ABSTRACT
The angry mobs turned into eager crowds, the church doors swung open, the hordes who came to hear Charles Wesley and Whitefield preach mounted to eight, to ten, to fifteen, to twenty thousand. Among the ignorant and poor Wesleyanism had the effect of a revolution; and though Wesley noted how seldom his preaching roused the educated and wealthy, in time it converted persons as Lord Chesterfield's wife, Lord Dartmouth's wife, Lord Dartmouth himself, and the poet Cowper. What the Wesleyan revival represents historically, beyond the founding of a new and powerful sect, is first a cleansing influence upon the life of its times, and second the bringing to birth of a vivid life of the emotions. For the too credulous or zealous, Wesleyanism meant a lifetime of torturing doubts and shuddersome forebodings. Hence the Wesleyan movement stirred up the waters of a morally stagnant age.
