And yet, speaking again from the material which chances to be at my own disposal, I find, so far as Braintree is concerned, nothing to justify this statement of Lord Dartmouth’s in the manuscript record book of Col. John Quincy, which has been preserved, and is now in the possession of this Society. Colonel Quincy was a prominent man in his day and neighborhood; and the North Precinct of Braintree, in which he lived and was buried, when, nearly thirty years after his death, it was incorporated as a town, took its name from him. As a justice of the peace, Colonel Quincy kept a careful record of the cases, both civil and criminal, which came before him between 1716 and 1761, a period of forty-five years. These cases, a great part of them criminal, were over two hundred in number, and came not only from Braintree but from other parts of the old county of Suffolk. Under these circumstances, if the state of affairs indicated by Lord Dartmouth’s remark, and Governor Hutchinson’s apparent admission of its truth, did really prevail, many bastardy warrants would during those forty-five years naturally have come before so active a magistrate as John Quincy. Such does not seem to have been the case. Indeed I find during the whole period but four bastardy entries,—one in 1733, one in 1739, one in 1746, and one in 1761,—and, in 1720, one complaint against a woman to answer for fornication. Considering the length of time the record of Colonel Quincy covers, this is a remarkably small number of cases, and, taken by itself, would seem to indicate the exact opposite from the condition of affairs revealed in the church records of the same period, for it includes the whole Hancock pastorate. This record book of Colonel Quincy’s I will add is the only original legal material I have bearing on this subject. An examination of the files of the provincial courts would undoubtedly bring more material to light.
I have only further to say, in passing, that some of the other cases mentioned in this John Quincy record are not without a curious interest. For instance, August 24, 1722, John Veasey, “husbandman,” is put under recognizance in the sum of £5 “for detaining his child from the public worship of God, said child being about eleven years old.” On the same day John Belcher, “cordwainer,” is put under a similar recognizance “for absenting himself from the public worship of God the winter past.” Eleazer Veasey,—the Braintree Veaseys I will say in passing were members of the Church of England in Braintree, and not members of the Braintree church,—Eleazer Veasey is, on the 20th of September, 1717, fined five shillings to the use of the town poor for “uttering a profane curse.” So also Christopher Dyer, “husbandman,” “did utter one profane curse,” to which charge he pleaded guilty, and, on the 17th of May, 1747, was fined four shillings for the use of the poor. In this case the costs were assessed at six shillings, making ten shillings as the total cost of an oath in Massachusetts at that time; but as Dyer was a “soldier of His Majesty’s service,” the court added that if the fine was not paid forthwith, he (Dyer) “be publickly set in the stocks or cage for the space of three hours.”
Returning to the subject of church discipline and public confessions of incontinence, it will be observed that in the case of the North Precinct Church of Braintree the great body of these confessions are recorded as being made during the Hancock pastorate, or between the years 1726 and 1744. This also, it will be remembered, was the period of what is known in New England history as “The Great Awakening,” described in the first chapter of the recently published fifth volume of Dr. Palfrey’s work. Some writers, while referring to what they call “the tide of immorality” which then and afterward “rolled,” as they express it, over the land, so that “not even the bulwark of the church had been able to withstand” it,—these writers, themselves of course ministers of the church, have, for want of any more apparent cause, attributed the condition of affairs they deplored, but were compelled to admit, to the influence of the French wars, which, it will be remembered, broke out in 1744, and, with an intermission of six years (1749-1755), lasted until the conquest of Canada was completed in 1760. But it would be matter for curious inquiry whether both the condition of affairs referred to and the confessions made in public of sins privately committed were not traceable to the church itself rather than to the army,—whether they were not rather due to the spiritual than to the martial conditions of the time.
I have neither the material at my disposal, nor the time and inclination to go into this study, both physiological and psychological, and shall therefore confine myself to a few suggestions only which have occurred to me in the course of the examination of the records I have been discussing.
“The Great Awakening,” so called, occurred in 1740,—it was then that Whitefield preached on Boston Common to an audience about equal in number to three quarters of the entire population of the town.[12] Five years before, in 1735, had occurred the famous Northampton revival, engineered and presided over by Jonathan Edwards; and previous to that there had been a number of small local outbreaks of the same character, which his “venerable and honoured Grandfather Stoddard,” as Edwards describes his immediate predecessor in the Northampton pulpit, was accustomed to refer to as “Harvests,” in which there was “a considerable Ingathering of Souls.” A little later this spiritual condition became general and, so to speak, epidemic. There are few sadder or more suggestive forms of literature than that in which the religious contagion of 1735, for it was nothing else, is described; it reveals a state of affairs bordering close on universal insanity. Take for instance the following from Edwards’s “Narrative” of what took place at Northampton:—
“Presently upon this, a great and earnest Concern about the great things of Religion, and the eternal World, became universal in all parts of the Town, and among Persons of all Degrees, and all Ages; the Noise amongst the Dry Bones waxed louder and louder: All other talk but about spiritual and eternal things, was soon thrown by.... There was scarcely a single Person in the Town, either old or young, that was left unconcerned about the great Things of the eternal World. Those that were wont to be the vainest, and loosest, and those that had been most disposed to think, and speak slightly of vital and experimental Religion, were now generally subject to great awakenings.... Souls did as it were come by Flocks to Jesus Christ. From Day to Day, for many Months together, might be seen evident Instances of Sinners brought out of Darkness into marvellous Light, and delivered out of an horrible Pit, and from the miry Clay, and set upon a Rock, with a new Song of Praise to God in their mouths ... in the Spring and Summer following, Anno 1735 the Town seemed to be full of the Presence of God. It never was so full of Love, nor so full of Joy; and yet so full of Distress as it was then. There were remarkable Tokens of God’s Presence in almost every House.... Our publick Praises were then greatly enlivened.... In all Companies on other Days, on whatever Occasions Persons met together, Christ was to be heard of and seen in the midst of them. Our young People, when they met, were wont to spend the time in talking of the Excellency and dying Love of JESUS CHRIST, the Gloriousness of the way of Salvation, the wonderful, free, and sovereign Grace of God, his glorious Work in the Conversion of a Soul, the Truth and Certainty of the great Things of God’s Word, the Sweetness of the Views of his Perfection &c. And even at Weddings, which formerly were meerly occasions of Mirth and Jollity, there was now no discourse of any thing but the things of Religion, and no appearance of any, but spiritual Mirth.”[13]
And it was this pestiferous stuff,—for though it emanated from the pure heart and powerful brain of the greatest of American theologians, it is best to characterize it correctly,—it was this pestiferous stuff that Wesley read during a walk from London to Oxford in 1738, and wrote of it in his journal,—“Surely this is the Lord’s doing, and it is marvellous in our eyes.” Such was the prevailing spiritual condition of the period in which the entries I have read were made in the Braintree church records. In the language of the text from which Dr. Colman preached on the occasion of the first stated evening lecture ever held in Boston, “Souls flying to Jesus Christ [were] pleasant and admirable to behold.”
The brother clergyman[14] who prepared and delivered from the pulpit of the Braintree church a funeral sermon on Mr. Hancock referred to the religious excesses of the time, and described the dead pastor as a “wise and skilful pilot” who had steered “a right and safe course in the late troubled sea of ecclesiastical affairs,” so that his people had to a considerable degree “escaped the errors and enthusiasm ... in matters of religion which others had fallen into.”[15] Nevertheless it is almost impossible for any locality to escape wholly a general epidemic; and in those days public relations of experiences were not only usual in the churches, but they were a regular feature in all cases of admission to full communion. That this was the case in the Braintree church is evident from the extract already quoted from the records, when in 1722 “some persons of a sober life and good conversation signified their unwillingness to join in full communion with the church unless they [might] be admitted to it without making a Public relation of their spiritual experiences.” It was also everywhere noticed that the women, and especially the young women, were peculiarly susceptible to attacks of the spiritual epidemic. Jonathan Edwards for instance mentions, in the case of Northampton, how the young men of that place had become “addicted to night-walking and frequenting the tavern, and leud practices,” and how they would “get together in conventions of both sexes for mirth and jollity, which they called frolicks; and they would spend the greater part of the night in them”; and among the first indications of the approach of the epidemic noticed by him was the case of a young woman who had been one of the greatest “company keepers” in the whole town, who became “serious, giving evidence of a heart truly broken and sanctified.”
This same state of affairs doubtless then prevailed in Braintree, and indeed throughout New England. The whole community was in a sensitive condition morally and spiritually,—so sensitive that, as the Braintree records show, the contagion extended to all classes, and, among those bearing some of the oldest names in the history of the township, we find also negroes,—“Benjamin Sutton and Naomi his wife,” and “Jeffry, my servant, and Flora, his wife,”—grotesquely getting up before the congregation to make confession, like their betters, of the sin of fornication before marriage. It, of course, does not need to be said that such a state of morbid and spiritual excitement would necessarily lead to public confessions of an unusual character. Women, and young women in particular, would be inclined to brood over things unknown save to those who participated in them, and think to find in confession only a means of escape from the torment of that hereafter concerning which they entertained no doubts; hence perhaps many of these records which now seem both so uncalled for and so inexplicable.
So far, however, what has been said relates only to the matter of public confession; it remains for others to consider how far a morbidly excited spiritual condition may also have been responsible for the sin confessed. The connection between the animal and the spiritual natures of human beings taken in the aggregate, though subtile, is close; and while it is well known that camp-meetings have never been looked upon as peculiar, or even as conspicuous, for the continence supposed to prevail at them, there is no doubt whatever that in England the license of the restoration followed close on the rule of the saints. One of the authorities on New England history, speaking of the outward manifestations of the “Great Awakening,” says that “the fervor of excitement showed itself in strong men, as well as in women, by floods of tears, by outcries, by bodily paroxysms, jumping, falling down and rolling on the ground, regardless of spectators or their clothes.” Then the same authority goes on to add:—“But it was common that when the exciting preacher had departed, the excitement also subsided, and men and women returned peaceably to their daily duties.”[16] This last may have been the case; but it is not probable that men and women in the condition of mental and physical excitement described could go about their daily duties without carrying into them some trace of morbid reaction. It was a species of insanity; and insanity invariably reveals itself in unexpected and contradictory forms.