These preachers were anxious not just to deliver a message but to get their hearers to learn it themselves by studying the Bible; and to do that they needed to read. So an important element in the early Great Awakening was the provision of some kind of basic education in the frontier districts and among rural communities which as yet had no regular schools.
A key figure was William Tennent, a Scotch-Irish Prebyterian who settled a Neshaminy, Pennsylvania, in the 1720s, where he built what he called his Log College, a primitive rural academy teaching basic education as well as godliness. Many of Tennent's pupils, or disciples, became prominent preachers themselves, all over the colonies, and his Log College became the prototype for the famous College of New Jersey, founded in 1746, which eventually settled at Princeton.
The minister at the congregationalist church in Northampton, Massachusetts, Jonathan Edwards (1703-58), the first major thinker in American history, was intrigued by what he heard. He was the son and grandson of Puritan ministers, and had gone to Yale almost as young (not quite thirteen) as Cotton Mather went to Harvard. When his grandfather died, Edwards took over his church in Northampton and he learned to base his message no so much on fear, as the old Puritan preachers did, as on joy.
