These laws restrained both ordained Ministers and licensed candidates from preaching in other Men's Parishes without their and the Church's consent and wholly prohibited the Exhortations of Illiterate Laymen.
These laws were a high-handed infringement of the rights of conscience, and in a few years fell and buried with them the party that had enacted them. These were the laws which he (Davenport) exhorted his hearers to set at defiance; and seldom, it must be acknowledged, has a more plausible occasion been found in New England to preach disregard for the law.
The laws were framed to repress itinerants and exhorters through loss of their civil rights. By them, a man's good name was dishonored and he was deprived of all his temporal emoluments. By many, in their own day, the laws were regarded as contrary to scriptural commands, and to the opinion and practice of all reformers and of all Puritans. These laws, with others that followed, were not warranted by the ecclesiastical constitution of the colony, and could find no parallel either in England or in her other colonies. Trumbull calls them—
a concerted plan of the Old Lights or Arminians both among the clergy and civilians, to suppress as far as possible, all zealous Calvinistic preachers, to confine them entirely to their own pulpits; and at the same time to put all the public odium and reproach upon them as wicked, disorderly men, unfit to enjoy the common rights of citizens. [109]
Yet for these laws the Association of New Haven sent a vote of thanks to the Assembly when it convened in their city in the following fall.
Jonathan Edwards opposed both the spirit of the General Consociation and also the legislation of the Assembly. He expressed his attitude toward the Great Awakening both at the time and later. In 1742 he wrote:—
If ministers preached never so good a doctrine, and are never so laborious in their work, yet if at such a day as this they show their people that they are not well affected to this work [of revival], they will be very likely to do their people a great deal more hurt than good.
Six years later Edwards wrote a preface to his "An Humble Inquiry into the Qualifications for Full Communion in the Visible Church of God," a treatise severely condemning the Half-Way Covenant, and urging the revival of the early personal account of conversion. In this preface he excuses his hesitation in publishing the work, on the ground that he feared the Separatists would seize upon his arguments to encourage them and strengthen them in many of their reprehensible practices. These, Edwards reminds his reader, he had severely condemned in his earlier publications, notably in his "Treatise on Religious Affections," 1746, and in his "Observations and Reflections on Mr. Brainerd's Life." In his preface Edwards repeats his disapproval of the Separatist "notion of a pure church by means of a spirit of discerning; their censorious outcries against the standing ministers and churches in general, their lay ordinations, their lay-preaching and public exhortings and administering sacraments; and their self-complacent, presumptuous spirit." Edwards believed that enthusiasts, though unlettered, might exhort in private, and even in public religious gatherings might be encouraged to relate in a proper, earnest, and modest manner their religious experiences, and might also entreat others to become converted. He maintained that much of the criticism of an inert ministry was well founded, that much of the enthusiastic work of laymen and of the itinerants deserved to be recognized by the regular clergy, and that they ought to bestir themselves in furthering such enthusiasm among their own people. Edwards urged also his belief in the value of good works, not as meriting the reward of future salvation, but as manifesting a heart stirred by a proper appreciation of God's attributes. Jonathan Edwards held firmly to the foundation principles of the conservative school, while he sympathized with and supported the best elements in the revival movement.
This attitude of Edwards eventually cost him his pastorate, for he judged it best to resign from the Northampton church, in 1750, because of the unpopularity arising from his repeated attacks upon the Half-Way Covenant and the Stoddardean view of the Lord's supper. Nevertheless, it was the influence of Jonathan Edwards and of his following which gradually brought about a union of the religious parties, after the Separatists had given up their eccentricities and the leaven of Edwards' teachings had brought a new and invigorated life into the Connecticut churches. This preacher, teacher, and evangelist was remarkable for his powerful logic, his deep and tender feeling, his sincere and vivid faith. These characteristics urged on his resistless imagination, when picturing to his people their imminent danger and the awful punishment in store for those who continued at enmity with God. Of his work as a theologian, we shall have occasion to speak elsewhere.
Some illustrations of church life in the troublous years following the Great Awakening will best set forth the confusion arising, the difficulties between Old and New Lights, and the hardships of the Separatists. Among the colony churches, the trials of three may be taken as typical,—the New Haven church[110], the Canterbury church,[111] and the church of Enfield.[112] Nor can the story of the first two be told without including in it an account of later acts of the Assembly and of the attitude of the College during the years of the great schism.