ormal an incident as the baptism of an
adult, and all baptized children growing up and not being of scandalous
life are to be welcomed to the Lord's Supper. It proves the immense
power of the Awakening, that this rigid and powerful organization, of a
people tenacious of its traditions to the point of obstinacy, should
have swung so completely free at this point, not only of its
long-settled usages, but of the distinct letter of its standards.

The Episcopal Church of the colonies was almost forced into an attitude
of opposition to the revival. The unspeakable folly of the English
bishops in denouncing and silencing the most effective preachers in the
national church had betrayed Whitefield into his most easily besetting
sin, that of censorious judgment, and his sweeping counter-denunciations
of the Episcopalian clergy in general as unconverted closed to him many
hearts and pulpits that at first had been hospitably open to him. Being
human, they came into open antagonism to him and to the revival. From
the protest against extravagance and disorder, it was a short and
perilously easy step to the rejection of religious fervor and
earnestness. The influence of the mother church of that dreary period
and the influence of the official rings around every royal governor were
all too potent in the same direction. The Propagation Society's
missionaries boasted, with reason, of large accessions of proselytes
alienated from other churches by their distaste for the methods of the
revival. The effect on the Episcopal Church itself was in some respects
unhappy. It "lowered a spiritual temperature already too low,"[177:1]
and weakened the moral influence of the church, and the value of its
testimony to important principles which there were few besides
efficiently to represent--the duty of the church not to disown or shut
out those of little faith, and the church's duty toward its children.
Never in the history of the church have the Lord's husbandmen shown a
fiercer zeal for rooting up tares, regardless of damage to the wheat,
than was shown by the preachers of the Awakening. Never was there a
wider application of the reproach against those who, instead of
preaching to men that they should be converted and become as little
children, preach to children that they must be converted and become like
grown folks.[178:1] The attitude of the Episcopal Church at that period
was not altogether admirable; but it is nothing to its dishonor that it