“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….”
“She…said the Jirks came from the Devil & wou’d go Back to him again. I told her to pray or [I] Did not know But the Jirks wou’d Kill her & she’d go to hell & she said she wished I might to go Hell above all people….”
“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….”
“In the southern parts of our bounds, the extraordinary revivals of religion have considerably declined; bodily agitations are gradually disappearing….”
“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….”
