all the work.’

The leaders of the eighteenth-century awakening did not live to see the new missionary age which was dawning when Hill spoke, but in redirecting the Church to her true work they had recovered principles which were as relevant to the world as to the English-speaking nations. All that was needed was men of faith and prayer who, understanding these principles, would go out to apply them to all the world. The hope, nurtured in seventeenth-century Britain, recovered in the days of Whitefield, was about to penetrate the darkest places of heathendom.

Charles Wesley both celebrated the revival and anticipated what was to come when he wrote in 1749:

When He first the work begun,
Small and feeble was His day:
Now the word doth swiftly run,
Now it wins its widening way:
More and more it spreads and grows,
Ever mighty to prevail;
Sin’s strongholds it now o’erthrows,
Shakes the trembling gates of hell.