Some illustrations of church life in the troublous years following the Great Awakening will best set forth the confusion arising, the difficulties between Old and New Lights, and the hardships of the Separatists. Among the colony churches, the trials of three may be taken as typical,--the New Haven church[110], the Canterbury church,[111] and the church of Enfield.[112] Nor can the story of the first two be told without including in it an account of later acts of the Assembly and of the attitude of the College during the years of the great schism. The pastor of the New Haven church was Mr. Noyes, whom many of his parishioners thought too noncommittal, erroneous, or pointless in discussing the themes which the itinerant preachers loved to dwell upon. Moreover, Mr. Noyes had refused to allow the Rev. George Whitefield to preach from his pulpit while on his memorable pilgrimage through New England. Mr. Noyes had also forbidden the hot-headed James Davenport to occupy it. As a result of their minister's actions, the New Haven church was divided in their estimate of their pastor. There were the friendly Old Lights and the hostile New. Neither party wished to carry their trouble before the Consociation of New Haven county, for that had come at last to be a tribunal "whose decision was at that time considered _judicial_ and _final_." Moreover, at the meeting of the General Consociation at Guilford in November, 1741, it was known that Mr. Noyes had been a most active worker in favor of suppressing the New Light movement. Consequently the New Lights, though at the time in the minority, sought to find a way out from under the jurisdiction of the Saybrook Platform and its councils by declaring that the church had never _formally_ been made a Consociated church. This was literally true, but the weight of precedent and their own observances were against them. Like other churches in the county, which had come slowly to the acceptance of the Saybrook councils as ecclesiastical courts, it had finally accepted them in their most authoritative character. Such being the case, the New Lights hesitated to appeal against their minister before a court presumably favorable to him. After the New Lights had declared the church not under the Saybrook system, Mr. Noyes determined to take the vote of his people as to whether they considered themselves a Consociated church. But as he was a little fearful of the result of the vote, he secured the victory for his own faction by excluding the New Lights from voting. Thereupon, the New Lights took the benefit of the Toleration Act as "sober dissenters," and became a Separate church. The committee, appointed for the organization of the new church, declared that "they were reestablished as the original church." The benefit of the Toleration Act accorded to these New Light dissenters in New Haven, to some in Milford,[b] and to several other reinvigorated churches in the southern part of the colony, roused the opposition of