Excerpt from The Great Awakening, in the Middle Colonies

Centennial celebrations of what Jonathan Edwards called the Revival of Religion in New England in suggested to Joseph Tracy the preparation of a history of that revival. His design was admirably executed. Subordinate attention was given by him to the progress of the revival in other sections of the country and in Great Britain, but in the main his Great Awakening is an exhaustive history of the revival proper in New England. It gives extended quotations from the personal narratives of many promoters of the revival which were written in 1743 and 1744 for Prince's Christian History.

Approaching my task almost three-fourths of a century after Tracy, I find myself more in sympathy than was common in Tracy's day with the catholicity of Whitefield and with the democratic tendencies of the revival which were so largely responsible for the destruction of the ecclesiastical system of New England. Tracy wrote with the purpose of encouraging a similar quickening in his own time but wished to avoid resort to measures which he imagined to be harmful. I find my purpose not in the advocacy of a program but in the attempt to demonstrate that the religious energies liberated by the Great Awakening were trans formed into forces, social, humanitarian, educational, and political, which have been of almost incalculable importance in the making of the American people.

This study, much briefer than Tracy's, will make only such reference to the revival in New England as is demanded for understanding the movement in the Middle Colonies. The statement of the relation Of the revival in the Middle Colonies to its extension southward will not be so abbreviated, because that relation was very close, and because there is no account of the revival in the South like that of Tracy for New England.

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