CHAPTER XII.
CLOSE OF THE COLONIAL ERA--THE GERMAN CHURCHES--THE BEGINNINGS OF THE METHODIST CHURCH.
The quickening of religious feeling, the deepening of religious conviction, the clearing and defining of theological opinions, that were incidental to the Great Awakening, were a preparation for more than thirty years of intense political and warlike agitation.

The churches suffered from the long distraction of the public mind, and at the end of it were faint and exhausted.

But for the infusion of a "more abundant life" which they had received, it would seem that they could hardly have survived the stress of that stormy and revolutionary period.
The religious life of this period was manifested in part in the growth of the New England theology.

The great leader of this school of theological inquiry, the elder Edwards, was born at the opening of the eighteenth century.

The oldest and most eminent of his disciples and successors, Bellamy and Hopkins, were born respectively in 1719 and 1721, and entered into the work of the Awakening in the flush of their earliest manhood.