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April 27 - June 23, 2023
During a meeting of young men in December 1741, one of Rogers’s kinsmen preached in a lively manner, and the “Power of God came down” among the assembly.
the zealous Whitefieldarian pushed forward to a novel conclusion.
This was one of the first instances in his diary in which Rogers explicitly noted that the “Children of God” in the meeting had been filled by the indwelling presence of the Holy Ghost.
Learning to discern the “hopeful symptoms” of converting grace proved to be an educational experience for many Whitefieldarians.
The clearest sign of the indwelling of the Spirit, as Pitkin learned through his interviews with Robinson, were the words that emerged from the mouths of newborn saints.
On nearly every occasion, they were direct quotations from scripture.
the confluence of exercised bodies and ejaculatory biblical outbursts in one of his parishioners.
the young convert “describes her Beloved like the Spouse in the Canticles” he concluded, proved that she had been visited by the Holy Spirit and released from the bonds of sin.
In the intensely literate culture of early New England, biblical verses sprang to mind inexplicably, structuring the thoughts and patterning the speech of pious men and women.
Enterprising parishioners resorted to divining the future from verses selected from a Bible opened at random; and, on certain occasions, the book itself became a kind of magical talisman.
This highly subversive form of popular biblical exegesis, with deep roots in the soteriological underground of seventeenth-century English radical sectarianism, might have prefigured the phenomenon that resurfaced in Whitefieldian conversion narratives a century later.
Scores of books and pamphlets published between 1741 and 1744 condemned the controversial practice of conflating instantaneous conversion with unusually strong impressions on the imagination.
Presbyterians in Scotland and the Middle Colonies, southern Anglicans, and New England Congregationalists seldom agreed on anything, but clergymen from all three denominations stood united in their distaste for biblical impulses.
Such people, Chauncy concluded, were beyond rational persuasion. “You had as good reason with the wind.”
lay fascination with the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit continually threatened to collapse the divine pneuma and logos into a single entity.
The notion that Jesus required a Connecticut civil magistrate to “Step in to the Help of the Lord Against the Mighty Adversary of Souls” undoubtedly would have struck most of his contemporaries as presumptuous.
Nearly 750 people from more than 125 towns across New England, including three royal governors, 146 Congregational ministers, and dozens of notable merchants, magistrates, and militia officers, subscribed to Seasonable Thoughts on the State of Religion in New-England, Charles Chauncy’s ponderous antidote to the “Great disorders and irregularities” that the outspoken Boston revival opposer believed were flourishing everywhere.
New converts who believed that their actions were “guided by immediate direction from heaven,” Edwards ominously observed in Some Thoughts concerning the Present Revival of Religion in New-England, would inevitably become “incorrigible and impregnable” in their speech and actions.
Although a few radicals, including Samuel Buell, Andrew Croswell, and Daniel Rogers, continued to itinerate after the summer of 1742, nearly all of New England’s most active riding ministers curtailed their travels in direct response to their colleagues’ increasingly hostile assessment of revival innovations.
As they reassessed the revivals, many Congregational clergymen soon found themselves at odds with scores of lay men and women who continued to trumpet the revivals as an unprecedented outpouring of the Holy Spirit.
As ministers pulled back from itinerating and closed their pulpits to riding ministers, lay support appears to have grown more assertive.
In all, more than one hundred letters containing religious content penned by lay men and women have survived from the years between 1740 and 1744.
The vast majority reflect a militant spirit unbroken by clerical pronouncements, public sphere exposés, ecclesiastical censures, or civil penalties. Many people became increasingly vocal revival supporters in the face of mounting criticism.
For this radicalized cohort of new converts—men and women who dated their conversions to the descent of potent biblical impulses or believed that they had been carried to heaven in visions and shown their names in the Book of Life—the prospect that miraculous dispensations of the Holy Spir...
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“I speak not my own words,” the self-proclaimed oracle wrote, “butt what the lord teacheth mee.”
“If this bee delusion,” he brazenly proclaimed, “lett mee have more of it.”
The New London book-burning incident was not a bizarre aberration.
It was Whitefieldian revivalism in full flower; the most extreme expression of the new converts’ commitment to exercised bodies, biblical impulses, visions, and other gifts of the Holy Spirit; and the pinnacle of Davenport’s charismatic ministry.
Among the ringleaders of the Whitefieldarians’ crusade to restore the Pentecostal charismata of the apostolic age, the “Right Zealous” Mr. Davenport had no equal.
In July 1741, Davenport crossed the Long Island Sound and began igniting religious revivals along the Boston Post Road from New London to New Haven. In contrast to Whitefield, Wheelock, and most of his itinerating peers, Davenport preached without the consent of the standing ministers in the towns that he visited.
Davenport opened his revival meetings with a short prayer before ceding control to gifted lay people who were constrained to speak by the Holy Spirit.
When he did preach, Davenport yoked the Whitefieldarians’ practice of extemporaneous speech to the emerging popular fascination with immediate revelations of the Holy Spirit.
The Southold itinerant brazenly declared that his every utterance issued from the “immediate impressions and directions of the Divine Spirit.”
By almost any measure, Davenport was the single most successful riding minister of his generation.
He drank deeply from the streams of direct revelation, believing that “GOD INSPIR’D HIM as he did the ancient Prophets.”
Responding to the Davenport insurgency, ministers from across the colony gathered in Guilford, Connecticut, on November 24, 1741.
The “Guilford Resolves,” as the formal statement summarizing the proceedings came to be known, directly attacked Davenport’s controversial practice of spiritual discernment.
They rebuked parishioners who left their parishes to attend revival meetings in other towns, encouraged limitations on the formation of private prayer meetings, and recommended stringent standards for licensing preachers.
“Act for regulating Abuses and correcting Disorders in Ecclesiastical Affairs,”
They proposed a deadline for initiating further disciplinary actions against the recalcitrant Whitefieldarian: March 1, 1743. Three days after it expired, Davenport set fire to the first pile of books in New London.
On the same day that the general consociation of ministers met in Guilford, John Curtis and Christopher Christophers—both Yale College graduates and prominent New London merchants and magistrates—submitted a petition to the county court requesting the right to worship in a separate church.
grounded their argument in the provisions of the 1689 Toleration Act,
On November 27, 1742, local magistrates administered the required oath of allegiance to a group of three dozen men. The tolerance extended by the court transformed New London into a haven for ardent Whitefieldarians from across the colony.
the separatists took a further step toward ecclesiastical independence by establishing a theological seminary.
the religious commotions that roiled New England during the peak years of the Whitefieldian awakenings can be grouped into three broadly transgressive practices:
railing against revival opposers, judging the religious experiences of others, and insisting on an “Inward Commission” to preach or exhort in public without clerical sanction.
Hastings’s desire to divide the Suffield church between newborn saints and unregenerate hypocrites gestured toward a second major source of ecclesiastical discord: spiritual discernment, perhaps the defining characteristic of James Davenport’s inspired ministry.
Closely allied to verbal outbursts and discerning spirits were divine commands to preach and exhort.
the Scottish gentleman found it strange that so many New Englanders felt emboldened to hold forth on “justification, sanctification, adoption, regeneration, repentance, free grace, reprobation, original sin, and a thousand other such pritty, chimerical knick knacks as they had done nothing but studied divinity all their life time and perused all the lumber of the scholastic divines.”
Here, in the towns adjacent to New London, during the weeks and months following the 1743 bonfires, one of the best-documented church schisms of the eighteenth century unmasked Whitefieldian revivalism as a frontal assault on the gospel land of light and revealed the lasting scars inflicted on the Congregational establishment by James Davenport’s incendiary itinerancy.
