trinal cleavage had grown increasingly distinct in the religious thought of New England. Apart from those effects of the revival which already have been noted, 1 it may be said that the one really permanent result of that notable wave of religious enthusiasm was the polemical controversy which it precipitated. 2 The question concerning the " means of grace/' around which the controversy in its initial stage raged, 3 became larger and more complicated by virtue of the massive system of theology which Jonathan Edwards developed upon the fundamental notion of the utter worthlessness of man, due to his depravity and consequent helplessness.
Into the metaphyskal subtleties of the Edwardean system we are not called to go; it is sufficient to observe that the reaction against such a conception of human nature was bound to be marked in the midst of an age generally responsive to enthusiasms born of fresh conceptions of the essen
- 1 Cf. supra, pp. 36 and 37 et seq.
- 2 See Walker, Creeds and Platforms of Congregationalism, p. 287.
- 3 The lowest point of religious decline in the history of New England was reached in the first quarter of the eighteenth century. The absence of vital piety was generally remarked. The prevailing type of religious experience was unemotional and formal. The adoption of the HalfWay Covenant in the third quarter of the previous century helped to precipitate a state of things wherein the ordinary distinctions between the converted and the unconverted were largely obscured. Emphasis came to be laid heavily upon the cultivation of morality as a means of promoting spiritual life. Prayer, the reading of the Bible, and church attendance were other "means". In other words, man's part in the acquisition of religious experience came prominently into view. The promoters of the revival attacked these notions, asserting that repentance and faith were still fundamentally necessary and that the experience of conversion, i. e., the conscious sense of a change in one's relation to God, was the prime test of one's hope of salvation. Charles Chauncy, minister of the First Church, Boston, in his Seasonable Thoughts on the State of Religion in New England (1743), championed the former position; the great Edwards came to the defence of the latter.
