“People of every age, sex, sect, and condition appeared to be more or less affected with the disagreeable operations of these exercises, not only at their meetings, but in their daily employments….”
“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….”
“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….”
“[T]he subjects of this work receive no damage or injury whatever, and the most of them are exceedingly happy when they are thus exercised…. One may ask…, can they not be happy in religion and have the jirks?”
“Many extravagances prevailed during the intervals of the preaching, particularly among the Females: called here jerking, it appears to be similar to hysteric affection. Several were so much exhausted by these exertions as to fall to the ground apparently lifeless & were conveyed to the shade by the bystanders.”
