The example and fraternal counsel of this good man made him sensible of the fruitlessness of his own work, and moved him to more earnest prayers and labors.

Having been brought low with sickness, he prayed to God to grant him one half-year more in which to "endeavor to promote his kingdom with all my might at all adventures." Being raised up from sickness, he devoted himself to earnest personal labors with individuals and to renewed faithfulness in the pulpit, "which method was sealed by the Holy Spirit in the conviction and conversion of a considerable number of persons, at various times and in different places, in that part of the country, as appeared by their acquaintance with experimental religion and good conversation." This bit of pastoral history, in which is nothing startling or prodigious, was at least five years previous to the "Surprising Conversions" at Northampton.

There must have been generally throughout the country a preparedness for the Great Awakening.
* * * * * It was in that year (1735) in which the town of Northampton was all ablaze with the glory of its first revival under Edwards that George Whitefield, first among the members of Wesley's "Holy Club" at Oxford, attained to that "sense of the divine love" from which he was wont to date his conversion.

In May, 1738, when the last reflections from the Northampton revival had faded out from all around the horizon, the young clergyman, whose first efforts as a preacher in pulpits of the Church of England had astonished all hearers by the power of his eloquence, arrived at Savannah, urged by the importunity of the Wesleys to take up the work in Georgia in which they had so conspicuously failed.

He entered eagerly into the sanguine schemes for the advantage of the young colony, and especially into the scheme for building and endowing an orphan-house in just that corner of the earth where there was less need of such an institution than anywhere else.