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4. Giving Europe Another Chance
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72 chapter four Giving Europe Another Chance Spangenberg, who had recently come from America, said to me that the Brethren were very pleased that I was so amenable to this matter, and they considered it good that I was going to enter the marital state, for they had received an important calling for me from the Savior.1 —Jean-François Reynier in Marienborn, 1740 In the summer of 1739, a tidal wave of evangelical revivalism swept through England. George Whitefield had returned from America and was preaching to huge crowds in the open air, moving them to tears with his wondrous oratory while embarrassing his stodgy orthodox supervisors in the Anglican Church, who could not silence him. John Wesley had returned from America the previous year, and he raced from London to Oxford to Bristol and back to accommodate the demand for his preaching. Howell Harris, the great Welsh revivalist, contributed to the excitement as well. That summer , the epicenter of the revival was the Fetter Lane Society, founded in 1738 by Wesley, a bookseller named James Hutton, and the Moravian missionary Peter Böhler, who was on his way to the slave mission in South Carolina. In the midst of this exciting revival—an important event in the history of Protestantism—Jean-François Reynier appeared. He roomed with Hutton, as Wesley had, and saw the famous upper room where Wesley’s Aldersgate conversion experience had taken place. Reynier was happy to see his friend from Georgia. He saw Whitefield in action as well and went to the Fetter Lane meetings with Howell Harris and Charles Wesley. Reynier saw it all and was thrilled, but he watched quietly and kept a low profile. He admired Wesley and Whitefield and respected their awesome power, but theirs was not his style of spiritual fulfillment. Moreover, he was on a different mission: He wanted to meet Count Zinzendorf in Marienborn, and he needed Hutton, Wesley, and others in the English revival who had Moravian connections to Giving Europe Another Chance 73 help him get there. He got his wish and spent a spiritually fulfilling time in both London and Marienborn, but just as he achieved what he thought was spiritual fulfillment and acceptance by the Moravians, he discovered that those in charge had other plans for him.2 Reynier wrote nothing in his autobiography or letters about his second Atlantic crossing, which may mean that it was relatively uneventful, although crossing the Atlantic was always a long and dangerous affair in the eighteenth century. When Reynier’s ship sailed from Charleston, war with Spain was imminent , and there was no guarantee that it would not break out while the ship was at sea. Where exactly his ship landed in England is unclear, but Reynier himself reached London on 6 June 1739.3 When Reynier arrived in London and connected with its Moravian community , he had come to one of the most important centers of the Atlantic World. George II was king, Robert Walpole was prime minister, and the empire was in its ascendancy. The navy was emerging as the strongest in the Atlantic , and the colonies in America were growing and producing significant wealth, as the importation of sugar, tobacco, and other commodities, along with the rapid expansion of British involvement in the transatlantic slave trade, more than offset the financial disaster of 1720 known as the South Sea Bubble. London itself was in the midst of a massive population explosion, increasing from 630,000 residents in 1715 to 740,000 by 1760. Along with its population, the level of wealth increased dramatically, and so did poverty, crime, and unsanitary living conditions. George Frideric Handel’s music, Daniel Defoe’s novels, and John Gay’s plays were popular, as were William Hogarth’s realistic paintings of the vast disparities of wealth and lifestyles emerging in the city during the Gin Age. Meanwhile, authorities developed a severe penal code to control the growing population of poor and began a large-scale program of transporting convicts to North America to relieve the increasingly overcrowded prison system. What interested Reynier most that summer, however, were the events of the revival and the connections between London and the Continent, especially regarding the Moravians in Marienborn. He followed events in Hutton’s house andbookshop,theSociety’smeetingplaceonFetterLane,andthehousecalled Shiloh in Islington on the Cambridge road.4 Until their falling out with the English revivalists that summer, Reynier met with the French Prophets, whom he had known since...