han
thirty years of intense political and warlike agitation. The churches
suffered from the long distraction of the public mind, and at the end of
it were faint and exhausted. But for the infusion of a "more abundant
life" which they had received, it would seem that they could hardly have
survived the stress of that stormy and revolutionary period.

The religious life of this period was manifested in part in the growth
of the New England theology. The great leader of this school of
theological inquiry, the elder Edwards, was born at the opening of the
eighteenth century. The oldest and most eminent of his disciples and
successors, Bellamy and Hopkins, were born respectively in 1719 and
1721, and entered into the work of the Awakening in the flush of their
earliest manhood. A long dynasty of acute and strenuous argumentators
has continued, through successive generations to the present day, this
distinctly American school of theological thought. This is not the
place for tracing the intricate history of their discussions,[182:1]
but the story of the Awakening could not be told without some mention of
this its attendant and sequel.

Not less notable than the new theology of the revival was the new
psalmody. In general it may be said that every flood-tide of spiritual
emotion in the church leaves its high-water mark in the form of "new
songs to the Lord" that remain after the tide of feeling has assuaged.
In this instance the new songs were not produced by the revival, but
only adopted by it. It is not easy for us at this day to conceive the
effect that must have been produced in the Christian communities of
America by the advent of Isaac Watts's marvelous poetic work, "The
Psalms of David Imitated in the Language of the New Testament."
Important religious results have more than once followed in the church
on the publication of religious poems--notably, in our own century, on
the publication of "The Christian Year." But no other instance of the
kind is comparable with the publication in America of Watts's Psalms.
When we remember how scanty were the resources of religious poetry in
American homes in the early eighteenth century, and especially how rude
and even grotesque the rhymes that served in the various churches as a
vehicle of worship, it seems that the coming of those melodious stanzas,
in which the meaning of one poet is largely interpreted by the
sympathetic insight of another poet, and the fervid devotion of the