The thought-world of early evangelicalism.

Evangelicals, in the Anglo-Saxon sense of the word, seem generally to have found it easier to recognise each other than others have found it to categorise them. Indeed Ernst Benz found this to be true even of evangelical visions; these were strong in the discovery that God has his own in every confession, and that the true church was built from true, i.e., regenerate, Christians who were to be found in every denomination. Divided by language and theological tradition (Lutheran, Reformed or Anglican), separated by the Atlantic Ocean or (in the case of the Swedish prisoners-of-war) by the huge land mass of Siberia, confronting different problems (survival under the hammer of the Counter-Reformation, reviving a decayed Protestant establishment, or creating religious society from the ground up in America), evangelical friendship in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was as much an evidence of the persisting cohesion of a much riven Protestant world as it was of a desire to change it. The unlikely admiration in New England of Cotton Mather and his son for August Hermann Francke and his son spoke of an understanding on the fringes of the Protestant world for the problems of the centre, of some regrouping of sentiment, of a willingness to try new contractual methods of action. And although evangelicals liked to think of themselves as conservative in doctrine, they were looking to change, and put together a platform of forces for change extending beyond the narrowly theological region, so that their origins form a significant chapter in the history of European thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]