In the meantime Truro, with the coöperation of Wellfleet, Provincetown, and Eastham, and a money outlay of only eight dollars for nails, had built the first church. On a Sunday people from twelve miles north or south flocked to meeting, and those more favorably situated were happy in being able to attend three services a day. The Reverend Mr. Snelling, who fostered the faith there for twenty years, avers that “the congregations were large and the Word ran and was glorified.” And Rich has preserved for us a picture or two of the local exhorters. Dodge, who “could make more noise in the pulpit with less religion, and spoil more Bibles than any man I ever saw”; another, of gentler spirit, “in a tender, trembling, but earnest voice, loved to tell what religion had done for him and persuade others to accept Christ as their Lord and Saviour.” And another would “force home his rugged reasoning, and vivid personal experience, with an energy and eloquence that swept like a torrent. Sometimes when wrought upon with his theme, his heart on fire, his face aglow, his tall form bent, his long arm outstretched, his impetuous utterance fairly breaking through his pent-up prison-house, the Spirit rested like cloven tongues upon the audience.” And there was fine old Stephen Collins whose “soul basked in the sunshine of all the privileges of God’s people. He loved the songs of Zion, Lenox was his favorite: he was the author of _Give Lenox a pull_. His exhortations were full of fire, his pungent logic carried conviction to the mind.” In 1808 Barnstable, as had Provincetown, threatened a Methodist minister with mob violence. The old Pilgrim faith had tolerated Quakers; Baptists were established at Harwich in 1756 and at Barnstable in 1771; but Methodists were held as the great seceders, and it took them fifty years to soften the asperity of the prejudice against them. The new century was to end the old homogeneous theocracy and with it the paramount influence of the clergy. Quaker, Congregationalist, Baptist, and Methodist worshipped according to individual temperament, and participated in all civil rights; “Come-outers” practised ritual despised of aristocrats; camp-meeting grounds, where the Methodists improved a summer vacation for the soul’s profit, were established in the groves of Eastham and then at Yarmouth, when “men of power and deep religious experience,” says Mr. Rich, “made these green arches tremble with their eloquence.” A local bard sings, with some particularity: “We saw great gatherings in a grove, A grove near Pamet Bay, Where thousands heard the preached word, And dozens knelt to pray.” In 1821, “a Pentecostal year,” during the Great Revival in Wellfleet and Truro, over four hundred “professed religion,” and two hundred and thirty-six joined the Methodist church.