The congregations were much increased since his being
here last. The presence of God was much seen in the
assemblies, especially at Nottingham and Fog's Manor, where
the people were under such deep soul-distress that their cries
almost drowned his voice. He has collected in this and the
neighboring provinces about four hundred and fifty pounds
sterling for his orphans in Georgia."

Into the feeble but rapidly growing presbyteries and the one synod of
the American Presbyterian Church the revival had brought, not peace, but
a sword. The collision was inevitable between the fervor and
unrestrained zeal of the evangelists and the sense of order and decorum,
and of the importance of organization and method, into which men are
trained in the ministry of an established church. No man, even at this
day, can read the "standards" of the Presbyterian Church without seeing
that they have had to be strained to admit those "revival methods" which
ever since the days of Whitefield have prevailed in that body. The
conflict that arose was not unlike that which from the beginning of New
England history had subsisted between Separatist and Nationalist. In the
Presbyterian conflict, as so often in religious controversies,
disciplinary and doctrinal questions were complicated with a difference
of race. The "Old Side" was the Scotch and Irish party; the "New Side"
was the New England party, to which many of the old-country ministers
adhered. For successive years the mutual opposition had shown itself in
the synod; and in 1740, at the synod meeting at Philadelphia, soon after
the departure of Whitefield, the real gravamen of the controversy
appeared, in the implied and even express impeachment of the spiritual
character of the Old Side ministers. The impeachment had been implied in
the coming of the evangelists uninvited into other men's parishes, as
if these were mission ground. And now it was expressed in papers read
before the synod by Blair and Gilbert Tennent. The action of the synod
went so far toward sustaining the men of the New Side as to repeal the
rule restraining ministers from preaching outside of their own parishes,
and as to put on record a thanksgiving for the work of God in the land.
Through all the days of the synod's meeting, daily throngs on Society
Hill were addressed by the Tennents and other "hot gospelers" of the
revival, and churches and private houses were resounding with revival
hymns