The great spate of historical inquiry into evangelicalism in the last generation has been curiously uninformative in three respects. It has not dated the beginnings of the evangelical movement (in the Anglo-Saxon sense of the word) early enough; what are called early evangelicals here are those who originated in the first century of the movement from c.1670. The new work has also said little about the evangelical identity that was so apparent to the early evangelicals. And it has been overwhelmingly devoted to the Anglo-American aspects of the movement to the neglect of its global reference. For this reason there has never been an account of the internal discussions in the movement about the nature of evangelical identity. Jonathan Edwards thought that the millennial bliss was being anticipated in this present age by labour-saving ingenuity which provided more time for ‘contemplation and spiritual employments’; indeed ‘the invention of the mariner's compass is a thing discovered by God to that end’. The objects of this book are to supply some Edwardsian compass-bearings to the wider evangelical enterprise, and to present, not a rounded discussion of its leading exponents, but an account of where they stood in relation to the pool of common ideas to which they contributed and from which they drew, or (to paraphrase Jonathan Edwards) to mitigate the tedium of the voyage to the other hemisphere.