A History of the American People

was started by preachers moving among the rural fastnesses, close to the frontier, among humble
people, some of whom rarely had the chance to enjoy a sermon, many of whom had little contact
with structured religion at all. It was simple but it was not simplistic. 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 (1673-1745), a Scotch-Irish Presbyterian who settled at
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. This was Frontier Religion' in its pristine form, conducted with rhetorical fireworks and riproaring hymn-singing by Tennent and his equally gifted son Gilbert, but also in a spirit of high seriousness, which linked knowledge of God with the spirit of knowledge itself and insisted that education was the high road to heaven. 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. As with most seminal religious movements in history, news of these doings spread by word of mouth and by ministers-some of them unqualified and without a benefice-traveling from one small congregation to another, rather than through the official religious channels. The minister at the Congregationalist church in Northampton, Massachusetts, Jonathan Edwards (1703-58), was intrigued by what he heard. Edwards was a man of outstanding intellect and sensibility, the first major thinker in American history. 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. Yet he graduated first in his class and made a name for himself there as a polymath, writing speculative papers on the Mind, Spiders, the Theory of Atoms, and the Nature of Being. His ability was such that, at the age of twenty-one, he was already head tutor of the college-virtually running it, in fact. But, when his grandfather died, Edwards took over his church in Northampton and labored mightily in what was a rather unrewarding vineyard until he learned to base his message not so much on fear, as the old puritan preachers did, as on joy. It was not that Edwards neglected the element ofsalutary terror,' as he called it. He could
preach a hellfire sermon with the best. He told sinners: The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect, over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked.' This particular sermon, published (in 1741) under the title Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, was avidly read all over the colonies and committed to heart by many lesser evangelists who wanted to melt hardened hearts. But it was Edwards' nature, as an American, to stress not just God's anger but also his bounty to mankind, and to rejoice in the plenty and, not least, the beauty, of God's creation. Edwards put an entirely new gloss on the harsh old Calvinist doctrine of Redemption by stressing that God did not just choose some, and not others, but, as it were, radiated his own goodness and beauty into the souls of men and women so that they became part of him. He called ita kind of participation in God' in which
God puts his own beauty, ie his beautiful likeness, upon their souls.' In a riveting discourse, God Glorified in the Work of Redemption, first published in 1731, he insisted that the happiness human beings find in thethe Glorious Excellences and Beauty of God' is the greatest of earthly
pleasures as well as a spiritual transformation. Through God we love beauty and our joy in
beauty is worship. Moreover, this joy and knowledge of beauty, and through beauty God, is
`attainable by persons of mean capacities and advantages as well as those that are of the greatest