Item Detail
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11501
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1
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0
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English
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Religious Enthusiasm in Vermont, 1761-1847
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University of Notre Dame
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Ph.D. diss.
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"The pioneers who settled Vermont were to a large degree cast-offs from the Great Awakening. They were New Lights, mostly from Connecticut, who in the political turmoil during and after the revivals had grown disaffected. Under the pressure of a deteriorating economic situation they were ready to migrate. Arminian religion tended to establish itself among the inhabitants of eastern Massachusetts were ideas concerning man's free will and universal salvation found support and growth. On the other hand, those inclined towards Antinomianism, the ones most susceptible to visions and hearing inner voices, having become disenchanted with life in lower New England, headed north along the Connecticut and Housatonic River Valleys into the territory newly opened by the end of the French and Indian War. The Second Great Awakening, the wave of revivals at the beginning of the nineteenth century, was an encouragement to religion in all its varied forms. Those more enthusiastically inclined Vermonters reached beyond Congregational church and society to other churches that seemed better able to satisfy their spiritual needs and even to the bizarre cults that gathered around William Dorrell and Nathaniel Wood proclaiming the arrival of the millennium. In 1814 in Bennington County Methodists went into schism to unite in a community ruled by grace and not episcopal order. Discouraged by the most severe economic hardship, citizens of Woodstock followed the bearded prophet, Isaac Bullard, in 1817 on a pilgrimage to the promised land that only dissipated itself in the wilderness. As they marched off to the West, their fellow Vermonters were about to be blessed with the most extensive revival yet experienced. In the years that followed, the Congregational establishment under the guidance of the New Divinity brought revival enthusiasm under control for a time by directing its energies into benevolent activity within the churches. Migration from originally settled areas of New England northward and westward could not be contained. Vermont was merely a stopping-off point. Economic decline set in early which only encouraged the march westward. Upcountry religious enthusiasm was exported with the migrants to western New York only to be reintroduced into New England during the Great Revival set off by the New York evangelist, Charles Grandison Finney. The churches in Vermont were torn apart in the thirties by the excesses of revival and reform. In the midst of excitement and strife William Miller, a farmer turned revelator, proclaimed the imminent return of Jesus and the end of the world, while John Humphrey Noyes, surrounded by family and friends in Putney, Vermont, sought to live the life of perfection among the saints. Vermonters from all over the state left their homes and farms to follow Joseph Smith the Mormon prophet. Mormonism met with its initial success because it seemed to respond in a special way to the rural New England's spiritual needs. The religious enthusiasm which enlivened Vermont during the first ninety years of her existence went out with her people to extend itself across the great New England highway through New York and to the West. It still bears fruit in the life of the church today in many places across the world. Its origin is to be explained not in terms of economics, geography, the psychological make-up of the people or group interaction as important as all these factors are. Unquestionably early Vermonters were men struggling with faith in God, a faith offered to them by their fathers. The history of religious enthusiasm in Vermont is before anything else as account of that faith working itself out in the lives of men." [Author's abstract]