Joshua Gee of Boston's Second Church. Mather had dared to be critical of
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ather than restoring the dominant place of religion in the colony, the Great Awakening was undermining the already weakened public authority of the old standing clerical order. Not only were laypeople attacking clergy in the name of religion, but any semblance of unity among the congregational clergy was on the brink of collapse. Only gradually was the breach becoming apparent. In Boston, truly New England's hub, a few congregational pastors had been cool to the awakening ever since Whitefield's visit. They were outnumbered, however, nine to three, by proponents of the revival, including all the town's senior pastors.∞ At first, opposition to the revival had been hazardous, as the Reverend Samuel Mather found out in 1741. Mather, son of Cotton Mather, was assistant pastor to pro-revivalist Joshua Gee of Boston's Second Church. Mather had dared to be critical of Whitefield. Friends of the revival said Mather's preaching discouraged ''the work of conviction'' among parishioners. In summer 1741, a council of local clergy attempted to reconcile the di√erences between Gee and Mather. The council advised Mather to reform. When soon after they judged he had not, they voted for his dismissal, thus creating bitter dissension and much talk.≤
Charles Chauncy, junior pastor to Thomas Foxcroft at First Church, was emerging as the spokesman for the minority who were cool to the awakening. Chauncy was respected for his intellect and regarded as essentially orthodox even if he emphasized tolerance and rationality (only later would he emerge as openly liberal). Thirty-six years old in 1741, he was a year younger than Edwards. He was short in stature and assertive in temperament. First Church was known as ''Old Brick,'' and eventually Chauncy picked up the same
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nickname, perhaps because he resembled a brick both in appearance and in his solid temperament.≥
During 1741, as tensions over the awakening and the Mather case heightened, Chauncy spoke out cautiously. Some persons were doubtless benefiting from the awakening, he conceded, and regeneration indeed should involve heartfelt experiences. Yet people were easily deceived by uncontrolled emotions. Evangelists who imposed a standardized set of emotional expectations for all the truly regenerate were encouraging a dangerous party spirit. True experience of new birth might take many forms and was often a gradual disciplined process. Similarly, in reference to Mather, Chauncy emphasized that clergy had varieties of gifts and styles and no one pattern should be demanded of all.∂
By 1742 Chauncy was deeply alarmed at the awakening's excesses. During the visits of Whitefield and even of Tennent there had been few extravagant bodily e√ects, visions, and trances. Now, especially as a result of the excitements stirred by the itinerants, such as Davenport, Wheelock, Buell, and Pomeroy, such ecstasies were becoming standard, even expected. Judgments against allegedly unconverted persons were commonplace, and congregations were being urged to forsake their pastors. Not only itinerant clergy but now all sorts of laypeople were making unsubstantiated claims to impulses, leadings from the Lord, and visions. Laypeople were exhorting and claiming spiritual authority to which they had no right. Unlike Edwards, who was defending these as peripheral excesses connected with an essentially good work, Chauncy saw the excesses as overwhelming any good that the revival might have done. Such extremes could result only in damage to true religion and irreparable damage to the standing order.∑
The itinerants, Chauncy now observed, were increasingly preaching in the most extravagant ways, trying to frighten people and otherwise arouse passions. Using vulgar appeals to sentiment, they would generate mass hysteria that they encouraged people to regard as evidence of the work of the Holy Spirit. Scores or even hundreds of people would shriek, swoon, or fall into fits. '' 'Tis scarce imaginable'' wrote Chauncy, ''what excesses and extravagancies people were running into, and even encouraged in. . . . In the same house [of worship], and at the same time, some would be praying, some exhorting, some singing, some clapping their hands, some laughing some crying, some shrieking and roaring out.'' Often the worst e√ects, Chauncy observed, would be at night. ''It is in the evening, or more late in the night with
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[To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.]
Charles Chauncy (1705–87) in his later years, when he was known as ''Old Brick''
only a few candles in a meeting-house, that there is a screaming and shrieking to the greatest degree; and the persons thus a√ected are generally children, young people, and women.'' Anyone who dared criticize any of these improprieties would be dismissed as ''an opposer of the Spirit, and a child of the Devil.''
To make matters worse, supposed converts might then immediately become exhorters. These might even be women or children, though they were ''most commonly raw, illiterate, weak and conceited young men, or lads.'' Such fledgling exhorters would be ''generally much better thought of than any ministers, except those in the New Way.'' Chauncy, a champion of good order and deference, was appalled at these departures from the hard-won traditions of decorum of the New England way.∏
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As itinerants increasingly made ecstatic religion the norm and encouraged disparagement of the authority of any who dared criticize them, Chauncy felt correspondingly bold to speak out. A backlash was developing and he was articulating its sentiments. Friends of the revival sensed the changing atmosphere. Young Samuel Buell, who was preaching in Boston in April 1742 soon after his triumph in Northampton, reported great success but also noted a fast-growing opposition that made one ''tremble to think'' of the sequel.π In mid-May, on a day called by First Church for prayer for the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, Chauncy took o√ the gloves. While urging that Bostonians should indeed pray for the outpouring of the Spirit, he emphasized that they should also recognize that much that was going on was ''a dishounor to God, and may have a tendency greatly to obstruct the progress of real and substantial religion.'' Bitterness, evil speaking, slander, and lay exhorters showing contempt for pastors were not God's work. Sensationalists were betraying people by overheating their imaginations and calling the result true religion.∫
During the next two months, Chauncy's case that the awakening was out of control was made for him by James Davenport. The most controversial of the itinerants had returned to Connecticut still in the role of the wild-eyed prophet. The Connecticut General Assembly, meeting in May and alarmed at divisions in its parish churches, was in a strongly anti-revival mood and had just passed a stringent law banning itinerancy except by invitation of the local pastor.Ω Near the end of May citizens of Stratford, Connecticut, brought a complaint that Davenport and Benjamin Pomeroy were agitating for a church schism there. The two were arrested in New Haven (where they were abetting another church separation) and brought before the Assembly in Hartford for a hearing. During much of the two-day proceedings Davenport continued to preach and prophesy whenever he could. The Assembly dismissed the case against Pomeroy, who seemed mild by comparison. Davenport, however, they declared under such ''enthusiastical impressions and impulses, and thereby disturbed in the rational faculties of his mind, and therefore to be pitied and compassionated, and not to be treated as otherwise he might be.''∞≠ The Assembly ordered to have him transported back to his parish on Long Island.
Neither the Long Island Sound nor the Connecticut Assembly was su≈- cient to stop a prophet. Davenport heard in the voice of God that his opposition in Connecticut was pointing him toward a greater mission. Before the end of June, there he was in Boston itself. The pro-revivalist clergy were chagrined, alarmed at the damage he might do. The association of local pastors happened to be meeting, and they immediately called Davenport in
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for an interview. They quickly saw that he was as untamed as ever. The association published a sharp attack on Davenport's excesses and disorderly behavior. Almost all the pastors of Boston signed the document. Conspicuous in its absence, however, was the name of Charles Chauncy, who apparently had been at the discussions. The document, of which Benjamin Colman was the first signatory, concluded with an a≈rmation of ''the great and glorious work of God'' in the awakening despite the ''devices of Satan against it, of one kind or another,'' including ''the imprudence of its friends, or by the virulent opposition of its enemies.''∞∞
Chauncy was rapidly moving toward a campaign of all-out opposition to the awakening. The last straw, if one were needed, was that Davenport made a personal call on Chauncy to ''inquire into the reason of the hope that was in me.'' Chauncy instead gave him the reasons why he believed Davenport was under ''a heated imagination'' and deluded. '' 'Tis too evident to be denied,'' he told the itinerant, ''that you often take the motions of your own mind for divine communication.''
Chauncy took the occasion of the Sunday after the Harvard commencement in July, while many visiting clergy were in town, to fulminate directly against ''enthusiasm.'' He had the sermon quickly published, prefaced by an open letter to Davenport. Chauncy argued both that the work of the Spirit was more restrained in the current era than it was in New Testament times and that the New Testament expressly forbade many revivalist practices (such as disorderliness and women speaking in the assemblies). ''Enthusiasm,'' he said, '' 'tis properly a disease, a sort of madness.'' Almost anyone might be infected by it, but those prone to melancholy were especially susceptible. God was working in New England, but for the Spirit to be e√ective, religious a√ections must be strictly restrained by Scripture and by reason. The enthusiasts were defying this fundamental principle.∞≤
Chauncy could now speak his mind openly since Davenport's visit had thrown the friends of revival into such disarray. Thomas Prince recorded that a ''disputatious spirit most grievously prevailed amongst us'' and that ''every party'' was ''sadly guilty'' of lamentable acrimony. Davenport stayed in the region inflaming the situation by repeatedly denouncing most of the Boston clergy as unconverted and ''leading their people blindfold to hell.'' He urged the laity to rebel against their lukewarm pastors. ''Pull them down; turn them out, and put others in their places.'' Finally, after nearly two months of notable forbearance, the Boston authorities had heard enough. They collected su≈cient evidences of Davenport's incendiary and seditious statements
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to have him arrested. Still, several of the clergy, led by the venerable Benjamin Colman, petitioned the court for leniency. The court agreed, ruling as in Connecticut that Davenport was under delusions and hence that when he had condemned the ministers he had been non compos mentis.∞≥
Edwards remained undeterred in defense of the awakening despite the contentions, the disorders, and the divisions that were dogging it in 1742. Although there is no evidence that he visited Boston during the time of the Davenport fracas, everything that happened in Boston was widely publicized, and he kept closely apprised of such matters. The events of 1735 and since had confirmed his view that the greater the success, the greater would be Satan's counterattacks. So the Northampton pastor persevered, giving almost all his time to tending or defending the awakening. The greater the controversies, the more urgently he worked on Some Thoughts Concerning the Present Revival of Religion, which he believed could settle many of the disputed issues.
Chauncy also was turning all his energies toward the awakening, fighting what he saw as mass hysteria that had seized his native land. Like a good eighteenth-century scientist, he sent scores of letters to correspondents throughout New England and collected large files of accounts of abuses. He backed up these accounts with firsthand observations, making a three-month tour of New England, New York, and New Jersey, tracking the steps of the most notorious of the itinerants. By the time Edwards' massive argument was available in March 1743, Chauncy was well armed to focus his projected volume as a refutation of the revivalist champion.
Chauncy's increasingly open anti-awakening campaign contributed to a steadily widening rupture among the Congregational clergy. Even some who had welcomed Whitefield and rejoiced in the numerous conversions were now having second thoughts as they were confronted with the extravagant ecstasies, the disorders, the insubordination, and even schisms encouraged by some of the itinerants. The standing order was falling apart; the only question was, who was responsible, the awakeners or their opponents?
Although Chauncy and some others of the anti-revivalists either were or became mildly liberal in their theologies, the anti-revivalist or Old Light movement, as it was coming to be called, reflected a genuine conservatism about the New England way that might appeal to persons across the theological spectrum. Chauncy himself was deeply loyal to what he considered the essence of the Puritan heritage. Perhaps the best evidence of this conservative impulse was that ever since the Timothy Cutler defection he had been strongly anti-Anglican and had been collecting data for a projected volume