George Whitefield Comes to Middletown

Abstract

pREACHED to about 4000 People (great Numbers of which were considerably affected) about ii o'Clock. Under date of Thursday, October 23, i740, George Whitefield's journal thus briefly records his public appearance at Middletown, Connecticut, on his first evangelistic tour through England.' His calm words give the modern reader little conception of the tremendous excitement which news of his coming produced in the neighborhood of Middletown, as it did nearly everywhere he went. A more vivid portrayal of the scene upon Whitefield's arrival exists, however, in a narrative written by one Nathan Cole, a farmer and carpenter of Kensington Parish, some dozen miles northwest of Middletown.' Indeed, in the whole body of literature of the Great Awakening, in which George Whitefield played so central a part, it would be hard to find a more moving description of how the eloquent preacher's great audiences were assembled than is contained in this passage from Nathan Cole's autobiographical Spiritual Travels. Cole, a man of about twenty-nine at the time of Whitefield's visit, had been an Arminian, one who, as he describes himself, intended to be saved by my own works such as prayers and good deeds. But Whitefield's Middletown sermon convinced him of the doctrine of election and of his own probable damnation. Two years of inner torment followed before he had the joyous experience of conversion. Cole's new convictions led him to separate himself from the orthodox Congregational church of which he had been a member and for a number of years he and a few like-minded neighbors conducted private religious meetings in Kensington. Later he joined a New Light organization now known as the South Congrega-