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Updated: June 27, 2025
If the visitor goes to Ulster now and endeavours to trace the footsteps of Cennick, he will find it almost impossible to realize how great the power of the Brethren was in those palmy days. At Gracehill, near Ballymena, he will find the remains of a settlement. At Ballymena itself, now a growing town, he will find to his surprise that the Brethren's cause has ceased to exist.
If we seek for human influence at all let us give the honour to his mother; but the real truth appears to be that what John Wesley learned from Boehler, John Cennick learned by direct communion with God. His spiritual experience was as deep and true as Wesley's.
As the companions of Zinzendorf Boehler, Cennick, Rogers and Okeley passed one by one from the scenes of their labours, there towered above the other English Brethren a figure of no small grandeur. It was Benjamin La Trobe, once a famous preacher in England. He sprang from a Huguenot family, and had first come forward in Dublin.
For these follies Cennick knew only one cure; and that cure was the "apostolic discipline" of the Brethren. If the Brethren had now been desirous of Church extension, they would, of course, have turned Cennick's societies into Moravian congregations. But the policy they now pursued in the West was a repetition of their suicidal policy in Yorkshire.
Forthwith, at the earliest opportunity, John Cennick set off on foot for Oxford, to seek out the "stupid religious fellow"; found him sallying out of his room to breakfast; was introduced by Kinchin to the Wesleys; ran up to London, called at James Hutton's, and there met George Whitefield; fell on the great preacher's neck and kissed him; and was thus drawn into the stream of the Evangelical Revival at the very period in English history when Wesley and Whitefield first began preaching in the open air.
What sort of manuals, it may be asked, did Cennick provide? I have read them carefully; and have come to the conclusion that though Cennick was neither a learned theologian nor an original religious thinker, he was fairly well up in his subject.
John Cennick was asked to take a hand, and refused. For this he was regarded as a prig, and a young fellow in the company remarked, "There is just such a stupid religious fellow at Oxford, one Kinchin."
In those days Fulneck Chapel was not large enough to hold the crowds that came, and La Trobe had actually to stand upon the roof to harangue the vast waiting throng. As Cennick had been before in Ireland, so La Trobe was now in England. He was far above most preachers of his day. "He enraptured his audience," says an old account, "by his resistless eloquence.
He wrote when both Cennick and Wesley had been in Dublin; but Cennick to him seemed the really dangerous man. At first he intended to expose both Moravians and Methodists. "But," he added, "the Moravians being the more dangerous, subtle and powerful sect, and I fear will be the more obstinate, I shall treat of them first." For the next attack the Brethren were themselves to blame.
The Bishop had a stinging answer ready. "Preach what Cennick preaches," he said, "preach Christ crucified, and then the people will not have to go to Cennick to hear the Gospel." The good Bishop's words are instructive. At that time the Gospel which Cennick preached was still a strange thing in Ulster; and Cennick was welcomed as a true revival preacher.
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