Dr. Mather thought there was "A deluge of prophaneness," and bid men "be much in mourning and humiliation that God's bottle may be filled with tears." He thought piety was going out because surplices were coming in; it was wicked to "consecrate a church;" keeping Christmas was "like the idolatry of the calf." The common-prayer, an organ, a musical instrument in a church, was "not of God." Such things were to our worthy fathers in the ministry what temperance and anti-slavery societies are to many of their sons--an "abomination," "unchristian and atheistic!" The introduction of "regular singing" was an indication to some that "all religion is to cease;" "we might as well go over to Popery at once." Inoculation for the smallpox was as vehemently and ably opposed as the modern attempt to abolish the gallows; it was "a trusting more to the machinations of men than to the all-wise providence of God." "When the enchantments of this world," says the ecclesiastical historian, "caused the rising generation more sensibly to neglect the primitive designs and interests of religion propounded by their fathers; a change in the tenor of the divine dispensation towards this country was quickly the matter of every one's observation." "Our wheat and our pease fell under an unaccountable blast." "We were visited with multiplied shipwrecks;" "pestilential sicknesses did sometimes become epidemic among us." "Indians cruelly butchered many hundreds of our inhabitants, and scattered whole towns with miserable ruins." "The serious people throughout the land were awakened by these intimations of divine displeasure to inquire into the causes and matters of the controversie." Accordingly, 1679, a synod was convened at Boston, to "inquire into the causes of the Lord's controversie with his New England people," who determined the matter.[1] A little later, in 1690, the General Court considered the subject anew, and declared, that "A corruption of manners, attended with inexcusable degeneracies and apostacies ... is the cause of the controversie." We "are now arriving at such an extremity, that the axe is laid to the root of the trees, and we are in eminent danger of perishing, if a speedy reformation of our provoking evils prevent it not." In 1702, Cotton Mather complains that "Our manifold indispositions to recover the dying power of Godliness, were successive calamities, under all of which, our apostacies from that Godliness, have rather proceeded than abated." "The old spirit of New England has been sensibly going out of the world, as the old saints in whom it was have gone; and, instead thereof, the spirit of the world, with a lamentable neglect of strict piety, has crept in upon the rising generation."