The first “Christian Church” in New England was about seven years later than the first in the South, and its origin was entirely unrelated to the earlier one. The New England movement got its impulse from the independent reactions of two young men against the type of religion they found in the Baptist churches of which they were members and in which they began to preach. These churches were Calvinistic in their emphasis on original sin, the limitation of the benefits of Christ’s atonement to the “elect,” the wrath of God toward sinners, the threat of hell, and the inability of man to do anything for his own salvation. Elias Smith, born in 1769 at Lyme, Connecticut, spent his boyhood under very crude frontier conditions in a new settlement in Vermont, and had a violent experience of conversion when a log fell on him in the woods. He joined the Baptist church, and began to preach when he was about twenty-one. In spite of his almost complete lack of education, the Baptist ministers of Boston ordained him two years later. For almost a decade he was a somewhat irregular Baptist preacher, improving his education by diligent private study, becoming more and more dissatisfied with orthodox Calvinism, seeking a way out of his confusion by independent study of the New Testament, and moving toward the conviction that the churches should abandon their theological and ecclesiastical systems and restore the simple faith and practice of the primitive church. Abner Jones, born in 1772 at Royalton, Massachusetts, had a Vermont boyhood not unlike Smith’s in its combination of frontier hardship, lack of schools, and torturing religious experience. Having achieved conversion, he joined the Baptist church, taught school for a time, then studied and practiced medicine by the short-cut “Thompsonian” system; but he also preached as opportunity offered. Still in his early twenties, he “quit the fellowship of the Calvinist Baptists,” as his biographer testifies, after hearing Elias Smith preach, though Smith was then still a Baptist. As the result of his own thinking, stirred by Smith’s influence, Jones organized an independent church at Lyndon, Vermont, in the Autumn of 1801, to which he would give no name but “Christian.” This, says the historian of the movement, was “the first Christian church in New England.” During the next year Jones secured ordination by three Free Will Baptist preachers—not as a Baptist but “only as a Christian”—and organized “Christian” churches at Hanover and Piermont, New Hampshire. Up to this time, Smith had been the leader in thought but had hesitated to break his Baptist ties. Jones now persuaded him to abandon the Baptist name and joined him in organizing a “Christian” church at Portsmouth, New Hampshire. In 1804 Jones moved to Boston and formed a church there.