Gentle Conquest is Published Monthly by Charles Carrin

1741, the Dean of Yale University, the Rev. Samuel Johnson, became alarmed at the effect George Whitefield’s preaching was having on the students at the University. Whitefield, who was contemporary with John and Charles Wesley and a personal friend of Benjamin Franklin, experienced “miraculous signs” attending his ministry. The Dean wrote a friend in England about these strange physical manifestations affecting those who heard Whitefield preach. Not only the students, he lamented, but whole congregations were being seized with some kind of bizarre power. Dean Johnson, in criticizing Mr. Whitefield and other revivalists, described their preaching as “hideous outcries,” but failed to mention that a wave of God-fearing morality, intense prayer, and love for Jesus, was also gripping the campus. His letter said:

But this new enthusiasm, in consequence of Whitefield’s preaching through the country and his disciples’, has got great footing in the college (Yale) ... Many of the scholars have been possessed of it, and two of this year’s candidates were denied their degrees for their disorderly and restless endeavors to propagate it ... We have now prevailing among us the most odd and unaccountable enthusiasm than perhaps observed in any age or nation. For not only are the minds of many people at once struck with prodigious distresses upon their hearing the hideous outcries of our itinerant preachers, but even their bodies are frequently in a moment affected with the strangest convulsions and involuntary agitations and cramps, which also have sometimes happened to those who came as mere spectators ...”

As an example of his concern for Yale students, Johnson knew that Samuel Buell, another of their graduates, preached in Jonathan Edwards church in Northampton, Massachusetts. The same peculiar manifestations had occurred. The “anointing” on George Whitefield was passing to other Yale evangelists. Fortunately, Edwards described Buell’s preaching in a letter to a friend, the Reverend Thomas Prince of Boston. He said: “There were some instances of persons lying in a sort of trance, remaining for perhaps a whole twenty-four hours motionless, and with their senses locked up but in the meantime under strong imaginations, as though they went to Heaven, and had there a vision of glorious and delightful objects. But when the people were raised to this height, Satan took the advantage, and his interposition in many instances soon became very apparent; and a great deal of caution and pains were found necessary to keep the people, many of them, from running wild.

Today we wonder if the accusation that the people’s “strong imaginations as though they went to Heaven,” and their being “raised to this height,” which the clergy thought gave access to Satan, was not a tragic misjudgment by the ministry. Satan does not willfully glorify Heaven. The “great deal of caution and pains necessary to keep the people from running wild” may have been another religious mistake. In all probability, the people’s behavior was no different from the “drunken” actions on the day of Pentecost. Acts 2. Records of Edwards’ day tell that riotous laughter, jerking, loud shouting, groaning, came upon the people. Thankfully, Acts, chapter two, records no effort by Peter to control those overcome with such manifestations.