without intermission; and then there were the blessed
outpourings of the Spirit!... After him came one Tennent, a
monster! impudent and noisy, and told them they were all
damn'd, damn'd, damn'd; this charmed them, and in the most
dreadful winter I ever saw people wallowed in the snow night
and day for the benefit of his beastly brayings, and many
ended their days under these fatigues. Both of them carried
more money out of these parts than the poor could be thankful
for."[170:1]

This is in a tone of bitter sectarian railing. But, after all, the main
allegations in it are sustained by the ample evidence produced by Dr.
Charles Chauncy, pastor of the First Church in Boston, in his serious
and weighty volume of "Seasonable Thoughts on the State of Religion in
New England," published in 1743, as he sincerely says, "to serve the
interests of Christ's kingdom," and "faithfully pointing out the things
of a bad and dangerous tendency in the late and present religious
appearance in the land." Dr. Chauncy was doubtless included in the
sweeping denunciation of the Christian ministry in general as
"unconverted," "Pharisees," "hypocrites." And yet it does not appear in
historical evidence that Chauncy was not every whit as good a Christian
as Tennent or Whitefield.

The excesses of the revival went on from bad to worse. They culminated,
at last, in the frenzy of poor James Davenport, great-grandson of the
venerable founder of New Haven, who, under the control of "impressions"
and "impulses" and texts of Scripture "borne in upon his mind,"
abandoned his Long Island parish, a true _allotrio-episcopos_, to thrust
himself uninvited into the parishes of other ministers, denouncing the
pastor as "unconverted" and adjuring the people to desert both pastor
and church. Like some other self-appointed itinerants and exhorters of
the time, he seemed bent upon schism, as if this were the great end of
preaching. Being invited to New London to assist in organizing a
Separatist church, he "published the messages which he said he received
from the Spirit in dreams and otherwise, importing the great necessity
of mortification and contempt of the world; and made them believe that
they must put away from them everything that they delighted in, to avoid
the heinous sin of idolatry--that wigs, cloaks and breeches, hoods,
gowns, rings, jewels, and necklaces, must be all brought together into
one heap into his