Excerpt from the Memoir of the Rev. Jesse Lee (May 9, 1806)

In this excerpt from the journals of Jesse Lee (now lost), the popular Methodist circuit rider distanced himself from the “wild enthusiasm” he occasionally encountered among his audiences. Like many of his contemporaries, Lee distinguished the Methodists’ distinctive shout tradition from more extreme forms of somatic agitation such as the jerks. Adapting Lee’s journals for publication two decades later, editor Minton Thrift placed his own interpretive spin on the bodily exercises in the second paragraph. Together, the two voices measure the growing conservatism of Methodist leaders toward the “disorderly” phenomena of the Great Revival. Click here for the full text of Thrift’s Memoir of the Rev. Jesse Lee (1823).

“Friday, May 9th. We began our camp-meeting at a meeting-house called the Olive Branch, in Brunswick county. At 12 o’clock D. Hall preached in the meeting-house. He gave us a lively discourse, and the people felt the power of truth. Then Lewis Taylor exhorted; and after a while a shout began, and one person I understood was converted. We had preaching at 4 o’clock, and at night.

“This meeting continued until the Monday following. The number of converts was considerable; but one circumstance contributed not a little to interrupt the harmony of the meeting, and retard the progress of the work, which was the wild enthusiasm displayed by a certain female, not a member of our church. Her exercises were such as to attract the attention of all present, and were of a character novel enough to be sure; for she exhibited at some times the jerking exercise, at other times the dancing exercise, and not unfrequently the basking [barking?] exercise; and taking them all together, made as ridiculous a set of exercises as ever attracted the gaze of the multitude.” Mr. Lee was opposed to all such extravagances, and therefore endeavoured to arrest the progress of the evil, but by so doing he doubtless gave offence to some, whose weak judgments caused them to justify every kind of religious extravagance. While piety prompts us to commiserate the case of those whose weakness exposes them to the impositions of a distempered imagination, and charity leads us to draw a veil over the infirmities of those who appear, in some of their religious exercises, to transcend the bounds of modesty and decorum, we are not prepared to anathematize every thing which may appear disorderly in the estimation of the cold philosophizing Christian. The warmth of devotion can only be duly appreciated by those who are under its sacred influence. Where wisdom and sincerity predominate, they will keep every disorderly passion in subordination to their control, and give a brilliancy and heavenly joy even to its outward expression, which the hollow hearted hypocrite cannot easily counterfeit.”

Source

Minton Thrift, Memoir of the Rev. Jesse Lee, with Extracts from His Journals (New York: N. Bangs and T. Mason, 1823), 294–295.

Images courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.