These laws restrained both _ordained Ministers_ and _licensed candidates_ from preaching in _other_ Men's Parishes without _their_ and the _Church's_ consent and wholly prohibited the _Exhortations of Illiterate Laymen_. These laws were a high-handed infringement of the rights of conscience, and in a few years fell and buried with them the party that had enacted them. These were the laws which he (Davenport) exhorted his hearers to set at defiance; and seldom, it must be acknowledged, has a more plausible occasion been found in New England to preach disregard for the law. The laws were framed to repress itinerants and exhorters through loss of their civil rights. By them, a man's good name was dishonored and he was deprived of all his temporal emoluments. By many, in their own day, the laws were regarded as contrary to scriptural commands, and to the opinion and practice of all reformers and of all Puritans. These laws, with others that followed, were not warranted by the ecclesiastical constitution of the colony, and could find no parallel either in England or in her other colonies. Trumbull calls them-- a concerted plan of the Old Lights or Arminians both among the clergy and civilians, to suppress as far as possible, all zealous Calvinistic preachers, to confine them entirely to their own pulpits; and at the same time to put all the public odium and reproach upon them as wicked, disorderly men, unfit to enjoy the common rights of citizens. [109] Yet for these laws the Association of New Haven sent a vote of thanks to the Assembly when it convened in their city in the following fall. Jonathan Edwards opposed both the spirit of the General Consociation and also the legislation of the Assembly. He expressed his attitude toward the Great Awakening both at the time and later. In 1742 he wrote:-- If ministers preached never so good a doctrine, and are never so laborious in their work, yet if at such a day as this they show their people that they are not well affected to this work [of revival], they will be very likely to do their people a great deal more hurt than good.