The faults of Whitefield were intensified to a hateful degree in some of his associates and followers. Leaving Boston, he sent, to succeed to his work, Gilbert Tennent, then glowing with the heat of his noted Nottingham sermon on "An Unconverted Ministry." At once men's minds began to be divided. On the one hand, so wise and sober a critic as Thomas Prince, listening with severe attention, gave his strong and unreserved approval to the preaching and demeanor of Tennent.[169:2] At the other extreme, we have such testimony as this from Dr. Timothy Cutler, the former rector of Yale College, now the Episcopalian minister of Boston:
"It would be an endless attempt to describe that scene of confusion and disturbance occasioned by him [Whitefield]: the division of families, neighborhoods, and towns, the contrariety of husbands and wives, the undutifulness of children and servants, the quarrels among teachers, the disorders of the night, the intermission of labor and business, the neglect of husbandry and of gathering the harvest.... In many conventicles and places of rendezvous there has been checkered work indeed, several preaching and several exhorting and praying at the same time, the rest crying or laughing, yelping, sprawling, fainting, and this revel maintained in some places many days and nights together without intermission; and then there were the blessed outpourings of the Spirit!... After him came one Tennent, a monster! impudent and noisy, and told them they were all damn'd, damn'd, damn'd; this charmed them, and in the most dreadful winter I ever saw people wallowed in the snow night and day for the benefit of his beastly brayings, and many ended their days under these fatigues. Both of them carried more money out of these parts than the poor could be thankful for."[170:1]
This is in a tone of bitter sectarian railing. But, after all, the main allegations in it are sustained by the ample evidence produced by Dr. Charles Chauncy, pastor of the First Church in Boston, in his serious and weighty volume of "Seasonable Thoughts on the State of Religion in New England," published in 1743, as he sincerely says, "to serve the interests of Christ's kingdom," and "faithfully pointing out the things of a bad and dangerous tendency in the late and present religious appearance in the land." Dr. Chauncy was doubtless included in the sweeping denunciation of the Christian ministry in general as "unconverted," "Pharisees," "hypocrites." And yet it does not appear in historical evidence that Chauncy was not every whit as good a Christian as Tennent or Whitefield.