“In the evening most of the believers met [for] the first time publicly in this place…. A. Dunlavy who had never before been exercised, was taken with shaking & Jerking from that to dancing, which continued for 4 hours with scarce any intermission.”
“In my serious reflections and enquiries after the salvation of my soul, the various noise and exercise of the people would oftentimes stagger me. I was sometimes rather doubtful, and almost led to believe that it was all enthusiasm and strong delusion….”
“When any ask me to explain all these antics or exercises, I say I do not explain what I do not understand. Many who had these exercises did not understand them—would not account for them. I am not called to analyze or methodize the jerks: have no tools for that work….”
“I can never forget one Sabbath, standing on a floor to preach: Brother Christie, a pious and upright man, the class-leader, was standing close by me; and while we were repeating and singing the first hymn, he was taken with the jerks, knocked the hymn book out of my hand, and gave my unfortunate nose a hard rap….”
“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….”
“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….”
