"THE GREAT AWAKENING."
Wake, awake, for night is flying:
The watchmen on the heights are crying,
Awake, Jerusalem, arise!--Advent Hymn.
The opposition of Episcopalian, Quaker, and Baptist to the Connecticut
Establishment, if measured by ultimate results, was important and
far-reaching. But it was dwarfed almost to insignificance, so feeble
was it, so confined its area, when compared to that opposition which,
thirty-five years after the Saybrook Synod and a dozen years after the
exemption of the dissenters, sprang up within the bosom of the
Congregational church itself, as a protest against civil enactments
concerning religion. This protest was a direct result of the moral and
spiritual renascence that occurred in New England and that became
known as the "Great Awakening." History in all times and countries
shows a periodicity of religious activity and depression. It would
sometimes seem as if these periodic 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 religion before the spiritual cyclone of the great
revival, or "Great Awakening," swept through the land in 1740 and the
two following years. The earlier and local revivals were generally
due to some special calamity, as sickness, failure of harvest,
ill-fortune in war, or some unusual occurrence in nature, such as an
earthquake or comet, with the familiar interpretation that Jehovah was
angry with the sins of his people. Sometimes, however, the zeal of a
devoted minister would kindle counter sparks among his people. Such a
minister was the Rev. Solomon Stoddard, who mentions five notable
revivals, or "harvests,"[a] as he calls them, during his sixty years
of ministry in the Northampton church. A few other New England towns
had similar revivals, but they were brief and rare.
Notwithstanding these occasional local "stirrings of the heart," at
the beginning of the second quarter of the eighteenth century a cold,
formal piety was frequently the covering of indifferent living and of
a smug, complacent Christianity, wherein the letter killed and the
spirit did not give life. This was true all over New England, and
elsewhere. Nor was this deadness confined to the colonies alone, for
the Wesleys were soon to stir the sluggish current of English
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 immorality that
was increasing among them. This indifference grew in Connecticut after
the Saybrook Platform had laid a firm hold upon the churches. Its
discipline created a tendency, on the one hand, to hard and narrow
ecclesiasticism, and, on the other, to careless living on the part of
those who were satisfied with a mere formal acceptance of the
principles of religion and with the bare acknowledgment of the right
of the churches to their members' obedience.[b]
It is a great mistake [writes Jonathan Edwards] if any one imagines
that all these external performances (owning the covenant, accepting
the sacraments, observing the Sabbath and attending the ministry), are
of the nature of a _profession_ of anything that belongs 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 are understood.... It is not unusual ... for persons, at the same
time they come into the church and pretend to own the covenant, freely
to declare to their neighbors, that they have no imagination that they
have any true faith in Christ or love to Him.[95]
The General Court, relieved from the oversight of the churches, had
bent itself to preserving the colony's charter rights from its enemies
abroad, and to the material interests involved in a conservative,
wise, and energetic home development. The people's thoughts were with
the Court more than with the clergy, who had fallen from a healthy
enthusiasm in their profession into a sort of spiritual deadness and
dull acceptance of circumstances. [96] As a sort of corollary to
Stoddard's teaching that the Lord's Supper was itself a means toward
attaining salvation, it followed that clergymen, though they felt no
special call to their ministry, were nevertheless believed to be
worthy of their office. The older theology of New England had tended
to morbid introspection. Stoddard, in avoiding that danger, had thrown
the doors of the Church too widely open, and the result was a gradual
undermining of its spiritual power. The continued acceptance of the
Half-Way Covenant, "laxative rather 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. This
depression contributed largely to the revival movement, and helped to
spread the enthusiasm of the Great Awakening. Connecticut's currency
had been freer from inflation than that of other New England
colonies. But her paper money experiments in the years from 1714 to
1749 grew more and more demoralizing. Up to 1740, Connecticut had
issued £156,000 in paper currency. At the time of the Great Awakening
she had still outstanding £39,000 for which the colony was
responsible. Of this, all but £6000 had been covered by special
taxation. There still remained, however, about £33,000 which had been
lent to the various counties. Taxation was heavy, wages low and
prices high, and there was not a man in the colony who did not feel
the effect of the rapidly depreciating currency.[98] This general
depression fell upon a generation of New Englanders whose minds no
longer dwelt preëminently upon religious matters, but who were, on the
contrary, preëminently commercial in their interests.
Such were the general conditions throughout New England and such the
low state of religion in Connecticut, when, in the Northampton church,
Solomon Stoddard's grandson, the great Jonathan Edwards, in December,
1734, preached the sermons which created the initial wave of a great
religious movement. This religious revival spread slowly through
generally lax New England, and through the no less lax Jerseys, and
through the backwoods settlements of Pennsylvania, until it finally
swept the southern colonies. At the time, 1738, the Rev. George
Whitefield was preaching in Carolina, and acceptably so to his
superior, Alexander Garden, the Episcopal commissary 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, he determined upon a visit to New
England in its behalf. Upon his arrival in Boston in 1740, the
Rev. George Whitefield was welcomed with open arms. Great honor was
paid him. Crowds flocked to hear him, and he was sped with money and
good-will throughout New England as he journeyed, preaching the
gospel, and seeking alms for the southern orphanage. His advent
coincided in time with the reviving interest in religion, especially
in Connecticut. Interest over the revival of 1735 had centred on that
colony the eyes of the whole non-liturgical English-speaking
world. Whitefield's preaching was to this awakening religious
enthusiasm as match to tinder.
The religious passion, kindled in 1735 by Edwards, and hardly less by
his devoted and spiritually-minded wife, had in Connecticut swept over
Windsor, East Windsor, Coventry, Lebanon, Durham, Stratford, Ripton,
New Haven, Guilford, Mansfield, Tolland, Hebron, Bolton, Preston,
Groton, and Woodbury. [99] The period of this first "harvest" was
short. The revival had swept onward, and indifference seemed once more
to settle down 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 the recent revival in
Connecticut. Religious enthusiasm revived, and was roused to a high
pitch by Whitefield's itinerant preaching, as well as by that of
Jonathan Edwards, and by the visit to New England of the Rev. Gilbert
Tennant, one of two brothers who had created widespread interest by
their revival work in New Jersey. A religious furor, almost mania,
spread through New England, and the "Great Awakening" came in earnest.
The Rev. George Whitefield reached Newport, Rhode Island, in
September, 1740. Crowds flocked to hear him during his brief visit
there. In October, he proceeded to Boston, where he preached to
enthusiastic audiences, including all the high dignitaries of Church
and State. During his ten days' sojourn in the city, no praise was too
fulsome, no honor too great. Whitefield next went to Northampton,
drawn by his desire 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 Christian character. This visit of Whitefield was followed
by one from the Rev. Gilbert Tennant, who arrived in Boston in
December, and spent his time, until the following March, preaching in
Massachusetts and Connecticut. Tennant was also outspoken in his
denunciations, and both men, while sometimes justified in their
criticisms, were frequently hasty and censorious in their judgments of
those who differed from them.
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.
[b] 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.