514 RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENT I 



ing the early years of the nineteenth century. For that 

 was the time of great &quot; revivals. &quot; The tremendous as 

 sertions of Jonathan Edwards regarding the tyranny of 

 God, having been taken up by a multitude of men who 

 were infinitely Edwards &amp;gt;s inferiors in everything save 

 lung-power, were spread with much din through many 

 churches: pictures of an angry Moloch holding over 

 the infernal fires the creatures whom he had pre 

 destined to rebel, and the statement that &quot;hell is filled 

 with infants not a span long,&quot; were among the choice 

 oratorical outgrowths of this period. With these loud 

 and lurid utterances went strivings after sacerdotal rule. 

 The presbyter-&quot; old priest writ large &quot;-took high 

 ground in all these villages : the simplest and most harm 

 less amusements were denounced, and church members 

 guilty of taking part in them were obliged to stand in 

 the broad aisle and be publicly reprimanded from the 

 pulpit. 



My mother was thoughtful, gentle, and kindly; in the 

 midst of all this froth and fury some one lent her a 

 prayer-book; this led her to join in the devotions of a 

 little knot of people who had been brought up to use it; 

 and among these she found peace. My father, who was 

 a man of great energy and vigor, was attracted to this 

 little company; and not long afterward rose the little 

 church on the Green, served at first by such clergymen as 

 chanced to be in that part of the State. 

 ^ Among these was a recent graduate of the Episcopal 

 College at Geneva on Seneca Lake Henry Gregory. 

 His seemed to be a soul which by some mistake had es 

 caped out of the thirteenth century into the nineteenth. 

 He was slight in build, delicate in health, and ascetic in 

 habits, his one interest in the world being the upbuilding 

 of the kingdom of God-as he understood it. It was the 

 time when Pusey, Newman, Keble, and their compeers 

 were reviving mediaeval Christianity; their ideas took 

 trong hold upon many earnest men in the western world, 

 and among these no one absorbed them more fully than 



