Excerpt from the Minutes of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (May 25, 1808)
“In the southern parts of our bounds, the extraordinary revivals of religion have considerably declined; bodily agitations are gradually disappearing….”
Excerpts from Joseph Thomas’s Life of the Pilgrim (Fall 1808–Spring 1809)
“[W]hile [I was] preaching a young woman was taken with the jirks…, and the people being mostly strangers to the like were much alarmed at the operation, as she was frequently jirked from her seat and thrown involuntarily over the floor and across the benches in different directions….”
Excerpt from the Journal of Constant Moseley (June 6, 1808)
“Had meeting at Robert Houstens. A Blessed assembly of people, white, Yellow, & black…. [I]n singing our Songs, the power of God came upon them, some fell with jurks, Some leaping, some dancing. The whole multitude were in motion….”
Excerpts from the Autobiography of Rev. James B. Finley (ca. 1808)
“These strange exercises that have excited so much wonder in the western country came in toward the last of the revival, and were, in the estimation of some of the more pious, the chaff of the work. Now it was that the humiliating and often disgusting exercises of dancing, laughing, jerking, barking like dogs, or howling like wolves, and rolling on the ground, manifested themselves….”
Excerpt from David Rice’s Second Epistle to the Citizens of Kentucky (1808)
“We ought, however, to have remembered that bodily convulsions, the jirks, &c. are never mentioned in scripture, as evidences of a graceless state, or a delusion of the devil; nor yet as evidences of a work of God’s grace. In a religious view, we ought to have thought but little of them….”
Excerpt from the Minutes of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (May 24, 1809)
“[B]odily agitations, where they had appeared, have almost wholly subsided, and have given place to calm inquiry into the great and leading doctrines of the gospel….”
