Sometimes, however, the zeal of a devoted minister would kindle counter sparks among his people. Such a minister was the Rev. Solomon Stoddard, who mentions five notable revivals, or "harvests,"[a] as he calls them, during his sixty years of ministry in the Northampton church. A few other New England towns had similar revivals, but they were brief and rare. Notwithstanding these occasional local "stirrings of the heart," at the beginning of the second quarter of the eighteenth century a cold, formal piety was frequently the covering of indifferent living and of a smug, complacent Christianity, wherein the letter killed and the spirit did not give life. This was true all over New England, and elsewhere. Nor was this deadness confined to the colonies alone, for the Wesleys were soon to stir the sluggish current of English religious life. In New England, the older clergymen, like the Mathers of Massachusetts, conservative men, whose memories or traditions were of the golden age of Puritanism, had long bemoaned the loss of religious interest, the inability of reforming synods to create permanent improvement, and the helplessness of ecclesiastical councils or of civil enactments to rouse the people from the real "decay of piety in the land," and from their indifference to the immorality that was increasing among them. This indifference grew in Connecticut after the Saybrook Platform had laid a firm hold upon the churches. Its discipline created a tendency, on the one hand, to hard and narrow ecclesiasticism, and, on the other, to careless living on the part of those who were satisfied with a mere formal acceptance of the principles of religion and with the bare acknowledgment of the right of the churches to their members' obedience.[b] It is a great mistake [writes Jonathan Edwards] if any one imagines that all these external performances (owning the covenant, accepting the sacraments, observing the Sabbath and attending the ministry), are of the nature of a _profession_ of anything that belongs to _saving grace_, as they are commonly used and understood.... People are taught that they may use them all, and not so much as make any pretence to the least degree of _sanctifying grace_; and this is the established custom. So they are used and so they are understood.... It is not unusual ... for persons, at the same time they come into the church and pretend to own the covenant, freely to declare to their neighbors, that they have no imagination that they have any true faith in Christ or love to Him.[95]