Ministers throughout New England were quick to support or to oppose the revival movement, and a goodly number of them, as itinerants, took up the evangelical work. Dr. Colman and Dr. Sewall of Boston, Jonathan Edwards and Dr. Bellamy of Connecticut, were among 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. The religious enthusiasm rushed into wild ecstasies during the preaching of the almost fanatic Rev. James Davenport of Southold, and of those itinerant preachers who, ignorant and carried away by emotions beyond their control, attempted to follow his example.
During this religious fever there were times when all business was suspended. Whole communities gave themselves up to conversion and to passing through the three or more distinct stages of religious experience which Jonathan Edwards, as well as the more ignorant itinerants, accepted as signs of the Lord's compassion. Briefly stated, these stages were, first, a heart-rending misery over one's sinfulness; a state of complete submissiveness, expressing itself in those days of intense belief both in heaven and in a most realistic hell, as complete willingness "to be saved or damned,"[c] whichever the Lord in his great wisdom saw would fit best into His eternal scheme. Finally, there was the blessed state of ecstatic happiness, when it was borne in upon one that he or she was, indeed, one of the few of "God's elect." [100] The revival meetings were marked by shouting, sobbing, sometimes by fainting, 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 possible to form a composite picture, having the unbridled emotionalism of our negro camp-meetings superimposed upon the solid respectability and grave reasonableness of the men of that earlier day. As the lines of one and the other constituent of this composite picture blend, the momentary feeling of impatience and disgust vanishes in a wave of compassion as the irresistible earnestness and the pitiless logic of those days press, for recognition, and we realize the awful sufferings of many an ignorant or sensitive soul. It was not until the religious revival had passed its height that the people began to realize the folly and dangers of the hysteria that had accompanied it. It was not until long afterward that many of its characteristics, which had been interpreted as supernatural signs, were known and understood, and correctly diagnosticated as outward evidence of physical and nervous exhaustion.
Such, outwardly, were the marked features of the Great Awakening. Yet its incentives to noble living were great and lasting. Its immediate results were a revolt against conventional religion, a division into ecclesiastical parties, and a great schism within the Establishment, which, before the breach was healed, had improved the quality of religion in every meeting-house and chapel in the land and broadened the conception of religious liberty throughout the colony.
FOOTNOTES:
[a] At Northampton in 1680, 1684, 1697, 1713, and 1719.
As early even as 1711, the Hartford North Association suggested some reformation in the Half-Way Covenant practice because it noted that persons, lax in life, were being admitted under its terms of church membership.
[c] This "to be saved or damned" was, later, a marked characteristic of Hokinsianism, or the teaching of the Rev. Samuel Hopkins, 1723-1813.
CHAPTER X
THE GREAT SCHISM
If a house be divided against itself.—Mark iii, 25.