Thomas Kidd, here:
George Whitefield, born on Dec. 16, 1714, was a Church of England minister who led the Great Awakening, a series of Christian revivals that swept through Britain and America in the mid-1700s. Whitefield drew enormous audiences wherever he went on both sides of the Atlantic, and his publications alone doubled the output of the American colonial presses between 1739 and 1742. If there is a modem figure comparable to Whitefield, it is Billy Graham. But even Mr. Graham has followed a path first cut by Whitefield. ...
“As you have made a pretty considerable progress in the mysteries of electricity,” Whitefield [once] wrote to [Benjamin] Franklin in 1752, “I would now humbly recommend to your diligent unprejudiced pursuit and study the mystery of the new-birth.”
