Ranging the continent literally from Georgia to Maine, with all his weaknesses and indiscretions, and with his incomparable eloquence, welcomed by every sect, yet refusing an exclusive allegiance to any, Whitefield exercised a true apostolate, bearing daily the care of all the churches, and becoming a messenger of mutual fellowship not only between the ends of the continent, but between the Christians of two hemispheres.

Remote churches exchanged offices of service.

Tennent came from New Jersey to labor in New England; Dickinson and Burr and Edwards were the gift of the northern colonies to the college at Princeton.

The quickened sense of a common religious life and duty and destiny was no small part of the preparation for the birth of the future nation.
Whether for good or for evil, the few years from 1740 to 1750 were destined to impress upon the American church in its various orders, for a hundred years to come, the character of _Methodism_.[176:1] In New England, the idea, into which the first pastors had been trained by their experience as parish ministers in the English established church, of the parochial church holding correlative rights and duties toward the community in all its families, succumbed at last, after a hundred years of more or less conscious antagonism, to the incompatible principle, adopted from the Separatists of Plymouth, of the church formed according to elective affinity by the "social compact" of persons of the age of discretion who could give account to themselves and to one another of the conscious act and experience of conversion.

This view, subject to important mitigations or aggravations in actual administration, held almost unquestioned dominance in the New England churches until boldly challenged by Horace Bushnell, in his "epoch-making" volume on "Christian Nurture" (1846), as a departure from the orthodoxy of the fathers.
In the Presbyterian Church, revivalism as a principle of church life had to contend with rules distinctly articulated in its constitutional documents.