The extremes of eighteenth-century debauchery and vice depicted by the artist Hogarth were not confined to the poor; the English Prime Minister, Walpole, led the way by his openly immoral life, and his "principle" of "let sleeping dogs lie" allowed every kind of public and private corruption to flourish unchecked.

Yet side by side with these poisonous weeds there grew the good seed that was to produce the Evangelical Revival--Daniel Rowland and Howell Harris in Wales, Jonathan Edwards in New England, the golden-tongued Whitefield in England and Scotland, and the two Wesleys, who took the world for their parish. While these and others helped to save Britain from the horrors of such a Reign of Terror as engulfed her nearest neighbor, they lit a blaze that the darkness could not put out.

With an enthusiasm informed and controlled by diligent scholarship and up-to-date research, Skevington Wood here tells the gripping story of those momentous days, and shows how the candle of men like Master Ridley and Latimer, that had become the refining fires of Puritan times, had now turned into an inextinguishable blaze that would, in the century to follow, carry the Light of the World to the ends of the earth.