Quaker; but the framework both of church and of state was wonderfully
little decayed or impaired. The same simplicity in the outward order of
worship was maintained; the same form of high Calvinistic theology
continued to be cherished as a norm of sound preaching and as a vehicle
of instruction to children. All things continued as they had been; and
yet it would have been a most superficial observer who had failed to
detect signs of approaching change. The disproportions of the
Calvinistic system, exaggerated in the popular acceptation, as in the
favorite "Day of Doom" of Michael Wigglesworth, forced the effort after
practical readjustments. The magnifying of divine sovereignty in the
saving of men, to the obscuring of human responsibility, inevitably
mitigated the church's reprobation of respectable people who could
testify of no experience of conversion, and yet did not wish to
relinquish for themselves or their families their relation to the
church. Out of the conflict between two aspects of theological truth,
and the conflict between the Nationalist and the Separatist conceptions
of the church, and especially out of the mistaken policy of restricting
the civil franchise to church-members, came forth that device of the
"Half-way Covenant" which provided for a hereditary quasi-membership in
the church for worthy people whose lives were without scandal, and who,
not having been subjects of an experience of conscious conversion, were
felt to be not altogether to blame for the fact. From the same causes
came forth, and widely prevailed, the tenet of "Stoddardeanism," so
called as originating in the pastoral work, and, it is said, in the
personal experience, of Solomon Stoddard, the saintly minister of
Northampton from 1669 till 1729, when he was succeeded by his colleague
and grandson, Jonathan Edwards. It is the view that the Lord's Supper is
instituted as a means of regeneration as well as of sanctification, and
that those who are consciously "in a natural condition" ought not to be
repelled, but rather encouraged to come to it. From the same causes, by
natural sequence, came that so-called Arminianism[104:1] which, instead
of urging the immediate necessity and duty of conversion, was content
with commending a "diligent use of means," which might be the hopeful
antecedent of that divine grace.

These divergences from the straight lines of the primeval New England
Calvinism had already begun to be manifest during the l