ABSTRACT
Moderate revivalists like Cooper and Edwards (see Chapter 48) deplored the hysteria they thought produced by zealots such as James Davenport (Chapter 50), in part because it provided opportunities for critics to attack the whole phenomenon. In this response to Cooper's Preface, the coolly rational tone, the defence of ministerial authority and scepticism about whether the effects of revival preaching were produced by God's spirit at work, all indicate a different mind-set and different priorities from those of the revivalists. It is an early expression of the rational spirit associated with the Enlightenment. The pamphlet extracted below was once attributed to Charles Chauncy (1705-1787), minister at the First Church in Boston from 1727 who distrusted Edwards's renewal of Calvinism and was identified as the leading theological liberal of his day. A more recent suggestion, however, is that the author was William Rand, a minister from Hampshire County, Massachusetts, and thus a neighbour of Edwards.
