Although a considerable number of
scattered records accompanied what
Jonathan Edwards called the ‘Revival of
Religion in New England in 1740’ it was
not until 1841 that Joseph Tracy
thoroughly sifted these original sources
and became its first historian. He aimed
to provide ‘a work which should furnish
the means of suitably appreciating both
the good and the evil of that period of
religious history.’ ‘His design,’ as C.
H. Maxson has written, ‘was admirably
executed.’
Scarcely any phenomenon could be more
exacting for a church historian than the
Great Awakening, for assessments of its
nature and value differed widely at the
time of its occurrence and have done
ever since: ‘The doctrine of the new
birth made its way like lightning into
the hearers’ consciences’, wrote George
Whitefield, but an adverse contemporary
critic asserted that ‘Multitudes were
seriously, soberly and solemnly out of
their wits.’ Certainly the Great
Awakening does not fit into any of the
usual norms. It had no procedures –
neither ‘altar-calls’ nor enquiry rooms
– for making and recording conversions,
yet the numbers added to the churches in
New England alone have been estimated at
between twenty-five and fifty thousand.
Emotion was profoundly stirred, yet some
of the finest intellects of that age
were among its leaders. It moved the
common people, yet it led to the
establishment of such new colleges of
learning as Princeton and Dartmouth,
Brown and Rutgers. Again, while the
revival supplied neither social nor
political messages, the changes it
brought about in society were as far
reaching as those associated with the
1776 Revolution itself; indeed, Tracy
argues that the effects of the
Revolution would have been very
different if the country had not been
‘strengthened by so many tens of
thousands of converts’.
The author follows his theme from the
local revivals of the 1730s to the
floodtide of 1740-42. While such major
figures as Jonathan Edwards and George
Whitefield are frequently prominent in
the narrative, the material is broad-
based and no small part of its
fascination lies in the quotations given
from the personal narratives and diaries
of such men as Eleazar Wheelock, with
his ‘close, searching, experimental’
preaching, and William Cooper of Brattle
Street Church, Boston, who in one week
in 1741 had more persons coming to him
‘in deep concern about their souls’ than
in the 24 years of his preceding
ministry. Extended treatment is also
given to the ebb of the revival down to
1745, with a penetrating discussion of
the aberrations and divisions which
marked those years. The school of
opinion which treated the Great
Awakening as a movement of mass
hysteria, generated by a few pulpit
orators, has been losing ground of late
years.
But while a number of modern writers
have seen reason to question that
thesis, they have not recognised, as
Tracy did, that just as the doctrines of
the Awakening were biblical so also were
the phenomena. That is not to say that
Tracy approves all that occurred in the
1740s (any more than the New Testament
approves all the phenomena of the
apostolic age), and much of the
importance of his work lies in the
mature and discerning judgment which he
brings to his factual material.
This volume remains second to none in
its definitive treatment of one of the
most important and remarkable eras in
the history of the Christian church in
modern times.