The history of Congregationalism in early eighteenth-century Boston has long been dominated by the figure of Cotton Mather (1663–1728), the learned pastor of Boston's Second Church. From Benjamin Franklin's notice of Mather's “do-good” campaign of Christian charitable works to recent scholarly studies of Mather's closet piety, historians have measured the religious mood of the period by the yardstick of ideas, joys, and complaints in Mather's voluminous writings. In the process, some questions about the history of Congregationalism have been answered, but historical understanding of the period has been hindered by the relative lack of scholarly attention to the theology of other members of the clergy who served Boston congregations in the decades leading up to the Great Awakening. Given the fact that the Boston clergy was divided between two parties, namely the Matherians1 and those opposed to them, it should be obvious that any assessment of this stage of Congregationalism that is based primarily on the testimony of one party will be untrustworthy. My purpose here is to outline the thinking of that other party, the “catholicks,” with particular attention to how they addressed Congregationalism's most pressing issue, the nature of public piety.

Throughout the 1720s and 1730s evangelical preachers sparked revivals from New England to New Jersey. In his long pastorate at Northampton, Massachusetts, Solomon Stoddard reported five “harvests” of souls in the Connecticut Valley. His grandson Jonathan Edwards succeeded him and led a spiritual awakening in 1734 and 1735 resulting in the “Conversion of Many Hundred Souls in Northampton and Neighboring Towns and Villages.” In the late 1720s the pietist minister Jacob Frelinghuysen inspired a renewal of piety among the Dutch Reformed in New York. At the same time the Presbyterian evangelists William and Gilbert Tennent reported revivals in the churches they had established between New Brunswick, New Jersey and Staten Island, New York.1 While sharing a common message, these evangelical revivals remained local, private affairs, contained within specific geographic and denominational boundaries. Although each proclaimed the necessity of a spiritual new birth and the primacy of divine grace in salvation, theawakenings did not expand into a larger, united movement.

When Canadians showed themselves off to the world at the international exposition at Montreal in 1967, Canadian Christianity presented itself in strikingly symbolic fashion.1 In the ecumenical spirit flourishing at the time, Roman Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox churches—which together represented the vast majority of Canadians—jointly sponsored a pavilion. In the experimental and critical spirit also flourishing at the time, the pavilion offered some disturbing reflections upon the fair's theme, ”Man and His World.“ A kaleidoscope of dramatic pictures and texts celebrated the possibilities of the “secular city,” but also reminded visitors how badly so many men (and women and children) were faring in their world.