But it is for others, like my friend Dr. Green, both by education and professional experience more versed in these subjects than I, to say whether a period of sexual immorality should not be looked for as the natural concomitant and sequence of such a condition of moral and religious excitement as prevailed in New England between 1725 and 1745. I merely now call attention to the fact that in Braintree the Hancock pastorate began in 1726 and ended in 1743, and that it was during the Hancock pastorate, also the period of "the Great Awakening," that public confessions of fornication were most frequently made in the Braintree church; further, and finally, it was during the years which immediately followed that the great "tide of immorality" which the clergy of the day so much deplored, "rolled over the land." But it still remains to consider whether the entries referred to in the church records must be taken as conclusive evidence that a peculiarly lax condition of affairs as respects the sexual relation did really prevail in New England during the last century. This does not necessarily follow; and, for reasons I shall presently give, I venture to doubt it. In the first place it is to be remembered that the language used in those days does not carry the same meaning that similar language would carry if used now. For instance, when Jonathan Edwards talks of the youth of Northampton being given to "Night-walking ... and leud practices," he does not at all mean what we should mean by using the same expression; and the young woman who was one of the greatest "company keepers" in the whole town, was probably nothing worse than a lively village girl much addicted to walking with her young admirers after public lecture on the Sabbath afternoons,--"a disorder," by the way, which Jonathan Edwards says he made "a thorough reformation of ... which has continued ever since."[17]