The great awakening in the middle colonies

Preface

Centennial celebrations of what Jonathan Edwards called the "Revival of Religion in New England in 1740," suggested to Joseph Tracy the preparation of a history of that revival. His design was admirably executed. Subordinate attention was given by him to the progress of the revival in other sections of the country and in Great Britain, but in the main his Great Awakening is an exhaustive history of the revival proper in New England. It gives extended quotations from the personal narratives of many promoters of the revival which were written in 1743 and 1744 for Prince's Christian History.

Approaching my task almost three-fourths of a century after Tracy, I find myself more in sympathy than was common in Tracy's day with the catholicity of Whitefield and with the democratic tendencies of the revival which were so largely responsible for the destruction of the ecclesiastical system of New England. Tracy wrote with the purpose of encouraging a similar quickening in his own time but wished to avoid resort to measures which he imagined to be harmful. I find my purpose not in the advocacy of a program but in the attempt to demonstrate that the religious energies liberated by the Great Awakening were transformed into forces, social, humanitarian, educational, and political, which have been of almost incalculable importance in the making of the American people.

This study, much briefer than Tracy's, will make only such reference to the revival in New England as is demanded for understanding the movement in the Middle Colonies. The statement of the relation of the revival in the Middle Colonies to its extension southward will not be so abbreviated, because that relation was very close, and because there is no account of the revival in the South like that of Tracy for New England.

I made a journey from Boston, Massachusetts, to Charleston, South Carolina, visiting most of the Ubraries which possess important collections of colonial newspapers. I gathered a mass of material on the moral and religious conditions of the colonies and the progress of the Great Awakening. Though everywhere courteously received, I feel myself under special obligation to the gentlemen in charge of the splendid collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society. In the notes a number of references to the newspapers, a neglected source material, will be found.

vi PREFACE

I have also visited libraries at New York, New Brunswick, Princeton, Trenton, and Philadelphia. Special mention must be made of some among the many visited. At the library of Union Theological Seminary I was given kindly assistance and access to rare books of the eighteenth century. At the Sage Library, New Brunswick, I found useful material on the relation of the Dutch church to the revival. At the Princeton Theological Library I was given access to the incomparable Sprague Collection. At Trenton the permanent clerk of the presbytery of New Brunswick, Rev. George H. Ingram, permitted me to inspect the manuscript records of that body and kindly presented me with a typewritten copy of the first record book. He was then writing a history of the presbytery of New Brunswick for the Presbyterian Historical Review. At Philadelphia my indebtedness among a number of libraries is greatest to that of the Presbyterian Historical Society. Here the extensive collection of Tennent papers, mostly manuscript sermons of Gilbert Tennent, was put at my disposal, as were also the records of the Second Presbyterian Church of Philadelphia and many old books and pamphlets not found elsewhere.

Source materials other than those mentioned in the statement of my obligations are the journals of Whitefield and Brainerd, Prince's Christian History, the Records of the Presyhterian Church, and many excerpts from eighteenth-century documents which are incorporated in the histories of churches, presbyteries, and denominations and in the biographies of men who were concerned in the movement. The Ecclesiastical Records of the State of New York are a mine of information upon the progress of revivalism in New York and New Jersey and to some extent in Pennsylvania.

The story of Pietism in Pennsylvania is based principally upon the extensive researches of Sachse and serves as an introduction to the more important phases of the revival, the story of which follows. Chapters ii to viii and the greater part of chapter ix are based on original material. So far as chapter ix deals with denominations other than the Presbyterian and Dutch Reformed it is based for the most part on denominational histories, secondary sources, though Edwards' Material may very properly be regarded as original. This part of chapter ix simply fills out the story and shows the remarkable parallelism in the results of the Great Awakening in the various denominations. The final chapter sums up a number of the distinguishing marks of the evangehcal revival.

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I. Introduction, and Pietism in Pennsylvania i

II. Frelinghuysen, and the Beginning of the Revival among

Chapter I Introduction, And Pietism In Pennsylvania

In the middle of the eighteenth century a tidal wave of religious fervor and reforming zeal swept over the British colonies in America. When this wave of emotionalism had passed, when the extraordinary in Christian experience and activity had given place to the ordinary, the friends of the revival, and after them their sons and sons' sons, called it the Great Awakening.

The term "Great Awakening," however, is not employed in this study in a restricted sense as applying only to the religious excitement of 1740, or even to the series of widely extended and closely related revivals among which that of 1 740 was the most remarkable. The name is used as an appropriate designation of the whole evangelical quickening in the colonies. This change in the attitude of the people toward religion, by which after a period of decay it became a power in the lives of thousands, had numerous and widely separated beginnings very early in the century. Among these beginnings the most important were the revival of Pietism among the Germans of Pennsylvania, the rise of a radical evangelism among the Dutch of New Jersey, a similar revival among the English-speaking Presbyterians of the Middle Colonies, and, following these, the remarkable outburst of old-time Puritan feeling among the Congregationahsts of New England. Though this intercolonial and interdenominational quickening rose at times to astonishing heights of excitement, these seasons were but passing manifestations of an abiding movement. It was still powerful in parts of the country at the breaking out of the Revolutionary War.

Though the Great Awakening, conceived of as a long-sustained movement, was professedly unsectarian, and its promoters were not concerned with the ecclesiastical affiliations of the religiously awakened, yet the denominations which heartily accepted its principles became strong and popular. The degree of their acceptance of these evangelistic ideals was the measure of their ultimate numerical strength. This building up of large bodies of aggressive religionists which possessed no special privileges and opposed the union of church and state contributed greatly to a social and political revolution. However vivid to the imaginations of New Lights and New Sides^ were heaven and hell, they excelled their more conservative brethren in determined pursuit of practical aims. Their awakened sympathy established orphanages and other institutions for social betterment. They gave new life to missions. In that time there were no other founders of schools like them. When a conservative majority in a colony held the evangelical minority in unwilling restraint, relief was found in emigration, and whole churches of the discontented moved beyond the jurisdiction of the persecuting government. Thus the Great Awakening was not wave on wave of excitement which, having passed, left no trace upon the placid waters. It was a powerful ferment which was destined to revolutionize colonial society. As an intercolonial movement it was the beginning of a unifying process which was carried still farther by common effort in the French and Indian War and to political union by the Revolutionary War.

Not only was the Great Awakening an intercolonial movement; it was part of a larger awakening within the whole British Empire which may very properly be called the Methodist Revival. Waves of influence crossed the Atlantic in both directions. The riemarkable revival which began in 1734 at Northampton under the preaching of Jonathan Edwards, already mentioned as one of the beginnings of the Great Awakening, was reported in Great Britain, first by the letters of American correspondents, and afterward by the publication in 1737 of Edwards' Narrative of Surprising Conversions.'^ Dissenters and conformists were stirred by its reading,^ and it was influential in the spread of the revival spirit in the homelands.'' Pious colonists in turn became expectant and hopeful

^ The former term was employed in New England and was frequently applied to the radical supporters of the revival; the latter term was employed in the Middle Colonies, but there it was applied to the evangeUcal party in the Presbyterian Church.

* Rev. W. Williams, of Hatfield, wrote a letter to Dr. Colman, of Boston, on the "Remarkable Success of the Gospel" in Hampshire county, dated April 28, 1735, which was published in the New England Weekly Journal, May 12, 1735. Colman forwarded this and other accounts to his correspondents, Drs. Watts and Guyse, of London. They asked for a fuller statement, which request Edwards received in a letter written by Colman to Williams. The narrative was dated November 6, 1736, and was published in London in 1737. The Boston Gazette, December 20, 1736, advertises that "An Account of the late wonderful Work of God by Rev. Jonathan, Edwards is JUST PUBLISHED." This is the narrative of November 6, 1736, abridged by Dr. Colman. The same paper, December 11, 1738, advertised Edwards' Surprising Work of God. This was the unabridged narrative of 1 736. The statement in Dwight's Edwards, Vol. I of Edwards' Works, pp. 137-40, is not accurate.

^Hoskins, "German Influence," Princeton Theological Review, 1907.

^Tyerman's Wesley, I, 220; Macpherson, A History of the Church in Scotland, p. 324.

INTRODUCTION, AND PIETISM IN PENNSYLVANIA 3

when the beginnings of a rehgious quickening in England were reported to them. Readers of the colonial newspapers' in January, 1738, found astonishing accounts of the preaching in the preceding October of a young deacon of the Church of England, Whitefield by name, a member of John Wesley's student club, derisively called the Methodists. Later the colonial papers^ copied from their London exchanges almost incredible stories of the throngs which crowded around the young orator, now become a field preacher. When, therefore, he arrived at Lewes, Delaware, on October 30, 1739, interest in the great evangelist was already raised to the highest pitch. From that day George Whitefield, the English Methodist, was the chief figure in the Great Awakening in the American colonies. For nearly a decade there was constant interchange of reports by both friends and enemies of the revival. English and Scotch tracts and sermons were republished by enterprising printers from Charleston to Boston, and colonial publications reappeared in Glasgow and London.

But the Great Awakening was not only part of the larger Methodist Revival, a movement within the British Empire; it was part of an international evangelical revival which among the Protestants of Germany was known as the pietistic movement.^ In this world movement emphasis was not put upon distinctive names, formal creeds, the claims of this or that system of church polity, or upon the efficacy of merely external rites. Its fundamental ideas were vital piety, the mystic union of the believer with God, the enthronement of emotion upon its rightful seat, and a thoroughgoing reformation of morals.

Spener, of Frankfort, was the founder of Pietism.^ Beginning in 1670 he established collegia pietatis, or private devotional societies,

' American Weekly Mercury, January 24, 1738, and other papers. ^ Boston Gazette, June 25, 1739, and many other papers.

3 Christian History for 1744, pp. 262-84. This weekly paper, edited by T. Prince, Jr., was the first religious periodical published in the colonies. Similar weekly histories of religion had recently been established in London by Whitefield and in Glasgow by McLaurin. These papers illustrate the international character of the revival, in the promotion of which they were established. The Christian History prints an account of the revival in Germany, which account was the preface to the English edition of 1705 of Francke's Pietatas Hallensis. Cotton Mather had previously corresponded with Francke and contributed to his work. They exchanged books. Knowledge of the revival in Germany must have awakened the desire for revival in New England and may have contributed to the revival of 1734. On Mather see Hoskins, pp. 210, 225.

■• The term "Pietism" is employed here in the sense of Riggenbach as a reaction of practical faith from barren orthodoxy, not as a vague term including various speculative and mystical phenomena. Yet there is an undoubted relation between the Labadists, Quakers, Quietists, and Pietists. Kaufmann, " Latitudinarianism and Pietism," in Cambridge Modern History, V, 753 ff.

within the churches, through which he hoped to leaven the whole lump. In these societies the Bible was enthusiastically studied, and the spiritual priesthood of laymen was exercised. Spener advocated gentleness in the intercourse of Lutherans and the Reformed and was called to Berhn by the king of Prussia as a pacificator. Under his influence the new University of Halle was manned with professors of pietistic sentiment. Halle accordingly became the center of evangelism in Germany. Presently the Lutheran communion was divided into two parties. The minority held to Pietism, though repudiating every charge of separation and heresy. The majority charged that the establishment of a church within the church inevitably paved the way to separation, and that the boasted Catholicism of the Pietists but opened the door to heresy, enthusiasm, and chiliastic reveries.^

Spener died in 1705, but already Francke had succeeded him as a vigorous leader of the movement. It was Francke who established the famous orphan house at Halle with its affiliated schools and various institutions for the propagation of this warm type of religion. Under his direction Pietism continued to exercise a wholesome influence upon the Lutheran Church, for it was a protest against dogmatism and formalism. Yet it was narrow in its tendency to define conversion in the terms of a single type. This narrowness was transmitted to the Methodist Revival.

The course of Pietism in the Lutheran Church of Germany may be dismissed with this brief characterization, but a word is demanded concerning the influence of the revival upon the various religious bodies the members of which swarmed to the New World and here participated in the Great Awakening. The Reformed as well as the Lutherans of the Palatinate, from which principality the main emigration was made from Germany to Pennsylvania, were under strong pietistic influences. But none responded more quickly to the new touch of Hfe than the so-called "Sectarian" bodies. The pietistic propaganda was a boon to them, for they too stood for experimental religion and the universal priesthood of beHevers. In addition to these principles, held in common with the revivalists of the estabHshed churches, they more or less generally held such doctrines as the separation of church and state, nonresistance, prohibition of oaths, plainness of dress, the love feast, the kiss of charity, and foot-washing.^

Of these Sectarians, aroused by the revival to activity, the most numerous connection was that of the Mennonites, the representatives

' Mirbt, "Pietism," in New Schaff-Herzog Rel. Enc, Vol. IX.

= Kuhns, The German and Swiss Settlements of Colonial Pennsylvania, p. 173.

INTRODUCTION, AND PIETISM IN PENNSYLVANIA 5

of the Anabaptists of the Reformation. The Schwenkfelders were another survival of the same period. More important than the Schwenkfelders, but like them insignificant in numbers, were the Bunkers, or German Baptist Brethren.' Though the spirit of Pietism was opposed to the organization of new sects, this brotherhood was none the less the fruit of the revival. The Moravians illustrated the opposite and prevailing tendency of the revival, the tendency to union and affiliation with all denominations. The Unitas Fratrum, the ancient Moravian Church, uprooted from its ancestral home, was reorganized by Count Zinzendorf in Germany and became beyond any other sect the very embodiment of Pietism. Moravianism was a wonderful system with its classes and discipline, with its hierarchy and co-operative business enterprises, with its orphanages and schools, with its vent for emotion and recreation in strangely appealing music, and above all with its truly heroic prosecution of foreign missions.^

Again the general international character of the whole religious movement can be seen from the relation between the German reformers and the men of England whom the new spirit was beginning to move. John Wesley was converted through the instrumentality of Peter Boehler, the Moravian. The Methodist societies in the Church of England adopted many features of Moravianism. Indeed the members of that brotherhood were pre-eminently the mediators of German Pietism to the revivalists of England. Moreover, George Whitefield, the chief apostle of the Great Awakening, was influenced profoundly by Pietism. In the story of his youth Whitefield tells of his first meeting with Charles Wesley.3 Whitefield was then a young Pembroke College student, shy but thirsting for spiritual friendship. Wesley understood his need and put into his hands Francke's treatise, the Fear of Man. This was Whitefield's introduction to the German Pietist whose orphan house at Halle was the model of his own in Georgia, and to whose example he frequently appealed. Whitefield's reading was not in systems of doctrine'' but in devotional books, pietistical and mystical, sometimes passionate in their portrayal of the struggles of the tempted. Ardent and imaginative as he was by nature, he experienced the very struggles of which he read, even suffering the torments of the damned. His surrender to these suggestions in such extreme fashion he afterward regarded as yielding to

' Brumbaugh, A History of the German Baptist Brethren, p. 12.

^Pennsylvania Gazette, February 24, 1743.

i Whitefield, Brief Account, pp. 19, 20.

* Whitefield, A Letter .... in Answer to ... . Querists, p. 61.

the temptations of Satan. But these struggles were very real to him and threw him into serious illness. At last his cry for relief was heard. Then his exaltation of spirit even exceeded the measure of his former distress. He was the first of the band of Methodists to pass through what the Moravians called "holy mourning" to its happy issue in assurance.'

The influence of Pietism upon Whitefield did not end with his conversion. There are frequent references in his journals to pietistic literature.^ The native tendency of his mind to eschew plodding logical processes and to leap at one bound to conclusions was encouraged by the mystical books which he read and by his intercourse with the Moravians. Deep impressions and sudden impulses were followed as inspirations of the divine Spirit, but if they proved harmful and erroneous they were afterward attributed to Satan. It was this that Jonathan Edwards criticized in friendly conversation with Whitefield, and it was this that Charles Chauncy openly denounced as Quakerish and Jesuitical superstition.^ But impulses and impressions were incidental; from Pietism the evangelist had learned that Christianity is a life, not a creed; the glow and warmth of that life he had come to feel himself.

But Pietism had another connection with the religious movement which is to be traced in these chapters, more direct, if less potent, than that indicated by its efifects upon the Wesleys, Whitefield, and other Methodist leaders, for Pietists came in great numbers to the Middle Colonies, and their influence ultimately determined the dominant character of the colonial German population. In 1683, two years after WilUam Penn obtained his charter, the first body of German emigrants arrived in Philadelphia and soon afterward founded Germantown. They were attracted by the proposals of Penn's Holy Experiment. The company was composed of Mennonites and German Quakers.^

The Mennonites were followed in 1694 by a strange body of mystics, forty in number, including university men of varied learning. First of all these mystics were Pietists, but they were also chiliasts.s It is remark-

' Whitefield, Brief Account, pp. 31, 40. Whitefield was converted in 1735 and Wesley in 1738; that is, in those years they passed through the emotional experiences which they accounted their conversions.

"Whitefield's Journals for January 6, 9, and March 26, 1738; September 15, 1739, etc.

3 Hoskins, op. cit., p. 223; Dwight, op. oil., p. 147; Chauncy, Seasonable Thoughts, P- 173.

* Sachse, German Pietists, p. 4. s Ibid., pp. 37, 38, 80, 129, 130.

INTRODUCTION, AND PIETISM IN PENNSYLVANIA 7

able that every revival of religion revives too the belief of the early Christians in the speedy return of the Lord. This body was sometimes called the Order of the Woman in the Wilderness, for were its members not carried over the sea by the "wings of the great eagle," and did they not flee into the wilderness, where God, as they imagined, had prepared a place for them ?' Here they would wait for the harbinger of the millennium soon to dawn upon the world, according to the calculations of their astronomers and astrologists. They were orthodox Lutherans, but they held in addition to the usual articles of faith these esoteric doctrines. Science and pseudo-science were strangely commingled, for they practiced medicine and manufactured amulets, studied botany and employed the divining rod to determine the location of springs of water.^

In contrast with the coming of this little band of enthusiasts there was in 1 709 the arrival of a horde of destitute Palatines. Most of them were brought to the province of New York by the English government. A few of those who first settled in New York made their way down the Susquehanna River and finally reached the more hospitable province of Pennsylvania. In 171 7 the immigration of Palatines direct to Pennsylvania was suddenly swelled by the coming of six or seven thousand. They were Reformed and Lutherans in approximately equal numbers, many of both communions holding pietistic views. They were driven from the fatherland by reHgious persecution and economic distress.^

Not all these Germans who year by year sought refuge in the New World were members of the two leading churches. Little companies of Sectarians arrived from time to time. In 1719 the Dunkers came. There were only twenty families, and these scattered to obtain suitable lands. Ten years later their founder, Alexander Mack, brought a large company to Germantown. The Dunkers were followed by the Schwenkfelders in 1734, and that year a few Moravian evangelists arrived. Thus the several denominations which had been stirred by the new evangel in the fatherland, and which were to be active in pious endeavor in the New World, were now planted in Pennsylvania, and some of them were also represented in New York and New Jersey.''

America was at first a disappointing refuge to these German immigrants. The hard conditions on the frontier, the exhausting labor of

3 Ecclesiastical Records of the State of New York, p. 1 71 2.

* Brumbaugh, op. cit., p. 49. It is estimated that up to 1739 there had been a German emigration to Pennsylvania of thirty to thirty-five thousand. Kuhns, op. cit., pp. 55, 57.

clearing the forests, the isolation of life, the breaking of former ties, the lack of encouragement from coreligionists — all these things had a benumbing effect upon the German immigrants, much to the detriment of their religious and intellectual well-being. Some, who had suffered the spoiling of their goods for sake of conscience in the Old World, seemed to lose their religion in the New World. They saw their children growing up in ignorance. They were perplexed by the religious confusion, for there were many sects among the Germans besides those mentioned, and some of them held views dangerous to society. The members of churches maintained by the state in the fatherland were unaccustomed to voluntary support of the gospel. Even the Sectarians were baffled for the time being. Such were the conditions in the early years when the material foundation was being laid.'

The prospect was discouraging, but the event proved that these plodding Germans had chosen the best lands and thus had the basis for material prosperity, while the leaven of Pietism in time gave character to the whole society. Among them mystical and pietistic leaders worked effectively. The forty mystics mentioned as coming to Pennsylvania in 1694 sought to meet the religious needs of the German colonists. Though these mystics had buried themselves in the western wilderness, their tabernacle was but three miles from Germantown. Children were received to be educated by them, and all who studied at the tabernacle were deeply imbued with the spirit of Pietism. This was the first charitable institution in Pennsylvania. Kelpius, the leader of the band, professing love for all denominations, sought to unite the Germans in one church. He was held in great veneration, but he died early, and even before his death the symbolical number of forty was broken by withdrawals.^

The associates of Kelpius were highly individualistic in their ideas and practices. Koster observed the Seventh-day as a day of sacred rest and immersed his converts from Quakerism when they insisted on following scriptural precedent. Others he led back to the Church of England. Thus the Baptists and Episcopalians were indebted to this Lutheran minister whose chief work was among the German people.^ The Falkner brothers, Daniel and Justus, also members of the order, gave years of missionary service to their fellow Lutherans. They were itinerant

' Sachse, German Sectarians, pp. 50-52. ' Kuhns, op. ciL, p. 86.

3 Sachse, The German Pietists, pp. 274, 277, 286; Morgan Edwards, Material, p. 45 ; Vedder, A History of the Baptists in the Middle States, p. 64; McConnell, History of the American Episcopal Church, pp. 80, 81.

INTRODUCTION, AND PIETISM IN PENNSYLVANIA 9

pastors for a great part of New York and New Jersey. Others of the band served as physicians and lay workers. At last the tabernacle was deserted. Only a solitary recluse, here and there, was left of the company that were called "Pietists" in distinction from all others. Whitefield tells of an interview with the hermit Matthai, the successor of Kelpius. Some members of the order lived even until the arrival of Muhlenberg, himself a Pietist from Halle, who was sent by Francke's orphanage as a missionary to America.'

Notwithstanding the efforts of these missionaries of pietistic sentiment and of others of conservative opinion violently opposed to Pietism, the rehgious destitution was great among the Lutherans and still greater among the Reformed. There was difficulty in obtaining regularly ordained and university-trained ministers, but the Sectarians, requiring only that education which comes from the exercise of gifts, often developed religious leaders of remarkable power. Furthermore, they were self-supporting. For this reason the Mennonites, and notably the Bunkers, were far more active and successful than the more numerous Lutherans and Reformed. Peter Becker, the leader of the first company of Dunkers, was discouraged by the separation of his people to obtain homes, but his spirit was stirred by a Mennonite revival in Germantown in 1722. The following year he organized a little church of the German Baptist Brethren. There were other revivals under Dunker patronage, though the principal evangeHst was a mystic, Beissel, not of their number.^

Beissel had come to America intending to join the mystics on the Wissahickon, but finding the tabernacle deserted he became a recluse like some of the surviving members of the order. He was a man of genius. He had intercourse with the solitary Pietists, with the Labadists of Maryland, and with Seventh-day Baptists. In 1723 he actually joined the Dunkers, but he brought with him an eclectic assortment of ideas and practices borrowed from all with whom he had had relations. The result was a schism among the brethren. Finally Beissel established the famous communistic institution at Ephrata.^

Though the Dunkers were greatly weakened by constant defection to their brethren who kept the Seventh-day, they did not lose the evangelistic spirit. There was special evidence of this after Alexander Mack, founder of the sect, came to Pennsylvania, seeking rest from wanderings

' Sachse, The German Pietists, pp. 299-386, 402; Whitefield, Journal, No. 5, p. 48. ^ Sachse, The German Pietists, pp. 52, 78. * Ibid., p. 104.

lo THE GREAT AWAKENING IN THE MIDDLE COLONIES

and persecutions in the Old World. As a result of frequent revivals a number of churches were organized. The converts were taken, of course, from the neglected Lutheran and Reformed population. When Zinzendorf called the first Pennsylvania synod, of which an account will be given in a later chapter, the Dunkers were able to send their delegation to the united council of the German churches as representing a body of earnest reHgionists of very considerable strength. In principles the German Baptist Brethren were like the Quakers, but they retained a propagating zeal which the Quakers were fast losing.^

Thus while the Great Awakening was part of the contemporaneous Methodist Revival and part of a world movement which had begun in Germany and was known on the Continent as Pietism, so the revival of Pietism among the Germans of the Middle Colonies was one of the several beginnings of the Great Awakening. This separate stream of emotional religion has been traced in this chapter only to its junction in 1739 with other streams of like nature. The operations of Zinzendorf, the Moravian, Muhlenberg, the Lutheran, and Schlatter, the organizer of the German Reformed Church, belonging to a later period, will be described in their appropriate connections. Throughout the eighteenth century the Germans of Pennsylvania were peculiarly subject to religious excitement.^ The pietistic sentiments of early and influential settlers and the labors of itinerant evangelists kept alive warm religious feehng. Pietism in its radical individualism brought to the New World men fantastically diverse from each other. Yet in spite of superficial differences, as true Pietists, they were sympathetic with all Christians and held as a fundamental principle that Christianity in its essence is the life of God in the soul of man.