_Excellency_ and dying _Love_ of JESUS CHRIST, the Gloriousness of the way of _Salvation_, the wonderful, free, and sovereign _Grace_ of God, his glorious Work in the _Conversion_ of a Soul, the _Truth_ and Certainty of the great Things of God's Word, the Sweetness of the Views of his _Perfection &c._ And even at _Weddings_, which formerly were meerly occasions of Mirth and Jollity, there was now no discourse of any thing but the things of Religion, and no appearance of any, but _spiritual Mirth_."[13] And it was this pestiferous stuff,--for though it emanated from the pure heart and powerful brain of the greatest of American theologians, it is best to characterize it correctly,--it was this pestiferous stuff that Wesley read during a walk from London to Oxford in 1738, and wrote of it in his journal,--"Surely this is the Lord's doing, and it is marvellous in our eyes." Such was the prevailing spiritual condition of the period in which the entries I have read were made in the Braintree church records. In the language of the text from which Dr. Colman preached on the occasion of the first stated evening lecture ever held in Boston, "Souls flying to Jesus Christ [were] pleasant and admirable to behold." The brother clergyman[14] who prepared and delivered from the pulpit of the Braintree church a funeral sermon on Mr. Hancock referred to the religious excesses of the time, and described the dead pastor as a "wise and skilful pilot" who had steered "a right and safe course in the late troubled sea of ecclesiastical affairs," so that his people had to a considerable degree "escaped the errors and enthusiasm ... in matters of religion which others had fallen into."[15] Nevertheless it is almost impossible for any locality to escape wholly a general epidemic; and in those days public relations of experiences were not only usual in the churches, but they were a regular feature in all cases of admission to full communion. That this was the case in the Braintree church is evident from the extract already quoted from the records, when in 1722 "some persons of a sober life and good conversation signified their unwillingness to join in full communion with the church unless they [might] be admitted to it without making a Public relation of their spiritual experiences." It was also everywhere noticed that the women, and especially the young women, were peculiarly susceptible to attacks of the spiritual epidemic. Jonathan Edwards for instance mentions, in the case of Northampton, how the young men of that place had become "addicted to night-walking and frequenting the tavern, and leud practices," and how they would "get together in conventions of both sexes for mirth and jollity, which they called frolicks; and they would spend the greater part of the night in them"; and among the first indications of the approach of the epidemic noticed by him was the case of a young woman who had been one