when patriarchal authority in the family was giving way to a new respect for the rights of women and children, he worshiped a God who looked to his contemporaries more and more like a petty domestic despot, caught in the common mistake of trying to frighten his children into good behavior.

The "new divinity" preached by Edwards and his followers offended old-line Calvinists and liberals alike. Those who still thought of themselves as orthodox Calvinists feared that emphasis on inner experience would undermine church discipline, "increase Deism and infidelity" (in the words of Samuel Moody), and lead to the "introduction of paganism in this land," as Joseph Huntington explained. Such concerns had been present in New England from the very beginning, and the controversy surrounding the "new divinity" revived a persisting conflict between Puritan "tribalism," as Edmund Morgan calls it, and a type of piety that was less interested in the problem of social order—in man's relations with his neighbors—than in his relations to God.

Liberals regarded the individual conscience as a more secure foundation of social order than religious institutions, but they too believed, no less than the orthodox, that the "new divinity" would undermine civil religion, in effect—the only force, in their eyes, that could hold an acquisitive society together. "The New Divinity so prevalent in Connecticut will undo the colony," said Charles Chauncy. " 'Tis as bad, if not worse than paganism." Liberals objected to the Great Awakening on the grounds, among others, that it stirred up the rabble. They disliked the authoritarian implications they found in the new divinity, but they also disliked its underlying egalitarianism. "It is monstrous," they said, "to be told that you have a heart as sinful as the common wretches that crawl the streets." They no longer felt comfortable with the requirement that conversion be followed by a public confession. Such an unseemly display of religious emotion seemed to violate new standards of privacy and decorum. Some of the would-be gentlemen of New England, increasingly attracted to the cultural standards set by the English gentry and often to high-church Anglicanism as well, found fault even with the "independent or congregational form of church government," as Samuel Johnson explained in the course of justifying his adherence to the Church of England. He disliked a system "in which every brother has a hand," Johnson said, because it "tended too much to conceit and self-sufficiency." He was

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