Indeed, many came to me of themselves, in their distress, for private instruction and counsel; and I found, so far as I can remember, that with by far the greater part their apparent concern in public was not just a transient qualm of conscience or merely a floating commotion of the affections, but a rational, fixed conviction of their dangerous, perishing estate....
"In some time many of the convinced and distressed afforded very hopeful, satisfying evidence that the Lord had brought them to true closure with Jesus Christ, and that their distresses and fears had been in a great measure removed in a right gospel way, by believing in the Son of God.

Several of them had very remarkable and sweet deliverances this way.

It was very agreeable to hear their accounts how that when they were in the deepest perplexity and darkness, distress and difficulty, seeking God as poor, condemned, hell-deserving sinners, the scene of recovering grace through a Redeemer has been opened to their understandings with a surprising beauty and glory, so that they were enabled to believe in Christ with joy unspeakable and full of glory."[162:1] The experience of Gilbert Tennent at New Brunswick had no connection with the first awakening at Northampton, but had important relations with later events.

He was the eldest of the four sons whom William Tennent, the Episcopalian minister from Ireland, had brought with him to America and educated at his Log College.

In 1727 he became pastor of a church at New Brunswick, where he was much impressed with what he saw of the results of the work of the Rev.Theodore Frelinghuysen, who for seven years had been pastor of a neighboring Dutch church.