‘I Will once more shake the heavens’: the 1762 Revival in Wales

Abstract

The Evangelical Revival in eighteenth-century Wales actually consisted of a number of separate ‘great collective spiritual outpourings’, as John Walsh described them, which seem to have been completely spontaneous and unplanned. By the nineteenth century, periodic revivals had become accepted as a characteristic of Welsh Nonconformity, but were perhaps increasingly less spontaneous. Historians have suggested that arranged revivals became more common in a Welsh context as a result of the influence of the ideas of Charles Finney in the 1830s and 1840s. Daniel Rowland’s first biographer, John Owen, condemned this as a ‘forcing system’ which he thought was ‘calculated only to increase the number of unsound professors’. In contrast, Owen emphasized the genuine unplanned nature of the eighteenth-century revivals. This paper examines the origins and influence of one of those unplanned revivals which occurred between 1762 and 1764, the first general renewal of Calvinistic Methodism in Wales after its initial beginning in the 1730s and the model for the future revivalist tradition.