Quotes from Douglas A. Sweeney

What a precious treasure God has committed into our hands in that he has given us the Bible. How little do most persons consider how much they enjoy in that they have the possession of that holy book. ... What an excellent book is this, and how far exceeding all human writings.... He that has a Bible, and don't observe what is contained [in] it, is like a man that has a box full of silver and gold, and don't know it.

Edwards taught that "most ... are to blame" for their "inattentive, unobservant way of reading" this gift of heaven. "The word of God contains the most noble, and worthy, and entertaining objects, ... the most excellent things that man can exercise his thoughts about." Those who had truly "tasted the sweetness" of God's Scriptural divinity ought to live out their days, he said, in "longing for more and more of it."126

To this day, the vast majority of black Christians are Baptists, and this is not a coincidence. White Baptists proved most aggressive in gospel missions to slaves. Their spiritual dynamism, populism, and extemporary preaching attracted large numbers of Africans in the early United States.

Christ has brought it to pass, that those that the Father had given him, should be brought into the household of God; that he, and his Father, and his people should be as it were one society, one family; that the church should be as it were admitted into the society of the blessed Trinity.156

Of course, there were other motives as well for their migration to the New World. But many believed that Native Americans had descended from ancient Israel—from the "ten lost tribes" dispersed soon after the exile in the Old Testament—and that their salvation was a necessary component of the conversion of "all Israel" that would precede the return of Christ (Rom. 11:11–36).

On the one hand, disestablishment led to an exponential increase in religious institutions, none of which was able to claim a legally sanctioned cultural authority. On the other hand, it deregulated the religious marketplace, enabling new ministry groups to flourish like never before.

On the eve of the Revolution in 1776, more than half of the nation's churchgoers went to Congregational, Presbyterian, and Anglican worship services—and supported the legal establishment of their churches. By 1850, though, these denominations contained fewer than 20 percent of churchgoers, while evangelical communities predominated the landscape. Baptists and Methodists alone comprised over half of the nation's attenders.

Most prodigious by far was the growth of the Baptists and the Methodists. Scholars estimate that at the outbreak of the American Revolution there were 494 Baptist congregations in the colonies. By 1795, this number had more than doubled to 1,152, and Baptists were poised to exert an enormous influence on the church of the next century. They proved most powerful in the South and on the ever-expanding frontier,

fact, he traveled nonstop for nearly forty-five years, covering three hundred thousand miles on horseback, crossing the Appalachian Mountains more than sixty times in the process, preaching sixteen thousand sermons, and ordaining four thousand Methodist preachers. He had no home—literally—and once told an English friend to address all future letters to him "in America.

Despite all this schism, Wesleyan Methodism continued to grow by leaps and bounds throughout the nineteenth century, bringing Arminian views to the mainstream of American evangelicalism.

Jonathan loved Sarah's beauty, but attributed her attractiveness to the fullness of God in her soul. To call theirs love at first sight would be to mislead most modern readers. These two fell in love with the image and glory of God they saw in each other.