The Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale University

Seasons of spiritual concern in individual parishes, often intense enough to produce several converts for church membership, were not unknown in New England before the "great and general awakening" of the 1740s. Jonathan Edwards recorded in his "Personal Narrative" that his own first "exercises about my soul" occurred "some years before I went to college, at a time of remarkable awakening in my father's congregation" at East Windsor, Connecticut.This account, for which the manuscript is now lost, was written about 1740 and printed first by Samuel Hopkins in The Life and Character of the Late Reverend Mr. Jonathan Edwards (Boston, 1765). Later editors (Austin, 1808, and Dwight, 1830) sought to "improve" the text but succeeded only in corrupting it, and nearly all modern anthological reprints unhappily follow them. The only exception is David Levin, ed., Jonathan Edwards: A Profile (New York, 1969), which contains the complete work by Hopkins: the above quotation appears on p. 26. The elder Edwards' parish stood in young Jonathan's memory as "a place favored with mercies of this nature above any on this western side of New England, excepting Northampton" (FN-1; below, p. 154).Quotations from JE's writings printed in this volume will be cited from the page numbers herein. For title abbreviations, see p. xii. Arriving in Northampton, Massachusetts, in 1727 to become assistant to his reverend grandfather, Solomon Stoddard (below, p. 15–17), he learned that "reformations" had been from time

to time "swiftly propagated through the town," and was impressed with Stoddard's "extraordinary success in the conversion of many [souls]" (below, pp. 114, 145). There had been five "harvests" during Stoddard's sixty-year pastorate: in 1679, 1683, 1696, 1712, and 1718. Edwards must have been fascinated by the accounts of these revivals, for he wrote:

By this count, the revivals of 1734–35 and 1740–43, described in the writings of this volume, would have been Northampton's sixth and seventh harvests.

In publishing defenses of his own manifestly greater awakenings, Edwards was careful not to deny their continuity with Stoddard's (cf. FN-1; below, p. 190). But occasionally he hinted at "some new circumstances" (below, pp. 157–59, 181, 268); and once he revealed, perhaps too ingenuously, that Northampton's people, for all their familiarity with revivals, had imbibed a quite mistaken notion of conversion. "And indeed it appears very plainly in some of [the new converts], that before their own conversion they had very imperfect ideas what conversion was: it is all new and strange, and what there was no clear conception of before." The converts themselves acknowledged, according to Edwards, that the expressions they formerly used so confidently in their talk about conversion had conveyed to them no more idea of the real thing than the names of colors conveyed to men born blind (FN-1; below, p. 174).

The error he discovered and set himself to combat, of course, was "Arminianism"; and during the Great Awakening most evangelicals

followed his lead in rejecting pre-Awakening ideas of conversion as based in varying degrees on Arminian presuppositions. For massive evidence of this, one need go no farther than the pages of The Christian History, a periodical of revival intelligence published in Boston 1743–44 (see below, p. 78). The Rev. Jonathan Parsons, in a well-known report from Lyme, Connecticut, wrote that he had renounced Arminian principles and after changing his preaching had convinced his church members that few of them had ever been "savingly converted." He described persons "who had made themselves easy for some time with the Arminian way of conversion," but who in the present revival "were now convinced that such a scheme of doctrines, embraced, fatally settled persons down short of Christ." The Christian History, 2, 123, 133–42. Excerpts from Parsons' account are printed in Joseph Tracy, The Great Awakening; A History of the Revival of Religion in the Time of Edwards and Whitefield (Boston, 1842), pp. 134–50, 152–55; and in Alan Heimert, The Great Awakening; Documents Illustrating the Crisis and Its Consequences (Indianapolis, 1967), pp. 36–40, 188–91, 196–200. Joseph Park, a missionary to the Indians at Westerly, Rhode Island, confessed that while he had never embraced Arminianism entirely, he "had secretly imagined that there was something [good] in men to begin with, and that Gospel grace came to make [it] perfect"; but after being caught up in the revival, he became fully convinced of the doctrines of total depravity and salvation by grace alone.The Christian History, 1, 202–03. Nathaniel Leonard of Plymouth, Massachusetts, recalled that after Gilbert Tennent (below, pp. 49–50) preached there in March 1741, urging the doctrines of strict Calvinism, "all persons were put upon examining themselves, warned against trusting in their own righteousness and resting in the form of godliness, without the power, etc. [2 Timothy 3:5]." The result was a profound alteration in the temper of the whole town.Ibid., 2, 314–15. Josiah Crocker of Taunton testified that Arminianism, formality, and moral laxity were so ingrained among his people that they were "filled with wonder" at Tennent's "strange" doctrine; but after hearing him and several other traveling evangelists, some were "plucked off from their false foundations and…savingly converted to God." Ibid., 2, 323–44. Peter Thatcher of Middleborough reported that converts in his parish had developed a new doctrinal awareness which made them hostile to "Arminian errors." Ibid., 1, 172.

John Porter of North Bridgewater, who admitted that before he heard Whitefield and Tennent he himself "knew nothing rightly of my sin and danger…neither was established in the doctrines of grace," wrote of his new converts: "many of them were, before this day of God's searching our Jerusalem with candles [Zephaniah 1:12], as exact and strict in the performance of the externals of religion (as far as could be observed by man) as any among us, and had gained the charity of their neighbors; but now see they built upon the sandy foundation of their own righteousness, and so had perished eternally, notwithstanding their blazing professions and the good opinion of others, had not God in mercy opened their eyes to see the way of salvation by Christ, and enabled them to embrace it." Ibid., 1, 406–07. There are many other testimonies of like import.

How far such manifestoes, penned in the flush of revivalistic fervor, reflect without exaggerating the actual theological situation in New England Congregationalism before the Great Awakening is difficult to say. But it is at least obvious that some new battle lines had been drawn. Edwards made it unmistakably plain in a A Faithful Narrative that the Northampton conversions of 1734–35, so far as they stemmed from the influence of his preaching, were produced by what he intended as a doctrinal corrective. And William Cooper, in an interim report on religion in Boston, 1741, enumerated the revival's positive results in both society and the lives of individuals, and reiterated the conviction that "these fruits do not grow on Arminian ground" (preface to DM; below, p. 223). The new wave of evangelical harvests clearly grew out of a challenge to something called Arminianism.

But what was the precise identity of this enemy? To formulate an accurate definition, one must explore the historical background very carefully. Anti-Arminianism in New England had been quiescent since the subsiding of shock waves generated by the defection of several Connecticut clergymen to Anglicanism in 1722. Ten years before Edwards wrote A Faithful Narrative, Boston's Cotton Mather had been unable to find that, "among all the pastors of two hundred churches, there is one Arminian." Ratio Disciplinae Fratrum Nov-Anglorum (Boston, 1726), p. 5. Yet at the onset of his first revival at Northampton, Edwards recorded "a great noise that was in this part of the country about Arminianism" and incurred the

wrath of some who faulted him for "meddling with the controversy in the pulpit." FN-1; below, p. 148. The opposition was personal as well as doctrinal, coming mainly from the powerful Williams family. The Rev. William Williams (1665–1741) of Hatfield, Mass., had married a daughter of Solomon Stoddard, sister to JE's mother, and the rivalry among the cousins was notorious for acrimony. For the bearing of this intrafamily feud on JE's career at Northampton, see Sereno E. Dwight, The Life of President Edwards (New York, 1830), pp. 433–34; and Perry Miller, Jonathan Edwards (New York, 1959), pp. 101–05. JE's own account is in his letter of Jan 30, 1753, to Sir William Pepperell, where he began a long and candid recital by writing: "There has for many years appeared a prejudice in the family of the Williams's against me and my family, especially ever since the great awakening at Northampton 18 years ago" (original in Andover MSS). Nor was the noise confined to western Massachusetts, for at the time young Jonathan began his meddling the first public accusation against Arminianism among the Congregational clergy was already in Boston bookstalls. John White of Gloucester complained that some of the younger ministers "are under prejudices against, and fall off from, important articles of the faith of these churches and cast a favorable eye upon, embrace, and as far as they dare, argue for, propagate, and preach the Arminian scheme." In a lengthy jeremiad, he denounced Arminianism as "another gospel" and advised his brethren to eschew this "new body of divinity," which "rather deserves the title of A Bundle of Errors." Sinners, White admonished, should "labor to know your hearts and state, and don't rest till you have experienced a thorough work of conversion or regeneration." John White, New England's Lamentations (Boston, 1734), pp. 16–18, 29, et passim.

Francis A. Christie attempted to explain the resurgence of anti-Arminianism as a reaction of the standing order to continued fears of Anglican incursion, and argued that George Whitefield conjured up the "myth of Arminianism" by his "rash and unwarranted aspersions" against the Congregational clergy."The Beginnings of Arminianism in New England," Papers of the American Society of Church History, 2nd ser., 3 (1912), 159. But Whitefield did not arrive in New England until September 1740. Perry Miller attributed it mainly to "the steady influx of books from English Nonconformity," but he made his case chiefly on the basis of John Taylor's The Scripture Doctrine of Original Sin, which was not published until 1738.Jonathan Edwards, pp. 106–20. On pp. 7–29 Miller suggests other indications of Arminianism in New England in the first third of the eighteenth century. Edmund S. Morgan dismissed Arminianism

as "something of a New England bogy man," but his main evidence was the simple fact that pillars of the establishment continued to call themselves Calvinists and disowned any label that hinted otherwise—a curious conclusion following his acknowledgment that "New England ministers…even while shouting loudest against Arminianism, were themselves gliding unconsciously toward it." The Gentle Puritan: A Life of Ezra Stiles, 1727–1795 (New Haven, 1961), pp. 15–19. Most recently, Gerald J. Goodwin has updated the Christie thesis by arguing "The Myth of 'Arminian-Calvinism' [as opposed to Arminian Anglicanism] in Eighteenth-Century New England." Restricting his definition of Arminianism to the Five Points of the Dutch Remonstrants (1610), and sharply separating formal theological statements from popular piety, he painted a Puritan establishment whose unadulterated Calvinism stood fast against the Arminian Anglicans and promptly unfrocked every Congregational clergyman departing from orthodoxy. The Arminian noise which disturbed western Massachusetts in 1734, according to Goodwin's reading, was due entirely to the controversy over Robert Breck, whose settlement at Springfield was opposed by the Hampshire Ministers Association in 1734–35, in Part because of suspicions regarding his orthodoxy.New England Quarterly, 41 (1968), 213–37. For the Breck case, see below, p. 113. Goodwin might have found himself even more persuaded by the action of the Hampshire Ministers Association, which in April 1734 protested "the increase of missionaries from the Church of England amongst us" and in September addressed a spirited remonstrance to the Bishop of London (MS records at Forbes Library; cf. also Carl Bridenbaugh, Mitre and Sceptre; Transatlantic Faiths, Ideas, Personalities, and Politics, 1689–1775 [New York, 1967], pp. 78–81). But he is simply wrong on the point: see below, pp. 17–18.

None of the attempts to deny the Arminian threat or locate it outside the standing order seems very convincing. For one thing, the Congregationalists' dispute with the Anglicans was mainly over ecclesiastical polity rather than doctrine. In an exchange on the doctrinal question aired in the columns of The Boston Gazette during the summer of 1735, one polemicist averred without contradiction that "the tenets of neither [Calvinists nor Arminians] are appropriate to either side of the controversy between Episcopalians and anti-Episcopalians" because each side received the Thirty-Nine Articles

and interpreted them in a variety of ways.The Boston Gazette, Aug 18, 1735. Goodwin, failing to recognize this, sought to support his contention regarding the mythical state of the Arminian bogy by citing the anti-Anglican comments of such men as Jonathan Parsons and John White; but upon examining the context of his citations one discovers that the Calvinistic protagonists were arguing polity, not doctrine.Parsons' account is in The Christian History, 2, 120–23. John White's New England's Lamentations is actually three separate tracts bound together: the second, which I have quoted above, is on "The Danger of Arminian Principles" among what White called "our young men"; the third, which Goodwin cites, is on "The Declining State of Our Church Order, Government and Discipline" and warns against presbyterianism (hardly an "Arminian" threat!) as well as episcopacy. Neither man made any explicit connection, in the passages cited, between his doctrinal and his political concerns.

To verify that Jonathan Edwards' Arminian target was not simply a straw man, one might start with Conrad Wright's essay on "Arminianism Before the Great Awakening," which is still the best summary treatment of the subject.The Beginnings of Unitarianism in America (Boston, 1966), ch. 1. He calls attention to the fact that for a long while New England had been moving in the direction of Arminianism because of a "latent ambiguity" in the traditional patterns of Puritan orthodoxy. This is the point to pursue, for the significant truth is that for at least half a century the whole basis of church life in New England had been shifting imperceptibly to human effort and moral striving, so that quite unawares many orthodox ministers were encouraging a subtle form of salvation by works.Such a shift was already far advanced in England; see Christopher FitzSimmons Allison, The Rise of Moralism; The Proclamation of the Gospel from Hooker to Baxter (New York, 1966). Indeed, this is what "Arminianism" meant in mid-eighteenth-century New England: it had less to do with Jacobus Arminius (1560–1609), the Dutch theologian from whom it took its name, than with a mood of rising confidence in man's ability to gain some purchase on the divine favor by human endeavor. It was, as Thomas A. Schafer put it, "a native American variety of human self-sufficiency which expressed itself still within the forms of the Covenant theology." "Jonathan Edwards and Justification by Faith," Church History, 20 (1951), 55. Cf. Clyde A. Holbrook, ed., Original Sin, vol. 3 of The Works of Jonathan Edwards (New Haven, 1970), p. 4 n.

Federal Theology (from foedus, covenant), though an impressive intellectual structure, was far from impregnable. It contained a built-in equivocacy whereby the Arminian camel could get his nose under the Puritan tent so unobtrusively that few of the insiders noticed when the stakes of orthodoxy began to loosen. Perry Miller argued that Puritan theologians, by emphasizing the doctrine of God's covenant with the elect, softened the harshness of Calvin's "inscrutable deity" and substituted the "reasonable" concept of a God who limited himself to acting in accord with the terms of his gracious promise of redemption. Thus any man who fulfilled the terms of the covenant would be taking God at his word and might in all justice hold God to his promise. According to Miller's understanding of the New England mind,

Theoretically, God still chooses whom he wills, and only the elect can accept the covenant. But practically all of New England's ecclesiastical, political, and social life was interpreted under rubrics derived from the Federal Theology; and the covenant of grace with individual saints was easily transmuted into an external covenant with the nation. As experiential piety waned, it was natural for leaders of the holy commonwealths to stress men's "natural power" to obey the terms of the external covenant, so that if they did what they could in this respect, possibly God would enable them "to exert those acts of religion which are internal"—i.e., to believe unto salvation.So preached Cotton Mather (1663–1728); quoted in Perry Miller, "Preparation for Salvation in Seventeenth-Century New England," Journal of the History of Ideas, 4 (1943), 285.

This suggests another development, a concomitant one turning on the question of what, if anything, a sinner might do to prepare himself for conversion and entrance into the covenant of grace. While some Puritan teachers had seen salvation as entirely due to divine initiative, others encouraged various kinds of pre-conversion responses to the early promptings of grace. Some indeed had gone so far in affirming the efficacy of preparation as to appear almost synergistic; for these, preparation became "an 'ability' on man's part as a wedge into grace." Norman Pettit, The Heart Prepared: Grace and Conversion in Puritan Spiritual Life (New Haven, 1966), p. 20; cf. also ch. 6. Practitioners of the preparation scheme thus "laid the groundwork for later American Arminianism by obligating God to bestow salvation on those who sufficiently performed their part of the legal bargain by preparing themselves for grace." Conrad Cherry, The Theology of Jonathan Edwards: A Reappraisal (Garden City, N.Y., 1966), p. 115. Cf. also Miller, "Preparation for Salvation in Seventeenth-Century New England," loc. cit., pp. 282–86.

But New England's departure from the experiential tradition has been attributed most often to the operation of the Halfway Covenant, adopted 1662, and the effects of the decrees of the Reforming Synod of 1679–80, for the subtle tendency of these decisions was to relax anxiety about personal regeneration and raise tentative hopes for salvation by character.

The Halfway Covenant was a measure designed to hold within the churches those persons who could not qualify for full membership under the terms of the original ecclesiastical constitution, which provided that only the regenerate were to be received as church members. Following a doctrine of the Federal Theology, according to which the offspring of the regenerate are included in the covenant of grace, the first generation of Puritans in New England presented their children for baptism, the sign and seal of the covenant, fully expecting that when such children reached spiritual maturity they would profess conversion as their parents before them had done. When many members of the second generation found that they could not honestly testify to such an experience, their relationship to the visible church was in considerable doubt. When they began to have children, whom they naturally wanted baptized, the problem became intolerable. After much discussion, a Massachusetts synod in 1662 finally affirmed:

Church members who were admitted in minority, understanding the Doctrine of Faith, and publicly professing their assent thereto; not scandalous in life, and solemnly owning the Covenant before the Church, wherein they give up themselves and their Children to the Lord, and subject themselves to the Government of Christ in the Church, their Children are to be baptized.Propositions Concerning the Subjects of Baptism (Cambridge, Mass., 1662), the Fifth Proposition; in Williston Walker, The Creeds and Platforms of Congregationalism (Boston, 1960), p. 328.

The synod acknowledged that persons baptized in infancy, though not professing Christians, were connected somehow with the visible church and might therefore pass along to their children the same ecclesiastical status. Providing they were of upright life and would accept the discipline of the church, they might present their children for baptism; but they could not partake of the Lord's Supper or vote in church affairs. They were halfway, rather than full, members.

Some modern historians have argued that this "way of reconciling the Puritans' conflicting commitments to infant baptism and to a church composed exclusively of saints" was "neither a sign of decline in piety nor a betrayal of the standards of the founding fathers, but an honest attempt to rescue the concept of a church of visible saints from the tangle of problems created in time by human reproduction." Morgan, Visible Saints, pp. 133–38. This is doubtless true with respect to the intentions of the synod, for the halfway arrangement did propose to safeguard the purity of communicant membership. But as with many a good intention, the historical aftermath was something different. By extending baptism and a measure of church membership to the children of unconverted parents, the synod was accepting another generation of unconverted members who would be content generally with no closer relation to the church—or to God—than their parents had enjoyed. As Robert G. Pope put it, "the halfway covenant represented the terminal commitment for most children who took advantage of it…. They took hold of the covenant as the easiest way to maintain their relations with the church." In a statistical analysis of selected church records, Pope found "a low percentage of persons who entered communion after owning the covenant," and

concluded that "by the turn of the century purity had been largely sacrificed to community." The Half-Way Covenant, pp. 235–38, 276. Pope also found that in churches adopting the halfway practice there was an overall increase in communicant membership, converted from the community at large, and this led him to regard the Halfway Covenant as an advance for the churches.

Jonathan Edwards, reflecting on this in 1749, observed that "'tis not unusual, in some churches…for persons at the same time that they come into the church, and pretend to own the covenant, freely to declare to their neighbors, they have no imagination that they have any true faith in Christ, or love to him." Owning the covenant, in his view, had "degenerated into a matter of mere form and ceremony…it being visibly a prevailing custom for persons to neglect this till they come to be married, and then to do it for their credit's sake, and that their children may be baptized." An Humble Inquiry into the Rules of the Word of God, Concerning the Qualifications Requisite to a Complete Standing and Full Communion in the Visible Christian Church (Boston, 1749), pp. 32, 36. On the basis of this and similar testimonies, there is no good reason to doubt Williston Walker's description of the way in which the Halfway Covenant actually operated over the years. By about 1719, he wrote,

When the line between halfway and communicant membership began to break down, as it inevitably did in the relaxation of rigor

to maintain an ostensibly pure church, the congregational way itself was in danger. The next "attempt to rescue the concept of a church of visible saints" would have either to redefine the concept of sainthood in terms that dispensed entirely with the demand for professions of experiential faith, or else recover the norms of early Congregationalism. Actually both were tried, the former by Solomon Stoddard and other advocates of an inclusive church, the latter by Jonathan Edwards and many New Lights of the Great Awakening.

The struggle to redefine sainthood was led by Solomon Stoddard (1643–1729) in the sense that he fought the public battles which earned him this notoriety, though others had quietly preceded him. He became pastor at Northampton in 1669; and in less than a decade he was discarding the distinction between full and halfway members, baptizing every adult who assented to the articles of faith, and admitting all the baptized to the Lord's Supper. In 1700 he startled traditionalists by publishing his judgment that visible saints are those who "make a serious profession of the true religion, together with those that do descend from them, till rejected of God." The Doctrine of the Instituted Churches (Boston, 1700), p. 6. By "profession" Stoddard meant an intellectual and verbal acquiescence, what early Puritans had called "a historical faith," In 1709 he announced that visible sainthood had nothing to do with inward grace and conversion.An Appeal to the Learned (Boston. 1709), p. 25. This was his way of interpreting the canons of the Reforming Synod (1679), one of whose crucial formulations he had been able to dictate. When some of the elders at the Synod had pressed for a statement requiring "that persons should make a relation of the work of God's Spirit upon their hearts, in order to coming into full communion," Stoddard moved successfully to substitute the following: "It is requisite that persons be not admitted unto communion in the Lord's Supper without making a personal and public profession of their faith and repentance." The Necessity of Reformation (Boston, 1679), p. 10; in Walker, Creeds and Platforms of Congregationalism, p. 433. Stoddard related his victory over traditionalist clergy in An Appeal to the Learned, pp. 93–94. As practiced at Northampton and throughout the Connecticut River Valley, where "Pope" Stoddard's influence was strong, such profession had nothing to say about inward religious experience. One of the few churches which resisted the new scheme was Westfield, whose poetically turned pastor, Edward Taylor, suspected a drift

Into ye Realm of Prelates arch, ye place

Where open Sinners vile unmaskt indeed

Are welcome Guests (if they can say ye Creed)

Unto Christ's Table.Quoted in Miller, The New England Mind, 2, 240. Taylor died in 1729, the same year as Stoddard, and the Westfield church soon adopted the Stoddardean practice. Cf. Norman Grabo, Edward Taylor's Treatise Concerning the Lord's Supper (Lansing, Mich., 1965).

At the very least, Stoddardism marked a major break with the experiential tradition, and indeed with the whole congregational way.See Pope, The Half-Way Covenant, pp. 251–58, where some precedents for Stoddard's "presbyterian polity" are cited; also Morgan, Visible Saints, p. 149; Pettit, The Heart Prepared, p. 203; and Thomas A. Schafer, "Solomon Stoddard and the Theology of the Revival," in A Miscellany of American Christianity (Durham, N.C., 1963), p. 332.

It is only fair to say that Stoddard himself was both a Calvinist and a conversionist. Though he discarded the practice of requiring relations of experience from persons entering full communion in the visible church, he still insisted on the necessity of gracious conversion. He regarded conversion as a change which God alone can produce when and as he wills. He rejected the "Arminian" notion that any acts of preparation are efficacious in themselves, and preached the terrors of hell to those who trusted in their own goodness for salvation. And yet, by insisting on what unregenerate men can and must do to prepare themselves for conversion, and by urging them to partake of the Lord's Supper because it is "a converting ordinance," See his Doctrine of the Instituted Churches, p. 22; and Appeal to the Learned, p. 25. he unwittingly encouraged the idea that God somehow could be bound to reward the more active doers among them. "If men were seeking more earnestly they would have more success," he declared, and quoted Matthew 11:12, "The kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent take it by force." Those Taught by God the Father, to Know God the Son; Are Blessed (Boston, 1712), p. 33; quoted in Schafer, "Solomon Stoddard and the Theology of the Revival," loc. cit., p. 342. Schafer adds: "Stoddard believes that men must achieve a rather high level of personal morality if the work of conversion is to proceed further" (p. 343). It is hardly remarkable that such exhortations underscored the importance of human striving, nor is it surprising that less theologically sophisticated men easily assumed that their efforts should purchase

some claim to the favor of God. Stoddard often sought to awaken sleepy sinners and bring them to that "humiliation" which would lead to genuine conversion, and with frequent success at Northampton; but elsewhere most professing Christians, having already gained all the privileges of church membership, simply enjoyed them with less pain and trouble.

Thus on the eve of the Great Awakening New England's churches were a mixed multitude like the ones from which their founders had fled, their outward religious life characterized largely by moral homilies in the pulpit—"Cotton Mather's 'do-good' piety"—and complacent self-confidence in the pew.Pope, The Half-Way Covenant, p. 276. Miller, in a similar context, referred to such deliverances as preaching "as though John Calvin had never lived" ("Preparation for Salvation in Seventeenth-Century New England," loc cit., p. 282); and Walker saw them as emphasizing "morality as a means to a Christian life" rather than the result of "a divinely wrought change in man's nature" (Creeds and Platforms of Congregationalism, p. 284). Under such preaching, many evangelists charged, pewsitters rested in "carnal security." This is not formal or explicit Arminianism, but it is certainly the prevailing mood which evoked the outcries of 1734 and afterward. Charles Chauncy, to be sure, was to reject the charge that those who opposed the Awakening did so on Arminian grounds.Seasonable Thoughts on the State of Religion in New England (Boston, 1743), pp. 397–98. On Chauncy, see below, pp. 62–64, 80–83. But other antirevivalists were less defensive. "A few years before these commotions began," wrote one in 1743, "some of the clergy began to preach less metaphysical and more practical sermons; on which many people complained of the decay of religion, the absence of that fervor and spirituality that had formerly appeared among ministers and people, and the danger of Arminianism overspreading the land." "A Dissertation of the State of Religion in North America," American Magazine, 1 (Sept. 1743), 2. He was admitting the reality; what one called it was only a matter of semantics.

But what precisely was the occasion of the "great noise" which Jonathan Edwards heard in Hampshire County in 1734? The best clue comes from the Diary of Stephen Williams (1693–1782), minister at Longmeadow, just below Springfield. On November 18, 1734, Williams recorded:

The "new notions" are not specified in any source yet discovered; but knowing their author, one can easily surmise their character. William Rand (1700–79) had been installed as the second minister at Sunderland in 1723. Classmate of Charles Chauncy (Harvard 1721), he was soon to be known as the most intransigent Old Light in Hampshire County—a stance which would lead to his removal in 1745.Rand was called to Kingston, which had just dismissed Thaddeus Maccarty for New Light sympathies. For the time being, however, he seems to have contented himself with one outburst of heterodoxy; and in deference to the uneasiness of his brethren, he soon "retracted the errors he was found to be falling into, and professed his principles in terms approved by his church and neighboring ministers." William Williams of Hatfield, letter dated April 28, 1735, to Benjamin Colman; in Colman Papers, Mass. Hist. Soc. A letter from Warham Williams of Watertown, dated April 28, 1735, to Benjamin Colman; in Colman Papers, Mass. Hist. Soc. A letter from Warham Williams of Watertown, dated March 20, 1734/5, to his brother Stephen Williams also adverts to "the particular state of the difficulties in Hampshire County in the upper [illegible word] parts of it" (Letters of American Clergymen, New York Public Library). The geographical location points not to Springfield, where in any case the Breck controversy was temporarily quiescent, but to Sunderland. The "exceeding alienation" between Rand and his congregation was healed, at least temporarily, when the revival reached Sunderland in the spring of 1735 (FN; below, p. 103). This little tempest might have brewed and cooled in a private teapot had not Jonathan Edwards, already alerted by the early bubblings of the Breck controversy, chosen to make a public issue of it. The real genie slipping silently out of the bottle, as he perceived it, was Arminianism. When Stoddard's young successor, standing on the threshold of his career called it by name and set his face against it, the Great Awakening in New England was on.Even though the Awakening in the Middle Colonies began several years earlier, there is no evidence of its having any influence on New England. JE testified that news of that movement first came to him when he traveled to New Jersey for his health in the summer of 1735 (FN-1; below, pp. 155–56).