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Its 1755, John Berridge has been preaching for 13 years,
Later that year, as John Berridge was meditating on the Bible, he discovered that trying to earn salvation by good deeds alone was mere vanity and pride. Instead he began to recognise the idea of “justification by faith” – that salvation required an act of sovereign grace by God.

This discovery transformed his whole life. He lost no time in making up for the years he had wasted. He abandoned and burnt all his previous sermons and began to preach salvation by “faith” rather than “works”.

The effects were amazing: “Some of his hearers cried out aloud hysterically, some were thrown into strong convulsions, and some fell into a kind of trance or catalepsy, which lasted a long time.”

John Berridge's ministry and outreach had a new authority. Within a few months people in the large congregations that gathered to hear him were regularly converted.

I have researched for years, gone to hundreds of libraries and universities,
This was the first modern account of Pentacost that was most noted after
the middle ages. John Wesley himself said of berridge that there was nothing
like him before, or nothing like him after. This was something never
quite seen before and was the birth pains of the Quaker movement by
Charles Fox. The spirit goes to the place you take it, the wind
moves from place to place. It moves into bad people who repent, and
into those who do not, woe to those who call good bad and bad good.
You reap what you sow.

There was no preacher like john Berridge, throughout England at the time,
all who saw him knew it. He preached like no other before, or after.
Wesley never really acknowledged the fact that Methodist, Quaker and
all other Prodistant movements at the time owed him Everything.
It was he, and John Berridge alone who Invoked the spirit into the Crowd.
No other preacher could do it, Especially John Wesley, and although
he never said he was jealous of him, I cannot but admit to the truth,
All preachers were green with envy, because the people knew, and would
gather in gigantic throngs wherever John Berridge spoke.

By 1758 he would ride on horseback far and wide across the whole of Huntingdonshire, Bedfordshire and the surrounding counties. He went wherever people could be found. He preached up to twelve open-air sermons and travelled over 100 miles each week.

Compelled by a desire to spread the good news of salvation, the indefatigable John Berridge became a leading evangelical in the same vein as the 18th century revivalists, such as the Wesley brothers, Daniel Rowlands and other Methodists.

Like them, he angered the clergy in whose parishes he preached, and the Bishop of Ely, Matthias Mawson, threatened to dispossess him unless he put a stop to his itinerant preaching. But the bishop backed down when William Pitt the elder, a friend from his Cambridge days, intervened.

Unlike some Methodists, he resisted marriage, and wrote that there was “no trap so mischievous to the field-preacher as wedlock; and it is laid for him at every hedge corner.”

Although John Berridge was not as well renowned for his preaching as George Whitefield and John Wesley,according to the history oxford clergy wrote
for themselves, he played a vital part in the eighteenth century revival, as his contemporaries recognised.

Henry Venn, who accompanied Berridge on preaching tours, said in 1776 that he had "the largest congregations that were ever known .... and greatly was his word owned of the Lord."

George Whitfield, who invited him to preach regularly at his chapel in Tottenham Court Road, London, described him as "a burning and shining light".

After a successful ministry of more than thirty years, both his sight and hearing began to fail. He died at the age of seventy-seven. Thousands of people attended his funeral.

At his own request John Berridge was buried on the north-east side of Everton churchyard as “a means of consecrating it”. This piece of ground had previously been reserved for those who had come to a dishonourable end.

ALEX JONES bradpi

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