ABSTRACT
In the British Isles during the 1730s and 1740s there took place a series of separate and independent religious revivals, each of which appears to have begun spontaneously. It is true that they had characteristics in common and that such characteristics make it possible for these revivals to be considered under one heading, ‘Revival’, which may be dignified with a capital ‘R’. Some of those characteristics were discussed in the previous chapter. But the primary causes of each revival were local and specific. These separate revivals were transformed from local to national, and then to international, phenomena by the way in which they took place within the same brief period of time, and by the way in which each quickly became known and aroused outside interest. Developments among the German Pietists do not fully explain what happened among the early Welsh evangelicals or in a small parish in rural Lanarkshire. But they do make it easier to understand why and how revivalists in one part of a country, continent or hemisphere rapidly acquired information about new revivals elsewhere and in many cases set out to join, stimulate and prolong them. The apparent spontaneity of the revivals, with no apparent single organizing agency or a single material explanation, led evangelicals themselves to interpret what was happening in terms of the divine will, an outpouring of the Holy Spirit.
