In all this the Episcopal Church was affected by the Awakening only by way of reaction. But it owes a debt to the direct influence of the Awakening which it has not always been careful to acknowledge. We have already seen that the requickening of the asphyxiated church of Virginia was part of the great revival, and this character remains impressed on that church to this day. The best of those traits by which the American Episcopal Church is distinguished from the Church of England, as, for instance, the greater purity of the ministry and of the membership, are family traits of the revival churches; the most venerated of its early bishops, White and Griswold, bore the same family likeness; and the "Evangelical party," for a time so influential in its counsels, was a tardy and mild afterglow from the setting of the Great Awakening.[179:1]
An incident of the revival, failing which it would have lacked an essential token of the presence of the Spirit of Christ, was the kindling of zeal for communicating the gospel to the ignorant, the neglected, and the heathen. Among the first-fruits of Whitefield's preaching at the South was a practical movement among the planters for the instruction of their slaves--devotees, most of them, of the most abject fetich-worship of their native continent. Of the evangelists and pastors most active in the revival, there were few, either North or South, whose letters or journals do not report the drawing into the churches of large numbers of negroes and Indians, whose daily lives witnessed to the sincerity of their profession of repentance and Christian faith. The Indian population of the southeastern corner of Connecticut with such accord received the gospel at the hands of the evangelists that heathenism seemed extinct among them.[179:2]
Among the first trophies of the revival at Norwich was a Mohegan boy named Samson Occum. Wheelock, pastor at Lebanon, one of the most ardent of the revival preachers, took him into his family as a student. This was the beginning of that school for the training of Indian preachers which, endowed in part with funds gathered by Occum in England, grew at last into Dartmouth College. The choicest spiritual gifts at the disposal of the church were freely spent on the missions. Whitefield visited the school and the field, and sped Kirkland on his way to the Oneidas. Edwards, leaving Northampton in sorrow of heart, gave his incomparable powers to the work of the gospel among the Stockbridge Indians until summoned thence to the presidency of Princeton College. When Brainerd fainted under his burden, it was William Tennent who went out into the wilderness to carry on the work of harvest. But the great gift of the American church to the cause of missions was the gift of David Brainerd himself. His life was the typical missionary's life--the scattering of precious seed with tears, the heart-sickness of hope deferred, at last the rejoicing of the harvest-home. His early death enrolled him in the canon of the saints of modern Christendom. The story of his life and death, written by Jonathan Edwards out of that fatherly love with which he had tended the young man's latest days and hours, may not have been an unmixed blessing to the church. The long-protracted introspections, the cherished forebodings and misgivings, as if doubt was to be cultivated as a Christian virtue, may not have been an altogether wholesome example for general imitation. But think what the story of that short life has wrought! To how many hearts it has been an inspiration to self-sacrifice and devotion to the service of God in the service of man, we cannot know. Along one line its influence can be partly traced. The "Life of David Brainerd" made Henry Martyn a missionary to the heathen. As spiritual father to Henry Martyn, Brainerd may be reckoned, in no unimportant sense, to be the father of modern missions to the heathen.