Spiritual Renewal and Advance in the Eighteenth Century by Arthur Skevington Wood

Arthur Skevington Wood’s contribution to the Paternoster Church History series, The Inextinguishable Blaze: Spiritual Renewal and Advance in the Eighteenth Century, has been out of print for many years. The publisher does not hold the digital rights to this title and all efforts to trace the author’s literary executor have failed. I am therefore placing this title on-line and requesting that anyone with information about the copyright holder please contact me.

Arthur Skevington Wood, The Inexistinguishable Blaze. Spiritual Renewal and Advance in the Eighteenth Century. Exeter: The Paternoster Press, 1967. bk. pp.256. [Click here to visit the download page]

Contents

Introduction: The Enigmatic Century

Prelude

1. The Condition of the Church
2. The Antecedents of the Revival

The Years of Visitation: 1711-1742

3. The Dawn in Wales
4. The American Awakening
5. The Moravian Contribution
6. The Trumpet Voice
7. The Conversion of the Wesleys
8. The Revival in Scotland

The Years of Evangelisation: 1742-1800

9. The Rise of American Evangelicalism
10. The Moravian Mission
11. The Spread of Methodism
12. The Calvanistic Wing
13. The Countess and Her Connexion
14. The Expansion of Evangelicalism

Postlude

15. The Message of the Revival
16. The Influence of the Revival

From the Dustjacket

The eighteenth century was an era of extremes. The extremes of debauchery and vice depicted by Hogarth were no confined to the poor; the Prime Minister, Walpole, led the way by his openly immoral life, and his “principle” of “let sleeping dogs lie” allowed every kind of public and private corruption to flourish unchecked.

Yet side by side with these poisonous weeds there grew, and flourished, and ultimately prevailed, the fruits of the good seed that were to produce the Evangelical Revival. Daniel Rowland and Howell Harris in Wales, Jonathan Edwards in New England, the golden-tongued Whitefield in England and Scotland, where revival spread like fire in the heather, and the two Wesleys, who took the world for their parish – these were roots out of dry ground indeed; yet while they probably saved Britain from horrors of such a Reign of Terror as engulfed her nearest neighbour, they most certainly lit a blaze that the darkness could not put out.

With infectious and heart-warming enthusiasm, informed and controlled by diligent scholarship and up-to-date research, Dr. Skevington Wood here tells the gripping story of those momentous days, and shews how the “candle” of men like Masters Ridley and Latimer, that had become the refining fires of Puritan times, had now grown into an inextinguishable blaze that would, in the century to follow, carry the Light of the World to the ends of the earth.