CONTINENTAL INFLUENCES: (1) IMMIGRATION

Despite the enormous dominance of England in the cultural exchanges between Britain and the continent in the early eighteenth century, the British churches as a whole were subject to important continental influences, influences which helped prepare British opinion for the startling news, sedulously disseminated, of religious upheaval in the American colonies. Just as the revival in the Rhineland and the international activities of the Moravians had helped to bridge the chasm between the Lutheran and Reformed worlds, so too did the British churches. A central position in the propaganda for the revival came to be taken by a group of ministers of the Church of Scotland, John Gillies producing an updated version of the Acts of the Apostles in his Historical Collections of Accounts of Revival; and the British Reformed churches fully and self-consciously shared in those changes of thought and sentiment in the Reformed world which had paved the way for revival in the Lower Rhine, Netherlands and New England. If August Hermann Francke, himself an apostle of reform and renewal rather than revival, had under-pinned the revival movements of the first generation, and the world-wide conflict between his son and Zinzendorf had given shape to the revival movements of the second generation, it was the eccentric English clergyman George Whitefield who established himself as the universal gospel salesman of the next generation, helping to unify both the friends and enemies of revival by focussing the division of spirits upon himself.

Britain had of course suffered many similar ideological alarms to her continental neighbours.