George Whitefield Grave

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Edwards' earliest published sermons were widely read and discussed. What particularly interested fellow-evangelists was his remarkable account, A Faithful Narrative (1737), of the conversions his methods brought about in his own parish. One of the men he thus stirred was John Wesley, in Georgia in the years 1735-8, to help general Oglethorpe to evangelize colonists and Indians. Another was George Whitefield, also a member of the general's mision. In 1740 he made the first continental tour of the colonies, from Savannah to Boston. It was Whitefield, the Grand Itinerant as he was known, who caused the Great Awakening to take off. He seems to have appealed equally to conventional Anglicans, fierce Calvinists, German pietists, Scotch-Irish, Dutch, even a few Catholics.

Whitefield made seven continental tours in the thirty years from 1740.

Whitefield was the first American public figure, equally well kown from Georgia to New Hampshire.

The great Anglo-Irish philosopher Bishop Berkeley taught Samuel Johnson, who had been with Edwards at Yale, that morality was 'the same as the religion of Nature,' not indeed discoverable without Revelation but 'founded on the first principles of reason and nature.' Johnson became the first president of the King's College (Future Columbia University). The Awakening indeed had a dramatic impact on education at all levels.