As the Great Awakening spread, the Christian Establishment loathed all the embarrassing emotional displays of me me me fanaticism—as one critic at the time wrote, these awful “perturbations of mind, possessions of God, ecstatic flights and supernatural impulses.” Sure, the religion was founded on stories of miracles and individual visions and revelations, but whoa … miracles and revelations right here, right now? To which the delirious mob responded yes, exactly. Whitefield wrote that the “screamings, tremblings” that he and other evangelists provoked were surely just like the “sudden agonies
...more
