Thenceforth the people began to tolerate variety in religious opinions with better grace, and the dominant authoritative rule of the Saybrook Platform began to wane, though for twenty years more it strove to assert its power. In 1755, the Middletown Association advised licensing candidates for the ministry for a term of years. The idea was to prevent errors arising from the personal interpretation of the Scriptures and indifference to dogmatic truths of religion from creeping into the churches. About the same time, the Consociation of New Haven invited their former member, Mr. Bobbins of Branford, to sit with them again at the installation of Mr. Street of East Haven. Conciliatory acts and measures such as these originated with both the Old and New Lights, and did much to lessen the division between them. Discussion turned more and more from personal opinions, character, and abilities, to considerations of doctrinal points. The churches found more and more in common, while worldly interests left the masses with only a half-hearted concern in church discussions.
To summarize the effect of the Great Awakening as evidenced by the great schism and its results thus far considered: The strength of the revival movement, as such, was soon spent. The number of its converts throughout New England was estimated by Dr. Dexter to be as high as forty or fifty thousand, while later writers put it as low as ten or twelve thousand, out of the entire population of three hundred thousand souls. The years 1740-42 were the years of the Great Awakening, and after them there were comparatively few conversions during any given time. Even in Jonathan Edwards's own church in Northampton there were no converts between 1744 and 1748. The influence of the Great Awakening was not, however, transient, nor was it confined to the Congregational churches, whether of the Cambridge or the Saybrook type. Baptist churches felt the impetus, receiving many directly into their membership, and also indirectly, from those Separatist churches which found themselves too weak to endure. Episcopalians added to their numbers from among religiously inclined persons who sought a calm and stable church home unaffected by church and political strife. The Great Awakening created the Separatist movement and the New Light party, revitalized the Established churches, invigorated others, and through the persecution and counter-persecution that the great schism produced, taught the Connecticut people more and more of religious tolerance, and so brought them nearer to the dawn of religious liberty. Such liberty could only come after the downfall of the Saybrook, Platform, and after a complete severance of Church and State. The last could not come for three quarters of a century. Meanwhile the leaven of the great revival would be working. On its intellectual side, the Great Awakening led to the discussion of doctrinal points, an advance from questions of church polity. These themes of pulpit and of religious press led, finally, to a live interest in practical Christianity and to a more genial religion than that which had characterized the Puritan age. The Half-Way Covenant had been killed. Education had received a new impulse, Christian missions were reinvigorated, and the monthly concert of prayer for the conversion of the world was instituted. [129] True, French and Indian wars, the Spanish entanglement with its West Indian expedition, and the consuming political interests of the years 1745-83, shortened the period of energetic spiritual life, and ushered in another half century of religious indifference. But during that half century the followers of Edwards and Bellamy were to develop a less severe and more winning system of theology, and the fellowship of the churches was to suggest the colonial committees of safety as a preliminary to the birth of a nation, founded upon the inherent equality of all men before the law. This conception of political and civil liberty was to develop side by side with a clearer notion of the value of religious freedom.
FOOTNOTES:
[a] This term came with the royal charter of 1662, but only gradually displaced the familiar "General Court."
The Milford church, like that of New Haven, suffered for many years from unjust exactions and taxation.
[c] Commencement then came in September.
[d] And this notwithstanding their willingness to include in their affirmation a denial of Mariolatry, purgatory, and other vital Romish tenets.
CHAPTER XI
THE ABROGATION OF THE SAYBROOK PLATFORM
That house cannot stand.—Mark iii, 25.