people had to a considerable degree “escaped the errors and enthusiasm ... in matters of religion which others had fallen into.”[15] Nevertheless it is almost impossible for any locality to escape wholly a general epidemic; and in those days public relations of experiences were not only usual in the churches, but they were a regular feature in all cases of admission to full communion. That this was the case in the Braintree church is evident from the extract already quoted from the records, when in 1722 “some persons of a sober life and good conversation signified their unwillingness to join in full communion with the church unless they [might] be admitted to it without making a Public relation of their spiritual experiences.” It was also everywhere noticed that the women, and especially the young women, were peculiarly susceptible to attacks of the spiritual epidemic. Jonathan Edwards for instance mentions, in the case of Northampton, how the young men of that place had become “addicted to night-walking and frequenting the tavern, and leud practices,” and how they would “get together in conventions of both sexes for mirth and jollity, which they called frolicks; and they would spend the greater part of the night in them”; and among the first indications of the approach of the epidemic noticed by him was the case of a young woman who had been one of the greatest “company keepers” in the whole town, who became “serious, giving evidence of a heart truly broken and sanctified.”

This same state of affairs doubtless then prevailed in Braintree, and indeed throughout New England. The whole community was in a sensitive condition morally and spiritually,—so sensitive that, as the Braintree records show, the contagion extended to all classes, and, among those bearing some of the oldest names in the history of the township, we find also negroes,—“Benjamin Sutton and Naomi his wife,” and “Jeffry, my servant, and Flora, his wife,”—grotesquely getting up before the congregation to make confession, like their betters, of the sin of fornication before marriage. It, of course, does not need to be said that such a state of morbid and spiritual excitement would necessarily lead to public confessions of an unusual character. Women, and young women in particular, would be inclined to brood over things unknown save to those who participated in them, and think to find in confession only a means of escape from the torment of that hereafter concerning which they entertained no doubts; hence perhaps many of these records which now seem both so uncalled for and so inexplicable.

So far, however, what has been said relates only to the matter of public confession; it remains for others to consider how far a morbidly excited spiritual condition may also have been responsible for the sin confessed. The connection between the animal and the spiritual natures of human beings taken in the aggregate, though subtile, is close; and while it is well known that camp-meetings have never been looked upon as peculiar, or even as conspicuous, for the continence supposed to prevail at them, there is no doubt whatever that in England the license of the restoration followed close on the rule of the saints. One of the authorities on New England history, speaking of the outward manifestations of the “Great Awakening,” says that “the fervor of excitement showed itself in strong men, as well as in women, by floods of tears, by outcries, by bodily paroxysms, jumping, falling down and rolling on the ground, regardless of spectators or their clothes.” Then the same authority goes on to add:—“But it was common that when the exciting preacher had departed, the excitement also subsided, and men and women returned peaceably to their daily duties.”[16] This last may have been the case; but it is not probable that men and women in the condition of mental and physical excitement described could go about their daily duties without carrying into them some trace of morbid reaction. It was a species of insanity; and insanity invariably reveals itself in unexpected and contradictory forms.

But it is for others, like my friend Dr. Green, both by education and professional experience more versed in these subjects than I, to say whether a period of sexual immorality should not be looked for as the natural concomitant and sequence of such a condition of moral and religious excitement as prevailed in New England between 1725 and 1745. I merely now call attention to the fact that in Braintree the Hancock pastorate began in 1726 and ended in 1743, and that it was during the Hancock pastorate, also the period of “the Great Awakening,” that public confessions of fornication were most frequently made in the Braintree church; further, and finally, it was during the years which immediately followed that the great “tide of immorality” which the clergy of the day so much deplored, “rolled over the land.”

But it still remains to consider whether the entries referred to in the church records must be taken as conclusive evidence that a peculiarly lax condition of affairs as respects the sexual relation did really prevail in New England during the last century. This does not necessarily follow; and, for reasons I shall presently give, I venture to doubt it. In the first place it is to be remembered that the language used in those days does not carry the same meaning that similar language would carry if used now. For instance, when Jonathan Edwards talks of the youth of Northampton being given to “Night-walking ... and leud practices,” he does not at all mean what we should mean by using the same expression; and the young woman who was one of the greatest “company keepers” in the whole town, was probably nothing worse than a lively village girl much addicted to walking with her young admirers after public lecture on the Sabbath afternoons,—“a disorder,” by the way, which Jonathan Edwards says he made “a thorough reformation of ... which has continued ever since.”[17]

So far the relations then prevailing between the young of the two sexes may have been, and probably were, innocent enough, and nothing more needs be said of them; but coming now to the facts revealed in the church records, I venture to doubt the correctness of the inference as to general laxity which would naturally be drawn from them. The situation as respects sexual morality which prevailed in New England during the eighteenth century seems to me to have been peculiar rather than bad. In other words, though there was much incontinence, that incontinence was not promiscuous; and this statement brings me at once to the necessary consideration of another recognized and well-established custom in the more ordinary and less refined New England life of the last century, which has been considered beneath what is known as the dignity of history to notice, and to which, accordingly, no reference is made by Palfrey or Barry, or, so far as I know, by any of the standard authorities: and yet, unless I am greatly mistaken, it is to this carefully ignored usage or custom that we must look for an explanation of the greater part of the confessions recorded in the annals of the churches. I refer, of course, to the practice known as “bundling.”

I do not propose here to go into a description of