of the revivals’ effects on all kinds of people—young and old, male and female, children and slaves. He also expressed his approval of revival attendees who organized their own religious societies, noting several instances of people who attended the meetings and returned home to tell their neighbors and begin meeting house-to-house without the oversight of a minister. Sermons and theology McGready’s sermons were prepared in advance and followed a consistent pattern" they began with an introduction of the text, three or four points explicating it, and a conclusion. Because they were memorized and enlarged upon during the preaching, many in his audiences may have been unaware that he had written the sermons in advance. McGready’s delivery was provocative and penetrating. Barton Stone said that “his coarse, tremulous voice excited in me the idea of something unearthly. His gestures were…the perfect reverse of elegance. Everything appeared by him forgotten, but the salvation of souls.” McGready’s preaching was “enforced by the joys of heaven and the miseries of hell. While McGready’s supporters called him a “Son of Thunder,” gifted in “close and practical preaching,” his enemies accused him of “undue severity." His sermons reveal the polarities of his preaching—sin and godliness, heaven and hell, salvation and judgment, truth and error—with titles such as, “The Sinner’s Guide to Hell,” “The Doom of the Impenitent,” “The Believer Embracing Christ,” and “The Danger of Rejecting the Means of Salvation.” While McGready’s sermons were not subtle or scholarly, they did reveal some marks of sophistication, including a grasp of history, an organized flow based on logical argument, and a theology derived from John Calvin and St. Augustine. The influence of Jonathan Edwards appeared both in McGready’s theology and in the language he used in his sermons. He was ecumenical in his invitation to Methodists and others to assist him in revivals, although he disagreed with them on theological matters. McGready was an unapologetic Calvinist. He believed that only the irresistible grace of God could enable the faith necessary for conversion, and that sinful man was devoid of the capacity to effect, or choose his own salvation. McGready believed he was acting on a solemn charge to shine the light of truth on man’s desperate spiritual condition, that judgment awaited, and was possibly imminent: “The ungodly and finally impenitent will now be ripe for destruction…they shall reap a harvest of immortal woe…. This is, indeed, the solemn,