General Reference Catherine died of cancer but not before she had worked tirelessly to secure the passage of laws that improved the lives of women and children. William lived another two decades and saw his organization spread to 55 countries. During his lifetime he traveled over five million miles and preached about 60,000 sermons. The Salvation Army continues to thrive and provide help for those in need, in Christ’s name, throughout the world.
Sadly the Indians came to be regarded as wards of the Government, and it became national policy to place them on specified reservations. The missionaries sent out by Eastern societies were the only groups sympathetic to this maltreatment and they tried to help by building schools, churches, and clinics.
Without the tireless efforts of Christian missionaries, the young nation would have had no moral compass and many of the important social programs that helped protect immigrants, women, children, Native Americans, and newly freed slaves would have never existed.
The opportunity for social gatherings had a powerful appeal to people who were starving for companionship. They were stirred by the evangelistic drive of the preachers, who encouraged emotional expression. The same exhibitions of tearful remorse and exuberant joy that appeared in England under Wesley’s preaching and in the Great Awakening in America appeared on the frontier. Out of the conversions of the camp meetings, the churches gathered recruits and the morals of the region showed dramatic improvement.
Along with his brother Charles, the great hymnist whose music was a key attraction for many to the movement, Wesley did much to save England from the social convulsions that came later in France. Tens of thousands of persons became connected with the Methodist societies before John Wesley died. In America, they began to grow rapidly from the time Methodism started. Methodism was revolutionary in its conception of religious principles. In the Church of England, salvation was theoretically a spiritual process to be secured through worship and the sacraments of the Church. The evangelical preaching of Wesley called for definite repentance of sin, wrestling with God for forgiveness, and an experience of peace and assurance. Feeling and volition were stressed more than intellectual assent and conformity to ecclesiastical custom. Directly and indirectly, the Methodists contributed to the missionary and humanitarian enterprises of the nineteenth century.
The Great Awakening on the whole set in motion currents that affected deeply the future of American Christianity. It revived personal religion, prompted the Protestant missionary enterprise somewhat later, gave an impetus to education, and kindled a new humanitarian spirit.