, for night

on the height

alem, arise!

dic outbreaks of religious aspirations were but the last device of self-seeking,-were but attempts to find consolation for life's hardships and to secure happiness hereafter. Fortunately such selfish motives are transmuted in the search for larger ethical and spiritual conceptions. An enlarged insight into the possibilities of living tends to slough off selfishness and to make more habitual the occasional, and often involuntary, response to Christlike deeds and ideals. But so ingrained is our earthly nature that, in communities as in nations, periods alternate with periods, and the pendulum swings from laxity to morality, from apathy to piety, gradually shortening its arc. So in Connecticut, numbers of her towns from time to time had been roused to greater interest in re

glish religious life. In New England, the older clergymen, like the Mathers of Massachusetts, conservative men, whose memories or traditions were of the golden age of Puritanism, had long bemoaned the loss of religious interest, the inability of reforming synods to create permanent improvement, and the helplessness of ecclesiastical councils or of civil enactments to rouse the people from the real "decay of piety in the land," and from their indifference to the

longs to saving grace, as they are commonly used and understood.... People are taught that they may use them all, and not so much as make any pretence to the least degree of sanctifying grace; and this is the established custom. So they are used and so they

ather than astringent in its nature," helped to produce a low estimate of religion. The tenderness that the Cambridge Platform had encouraged towards "the weakest measure of faith" had broadened into such laxity that, in many cases, ministers were willing to receive accounts of conversions which had been written to order for the applicants for church membership. The Church, moreover, had come directly under the control of politics, a condition never conducive to its purity. The law of 1717, "for the better ordering and regulating parishes or societies," had made the minister the choice of the majority of the townsmen who were voters. This reversed the early condition of the town, merged by membership into the church, to a church merged into the town. [97] There was still another factor, often the last and least willingly recognized in times of religious excitement, namely, the commercial depression throughout the country, resulting from years of a fluctuating currency. Thi

ary to that colony. Touched by the enthusiasm of the onflowing religious movement, Whitefield's zeal and consequent radicalism, as he swayed toward the Congregational teaching and practices, soon put him in disfavor with his fellow Churchmen. Such disfavor only raised the priest still higher in the opinion of the dissenters, and they flocked to hear his eloquent sermons. Whitefield soon decided to return to England. There he encountered the great revival movement which was being conducted, principally by the Wesleys, and he at once threw himself into the work. Meanwhile, he had conceived a plan for a home for orphans in Georgia, and, a little later

upon the land. But the news of the revival in Connecticut had reached England through letters of Dr. Benjamin Coleman of Boston. His account of it had created so much interest that Jonathan Edwards was persuaded to write for English readers his "Narrative of the Surprising Work of God." Editions of this book appeared in 1737-38 in both England and America, and all Anglo-Saxon non-prelatical circles pored over the account of

ire to visit Edwards. After a week of conference with the great divine, Whitefield passed on through Connecticut, preaching as he went, and devoted the rest of the year to itinerating through the other colonies. Already his popularity had been too much for him, and he frequently took it upon himself to upbraid, in no measured terms, the settled ministry for lack of earnestness in their calling and lack of Chris

the most influential divines to support the Great Awakening,-to call the revival by the name by which it was to go down in history. Unfortunately, among the aroused people, there were many who pressed their zeal beyond the reverent bounds set by these leaders

or by bodily contortions. All these, in the fever of excitement, were believed by many persons to be special marks of supernatural power, and, if they followed the words of some ignorant and rash exhorter, they were even more likely to be considered tokens of divine favor,-illustrations of God's choice of the simple and lowly to confound the wisdom of the world. The strong emotional character of the religious meetings of our southern negroes, as well as their frequent sentimental rather than practical or moral expression of religion, has been credited in large measure to the hold over them which this great religious revival of the eighteenth century gained, when its enthusiasm rolled over the southern colonies. Be that as it may, any adequate appreciation of the frequent daily occurrences in New England during the Great Awakening would be best realized by one of this twentieth century were it po

volt against conventional religion, a division into ecclesiastical parties, and a great schism within the Establishment, which, before the breach was healed

TNO

in 1680, 1684, 16

reformation in the Half-Way Covenant practice because it noted that perso

marked characteristic of Hokinsianism, or the