Seasonable Thoughts on the State of Religion in New-England
A treatise in five parts by the pastor of the First Church in Boston against what he saw as the disorders of the revival of the 1740s. He objects to itinerant preaching and to the bodily outcries that went with it, and answers Jonathan Edwards’s defence of the revival.
Chauncy’s title page announces a faithful account of “the things of a bad and dangerous tendency” in the religious appearance in the land. Part I takes them in turn, beginning with itinerant preaching, which he traces to George Whitefield, and going on to the swoonings, shriekings and convulsion-like tremblings that accompanied the preaching in many places. He does not deny that some were truly wrought upon by the Spirit of God; he holds that in the far greater number the terrors were a mechanical effect of frightening words and gestures. His footnotes cite and dispute Edwards’s book on the revival.
It states the case against the awakening as a Boston minister put it at the time. See the Great Awakening.
Cited in
- 1734 to 1743, firm date