[2] Knowledge of the Lord: The Early Evangelical Movement

The decade beginning in 1734 witnessed in the English-speaking world a more important development than any other, before or after, in the history of Protestant Christianity: the emergence of the movement that became Evangelicalism. Priority in the British Isles must go to Wales. A young schoolmaster living near Brecon, Howel Harris, came to faith during the spring of 1735. l A few weeks later Daniel Rowland, curate at Llangeitho in Carmarthenshire, underwent a similar experience of forgiveness. Soon both began travelling round South Wales, gathering large audiences and preaching the arresting message that salvation could be known now.2 England followed. George Whitefield, converted as an Oxford undergraduate in the spring of 1735, stirred both Bristol and London by his oratory two years later, exhorting his hearers to seek the new birth.3 Charles Wesley, who at Oxford had been Whitefield’s mentor in his religious quest, did not reach assurance of faith for himself until 1738. In the same week, on 24 May, his brother John felt his heart ‘strangely warmed’ as he trusted ‘in Christ, Christ alone for salvation’. Prompted by Whitefield, John Wesley began his career of open-air preaching at Bristol in the following year.4 Whitefield roused parts of Scotland in 1741, and in the next year there broke out at Cambuslang near Glasgow a revival in which men and women anxiously looked for pardon.5 Already there had been a comparable phenomenon in the colony of Massachusetts. In 17345, exactly when Harris and Rowland were wrestling with their conviction of sin in Wales, Jonathan Edwards was involved in a revival in the town of Northampton, where he was minister. His published analysis of the revival had impressed Wesley between his experience of trusting Christ and the inauguration of his travelling ministry and was well known to the Scottish

quickening of the spiritual tempo in Britain and beyond.