Jonathan Edwards, the most famous native-born revivalist of the Great Awakening, was living proof that the evangelical temperament need not be hostile to learning. Edwards, though deeply pious, was passionately devoted to intellectual pursuits. But in 1725, four years after graduating from Yale, he was offered the position of assistant at his grandfather Solomon Stoddard’s church in Northampton, Massachusetts. He accepted, and when Stoddard died two years later, Edwards became pastor.
During his six decades in Northampton, Stoddard had so dominated the ministers of the Connecticut Valley that some referred to him as “pope.” His prominence came in part from the “open enrollment” admission policy he adopted for his own church. Evidence of saving grace was neither required nor expected of members: mere good behavior sufficed. As a result, the grandson inherited a congregation whose members were possessed of an “inordinate engagedness after this world.” How ready they were to meet their Maker in the next world was another question.
Edwards had a talent for dramatizing what was in store for unconverted listeners. The heat of Hell’s consuming fires and the stench of brimstone became palpable at his rendering. In his most famous sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” delivered at Enfield, Connecticut, in 1741, he pulled out all the stops, depicting a “dreadfully provoked” God holding the unconverted over the pit of Hell, “much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect.” Later, on the off-chance that his listeners did not recognize themselves among the “insects” in God’s hand, he declared that “this is the dismal case of every soul in this congregation that has not been born again, however moral and strict, sober and religious, they may otherwise be.” A great moaning reverberated through the church. People cried out, “What must I do to be saved?”
Unfortunately for some church members, Edwards’s warnings about the state of their souls caused much anxiety. One disconsolate member, Joseph Hawley, slit his throat. Edwards took the suicide calmly. “Satan seems to be in a great rage,” he declared. But for some of Edwards’s most prominent parishioners, Hawley’s death roused doubts. They began to miss the forgiving God of Solomon Stoddard.
Rather than soften his message, Edwards persisted, and in 1749 his parishioners voted unanimously to dismiss him. He became a missionary to Indians in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. In 1759 he was appointed president of Princeton, but he died of smallpox before he could take office.
By the early 1750s a reaction had set in against religious “enthusiasm” in all its forms. Except in the religion-starved South, where traveling New Side Presbyterians and Baptists continued their evangelizing efforts; the Great Awakening had run its course. Whitefield’s tour of the colonies in 1754 attracted little notice.
Although it caused divisions, the Great Awakening also fostered religious toleration. If one group claimed the right to worship in its own way, how could it deny to other Protestant churches equal freedom?
The Awakening was also the first truly national event in American history. It marks the time when the previously distinct histories of New England, the Middle Colonies, and the South began to intersect. Powerful links were being forged. As early as 1691 there was a rudimentary intercolonial postal system. In 1754, not long after the Awakening, the farsighted Benjamin Franklin advanced his Albany Plan for a colonial union to deal with common problems, such as defense against Indian attacks on the frontier.
Thirteen once-isolated colonies, expanding to the north and south as well as westward, were merging.
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