[156] The lowest point of religious decline in the history of New England was reached in the first quarter of the eighteenth century. The absence of vital piety was generally remarked. The prevailing type of religious experience was unemotional and formal. The adoption of the Half-Way Covenant in the third quarter of the previous century helped to precipitate a state of things wherein the ordinary distinctions between the converted and the unconverted were largely obscured. Emphasis came to be laid heavily upon the cultivation of morality as a means of promoting spiritual life. Prayer, the reading of the Bible, and church attendance were other “means”. In other words, man’s part in the acquisition of religious experience came prominently into view. The promoters of the revival attacked these notions, asserting that repentance and faith were still fundamentally necessary and that the experience of conversion, _i. e._, the conscious sense of a change in one’s relation to God, was the prime test of one’s hope of salvation. Charles Chauncy, minister of the First Church, Boston, in his _Seasonable Thoughts on the State of Religion in New England_ (1743), championed the former position; the great Edwards came to the defence of the latter. [157] Channing, _Memoirs_, vol. i. pp. 287–290, 387. _Cf._ also Goddard, _Studies in New England Transcendentalism_, pp. 13 _et seq._ [158] Riley, _American Philosophy_, p. 192. Note: It is not here maintained that radical religious ideas in New England had their earliest roots, or found their sole stimulus, in the controversy which the theological formulations incident to the Great Awakening provoked. Incipient religious liberalism is distinguishable as far back as the publication of Cotton Mather’s _Reasonable Religion_, in 1713. In his erudite essay on “The Beginnings of Arminianism in New England,” F. A. Christie adopts the position that prior to the Great Awakening there were rumor and alarm over the mere arrival of Arminian doctrines in this country; but that after 1742 the heresy spread rapidly, chiefly due to the growth of the Episcopal church, with its marked leanings to the Arminian theology. _Cf._ _Papers of the American Society of Church History, Second Series_, vol. iii, pp. 168 _et seq._ But however that may be, the cause of Arminianism during the eighteenth century was promoted by men in New England who drew at least a part of their inspiration from the writings of leaders of thought in the mother country whose theological positions inclined strongly toward rationalism. _Cf._ Cooke, _Unitarianism in America_, pp. 39, 44 _et seq._, 79. Harvard College, from the close of the seventeenth century on, was increasingly recognized as a center of liberalizing tendencies, although none will dispute that the kernel of intellectual independence was found, all too frequently, well hidden within the tough shell of traditional conceits. _Cf._ Quincy, _The History of Harvard University_, vol. i, pp.