sure that "a way so entirely popular could but very poorly ... answer any ends of government, ... as every individual seemed to think himself infallible." It was with good reason that Edwards sarcastically referred to his opponents as "gentlemen possessed of that noble and generous freedom of thought, which happily prevails in this age of light and inquiry." Liberals represented the newly enlightened and cultivated classes, who had come to regard religious revivals with genteel contempt.

Jonathan Mayhew, a liberal both in religion and in politics, one of the early leaders of the movement for American independence, once spoke to the young men of Boston on the "most effectual means of securing a good name amongst men." He advised them to seek the "approbation of the few wise and knowing" instead of trying to please the "vast ignorant multitudes, who had neither skill, taste nor judgment in them." On another occasion, Mayhew took exception to the preaching of George Whitefield, next to Edwards the most important voice in the Great Awakening, on the grounds that a religion of the heart appealed only to the "more illiterate sort." "As Yankees became more prosperous and secure," writes Daniel Walker Howe, "some of their sense of dependence on God evaporated." So did their commitment to plain living, their rustic manners, and their old-fashioned dislike of social distinctions. Edwardsian piety conceded too little to the belief in the superiority of their own culture to retain the allegiance of the comfortable, educated classes. It insulted both their intelligence, now that a more liberal education gave them access to the knowledge that promised to set men free, and their need for the respect their worldly achievements appeared to have earned. The more closely Calvinism came to be identified with religious "enthusiasm," the more it struck the better sort of people not just as excessively harsh and uncompromising but as downright unseemly. Humility might be a virtue in the humble, but it was affected in people of standing; and even the humble deserved a religion that promised to improve them—to make them into prosperous, enterprising citizens in their own right, instead of crushing them under the conviction of their own iniquity. ^*

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*	"Edwards's inscrutable God," Henry May has observed, "could not be drafted into the task of social control." Not that the forces of respectability necessarily wanted to

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