Excerpt from the Minutes of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (May 21, 1806)
“Bodily exercise profiteth little….”
Published Letter by Jacob Gruber (ca. 1806)
“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….”
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 Eli W. Caruthers’s “Richard Hugg King and His Times” (ca. 1808)
“As for jerking, dancing, & barking, they were only fungi, which grew out of the revival in its state of decay & ought never to be imputed to the work itself….”
