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CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Great Danger

Inspired by the fervent message of a British evangelist who attracted rapt crowds on a tour of New England in 1740, Rev. Jonathan Parsons led a religious revival in Lyme that left his parish bitterly divided.

The parish is small, consisting of about 120 families, yet many days the past summer, I have had 20, 30, 40, 50, and sometimes 60 persons under deep concern with me in one day, inquiring the way to Zion. I hope since the 14th of May last, more than 140 souls have been savingly converted in this place. The same happy work has been carried on in the neighboring parishes of the town, especially one under the care of the Rev. Mr. Griswold, in a most wonderful manner.

Parsons’s prayer and reflection during a period of mental struggle in his early ministry brought a sudden moment of revelation and, according to his grandson, an “undoubted alteration both in his doctrines and mode of preaching.” After agonizing over his errors, the minister turned away from his Arminian beliefs and burned the sermons he had written in Lyme over the course of five years. An opportunity to hear British evangelist George Whitefield (1714–1770) preach in New Haven in 1740 accelerated his spiritual awakening. “The news of Mr. Whitefield’s rising up with great zeal for holiness and souls, had great influence upon my mind,” Parsons wrote.

George Whitefield, age twenty-six, enthralled crowds at each stop on his first New England tour, and news of his itinerary spread widely. When Nathan Cole (1711–1783), a farmer living near Hartford, learned that Mr. Whitefield would preach in Middletown, he dropped his farm tools in his field and rushed with his wife on horseback. “The land and banks over the [Connecticut] river looked black with people and horses all along the 12 miles,” Cole wrote in his journal. “When I saw Mr. Whitefield come upon the scaffold he looked almost angelical; a young, slim, slender, youth before some thousands of people with a bold undaunted countenance.” Although the charismatic evangelist “came not by the way of Lyme,” Parsons noted, his own parish members still became “more generally rous’d up to bethink themselves, and converse about religion.”

Most of the portraits of George Whitefield in an album of engravings given to Charles Ludington in Old Lyme depict the celebrated evangelist in middle age with white wig and portly build, but one shows a slender, youthful preacher “addressing one of the numerous crowds that attended his ministry.”

More than a year later, in a letter to Rev. Benjamin Coleman (1673–1747), pastor of Boston’s Brattle Street Church, Parsons praised the initial progress of the revival in his small parish of 120 families. Describing the revival’s “happy work,” he reported in December 1741 that “20, 30, 40, 50, and sometimes 60 persons under deep concern” had met with him in a single day. Ecclesiastical Society records the previous year had already noted that “men and their wives” were seated together in the meetinghouse, and Parsons stated that “more than 140 souls have been savingly converted in this place.”

Three years later he provided a more detailed account of the “very gracious revival of religion among us” in a letter to Rev. Thomas Prince (1687–1758) for publication in the recently launched revivalist newspaper Christian History.

An announcement of the launch of Christian History in March 1743 promoted its “Authentic Accounts; from ministers and other creditable serious persons, of the revival of religion in the several parts of New-England.” Subscriptions declined when the journal’s firsthand accounts repeated similar details, and publication stopped two years later.

Calling attention to the “vast falsehoods that have been spread about the country respecting our opinions and practices in this place,” Parsons asked that “you must suffer me to be a little more particular, than otherwise I would be.” His second narrative, written in April 1744 and published in seven installments, opened with “some hints of the town, its settlement, &c. and my own settlement also.” It recounted how his heart had “burned with love to and pity for the people of [his] peculiar charge” and how, believing them to be in “great danger,” he had determined that his “errand” was “to lay open the state of their souls.” He also expressed the hope that “above one hundred and eighty souls belonging to this congregation have met with a saving change.”

Parsons emphasized again the frequency of gatherings in the meetinghouse. He described the rush of people who flocked to his study “daily and in great numbers, and deeply wounded,” and noted that his sermons and prayer meetings held particular appeal for the town’s youth. They had “left their sports, and grew sick of their youthful amusements,” he wrote, but “some of middle age” had also appeared to be savingly converted. At a communion service in October 1741 when he “administered the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, to near 300 souls” amid many “signs of distress,” some at the communion table had dissolved in tears, while others trembled in anguish.

Parsons detailed, in addition, the response to a sermon he had preached, in the manner he “thought proper to awaken and convince,” to “a great assembly” on Election Day in May 1741. The election of civic officials in the past had brought an occasion for “feasting, music, dancing, gaming, and the like,” but during his lecture “some young women were thrown into hysteric fits.” Many others “had their countenances changed,” and “their thoughts seemed to trouble them, so that the joints of their loins were loosed, and their knees smote one against another.” Overwhelmed by emotion, “great numbers cried out aloud in the anguish of their souls,” and “several stout men fell as though a cannon had been discharged, and a ball had made its way through their hearts.” After the sermon, “those that could not restrain themselves were generally carried out of the meetinghouse.”

Displays of emotion had also greeted Parsons’s labor “beyond the bounds” of his own parish, particularly in Norwich, Stonington, and Groton. When he preached to George Griswold’s congregation in Lyme’s east parish in May 1741, “the assembly in general, were in tears, and near one half, I suppose, crying out aloud in distress.” Three years later when Parsons surveyed the achievements of the revival, he acknowledged that its fervent emotionalism had also provoked strong opposition. He mentioned the “unhappy case” of New London where “increased difficulties” had “produced an open separation” and where “Christians had such sharp contentions between them, as to part asunder from one another.”

Nor had the “happy work” of the revival prevailed in Saybrook. There Rev. William Hart (1713–1784) in August 1741 had denied the use of his pulpit to Rev. James Davenport after the itinerant preacher declared Hart “unconverted.” Parsons stated he had not known at the time that Mr. Davenport referred to the neighboring minister as unconverted. His Christian History report omitted mention of the impassioned sermon he delivered in Boston in 1742 defending Davenport after his arrest there for deliberately provocative preaching in the streets late at night. Also missing from the Lyme minister’s account was mention of Davenport’s frenzied preaching in New London in 1743, when he exhorted followers to burn all books of history and theology, then urged them to create a sacrificial blaze and incinerate their worldly goods. “I greatly loved him for his eminent piety, but I can’t justify all his measures,” Parsons wrote, acknowledging that the itinerant preacher had “greatly prejudice[d] persons against religion.”

Rev. Jonathan Parsons traveled to Boston in 1742 to deliver a sermon Wisdom justified of her Children defending the incendiary minister James Davenport, who had been jailed after his deliberately provocative preaching and his denunciation of fellow clergymen.

In Lyme’s north parish the great danger that concerned Rev. George Beckwith in August 1741 was not the problem of unsaved souls but the authorizing of anyone displaying a “divine impulse” to pass judgment on other brethren. In two strongly worded sermons Beckwith warned against following the “dictates of man’s wild fancies” and denounced those “who usurped God’s judgment and presumed to act in His place.” A group from his congregation, together with a few from Parsons’s west parish, funded the printing of the paired sermons. Influential among the contributors was Dr. Eleazar Mather (1716–1789), a Yale graduate and local physician who later quipped that Lyme had been favored during the Great Awakening “with the lights of several wandering stars, viz. traveling Tennant, singing Davenport … whining Whitefield.”

After George Whitefield died of chronic asthma in Newbury, he was interred in a crypt beneath the pulpit in Jonathan Parsons’s church. Fervent admirers later removed pieces of his clothing and parts of his body, and today a glass case at the Methodist Center at Drew University displays what is said to be the famous evangelist’s thumb.