Shunning and opposing vice” while at college. Jacob practiced what he preached. He focused on his studies, winning three scholarships and becoming Scholar of the House. The latter honor was especially fitting for this stern young man—in return for being paid an annual stipend of about five pounds, Jacob policed his classmates’ behavior.38
Jacob’s main extracurricular activity was his membership in a small religious society that he joined during his first year in Cambridge. The society had a membership of about twelve and met once a week for what he characterized as “religious exercises.” It was an uncomfortable experience during Jacob’s freshman year. To avoid ridicule and harassment, the society was forced to meet in secret, and members were careful not to draw attention to their activities. “So contemptible and persecuted were religious and religious persons, that we dared not sing in our worship,” Jacob complained.39
A pair of storms that swept through Harvard in the fall of 1740 and the winter of 1741 further upended the religious atmosphere on campus. The first disturbance was sparked by George Whitefield, the Anglican itinerant from England, who visited Cambridge on September 24 as part of a grueling, and wildly successful, forty-five-day tour of New England, where he delivered more than 175 sermons to crowds as large as twenty thousand. Whitefield was a mere twenty-five-years old in the fall of 1740, but he was a wizened veteran in the ways of revivalism, having conducted a successful tour of England a year earlier. Whitefield brought with him to New England a devotion to ecumenicalism, to the new birth, and to revivalism. Most of all, he brought a flair for the dramatic—he was a talented performer with a powerful voice that carried across open fields and crowded halls.40
Each appearance was an event. Nathan Cole, a farmer from Middletown, Connecticut, who went to hear the Great Awakener on October 23, 1740, captured the spectacle as well as anyone. Cole was working in his field when a messenger galloped by with the news that Whitefield was approaching Middletown: “I dropt my tool . . . and ran home to my wife telling her to make ready quickly to go and hear Mr. Whitfield preach at Middletown, then run to my pasture for my horse with all my might.” Fearing they would arrive late, Cole and his wife hurried toward the meetinghouse where Whitefield was to preach. Cole was astounded by the scene that awaited them. As they approached, “I saw before me a Cloud or fogg rising; I first thought it came from the great River,” he recalled, “but as I came nearer the Road, I heard a noise something like a low rumbling thunder . . . it was the noise of Horses feet coming down by the road.” A large throng—Cole estimated the “multitude” at three or four thousand—was gathering, and all was chaos: “The land and banks over the river looked black with people and horses all along the 12 miles I saw no man at work in his field, but all seemed to be gone.” Whitefield did not disappoint his hearers. Cole described him as “almost angelical; a young, Slim, slender youth before some thousands of people with a bold undaunted Countenance . . . [and] he looked as if he was Cloathed with authority from the Great God.” His sermon left Cole shaken and his heart pierced: “I saw that my righteousness would not save me; then I was convinced of the doctrine of Election.”41
The Harvard community received Whitefield cordially, with President Edward Holyoke entertaining the itinerant and students flocking to hear him speak at Cambridge’s meetinghouse. Standing before the assembled students, tutors, overseers, and guests, he preached on the theme of “We are not as many, who corrupt the Word of God.” Whitefield was fairly pleased with how it went: “God gave me great boldness and freedom of speech,” and he returned in the afternoon to speak to a crowd of about seven thousand. Whitefield was again satisfied with the results: “The Holy Spirit melted many hearts.”42
Henry Flynt, who succeeded the hapless Daniel Rogers as Jacob’s tutor, agreed that Whitefield’s visit was a success. He found Whitefield “affecting in his delivery,” a “good man [who is] sincerely desirous to doe good to the souls of Sinners.” Harvard’s students, Flynt reported, were tremendously moved and shaken by Whitefield: “Many Schollars appeared to be in great concern as to their souls and Eternal State.”43
Yet, thanks to Harvard’s irreligious ways, Whitefield’s appearance was controversial. The Great Awakener himself thought little of Harvard. “Discipline,” Whitefield confided in his journal, “is at a low ebb” at the college: “Bad books are become fashionable among the tutors and students. Tillotson and Clark are read, instead of Shepard, Stoddard, and such-like evangelical writers.” When Harvard’s faculty members learned of Whitefield’s criticisms, they were stung. His plans to return to New England in 1744 prompted them to publish “The Testimony of the President, Professors, Tutors, and Hebrew Instructor of Harvard College, against George Whitefield.” The essay condemned Whitefield on several levels—as a man (he was “an Enthusiast, a censorious, uncharitable Person, and a deluder of the People”); as a danger to organized religion (“he is presently apt to run into slander, and stigmatize them [ministers] as Men of no religion, unconverted, and Opposers of the Spirit of God”); and as an itinerant (“we apprehend this Itinerant Manner of preaching to be of the worst and most pernicious Tendency”). These critics at Harvard came to oppose the Great Awakening as a regressive and backward-looking movement, and their stance was another sign of the college’s growing liberalism. It demonstrated how Harvard was becoming more latitudinarian, and more Armininian, than Yale.44
Jacob’s position in the college’s growing rift between “liberal” Arminians and “traditional” Calvinists was no mystery—he was thunderstruck by Whitefield’s performance and supported him: “I heard him with wonder and affection, and approved highly of his preaching and conduct.” Green at this young age wholeheartedly backed the goals of the Great Awakening—to spark a resurgence of piety—and he agreed completely with Whitefield’s harsh assessment of Harvard. For Jacob, it was obvious that Harvard’s staid religious scene needed shaking up.45
In fact, he and some other members of the Harvard community were so excited by Whitefield’s preaching, and felt so strongly about what he was trying to achieve during his New England appearances, that they followed him to neighboring Massachusetts towns as he continued on his tour. Among this Harvard contingent was Daniel Rogers, the unpopular tutor of Jacob Green’s who had faced ridicule from students and teachers alike.
In September 1740, Rogers still harbored dreams of preaching, and Whitefield’s tour inspired him to take to the field. This, at last, was his chance to make a real difference in religion and to win a preaching position, and when the great George Whitefield himself asked Rogers to itinerate he enthusiastically concurred. The college authorities were not happy with his decision—Rogers was abandoning his students for a New Light itinerant, and they asked him to return to the classroom or to resign. Rogers did neither at first, explaining “that the blessed Spirit of God has led me out; and how far I shall proceed He only knows.”46
Like Rogers, Green dropped what he was doing in late September and followed Whitefield as he made his way across Massachusetts. Whitefield’s first stop after Cambridge was “Mr. Foxcroft’s meeting-house,” where the Great Awakener preached before a packed crowd. The next stop was an appearance at Roxbury before “many thousands.” For Jacob, the places, and the days, must have blurred as Whitefield kept up his punishing pace: Marble Head, Salem, Ipswich on September 29; Ipswich, Newbury, and Hampton on September 30; York and Portsmouth on October 2—and on and on, into mid-October, including a stop at Malden, where Jacob had been born and lived for so many years. Green witnessed firsthand some of the most stirring appearances of the 1740 tour, including Whitefield’s October 12 visit to Boston. Accompanied by the Massachusetts governor, Whitefield recounted how he preached his “farewell sermon [at the Boston Common] to near twenty thousand people,—a sight I have not seen since I left Blackheath [England],—and a sight, perhaps never seen before in America.”47
Jacob made it as far as Leicester, which Whitefield visited on the afternoon of October 15. Green was apparently fatigued and homesick at this point—Leicester was in western Massachusetts, about six miles from Worcester,
