of them of doubtful ordination or none, went out over the country in the name of Whitefield. Quoting his sanction, they denounced inhospitable pastors as sons of Belial leading their flocks "blindfold to hell" and initiated separatist movements within the churches. All their extravagances of behavior, all the untoward manifestations produced among the people who fell under the spell of their ranting were austerely attributed to the pervading Spirit. And who would dare rebel against God Himself speaking through His servants?

Two of the New Lights began their sacerdotal careers with the blessing of Whitefield who was impressed with their manifest devotion and unaware whither it would lead them. They were Jonathan Barber and James Davenport, the self-anointed prophets of Long Island. Barber at Oyster Ponds (now Orient, L. I.) and Davenport at Southold, ten miles away, simultaneously had visions of being "eminent instruments" in the salvation of souls in the great revival they foresaw in the advent of Whitefield, whom they regarded as an "angel of the Lord." They prayed together for guidance. Then one Saturday night in March, 1740, Scriptural quotations came to Barber adjuring him that the set time was come for him to arise for Zion. He fainted. Thereupon he went about proclaiming his experience.

Taking no money or change of clothing, relying wholly upon the Holy Ghost to tell him where to go and what to say, Barber had a strenuous season with Davenport at Southold and stirred up the countryside for twenty miles to Oldmans. There the Holy Ghost ceased operating. He said there was a "cloud upon the tabernacle."

Unshaven, ragged and growing fat in his idleness, Barber lingered for several months till the "call" should be

renewed. He got wind of Whitefield's sailing for Rhode Island and beat him to Newport. Whitefield firmly believed that the Holy Ghost brought Barber to him. “We took sweet counsel together," says Whitefield. "My heart rejoiced." Barber joined up. He went with Whitefield on the New England campaign and became the Superintendent of Spiritual Affairs at the Orphan House.

Davenport did not fare so well in his roving ministry, though he was as well recommended. Gilbert Tennent called him a "heavenly man." Whitefield never knew anyone who "kept so close a walk with God." And the Rev. Jonathan Parsons, the Lyme (Connecticut) pulpiteer who later warned his fellow-citizens against lack of discrimination regarding the works of the Holy Ghost, at first found Davenport one "living so near to God that his conversation was always in heaven."

Barber seems to have been a come-up lay exhorter, an intruder within the altar rail. The First Church Society of Southold, dating from 1640 and the earliest Englishspeaking church in New York, has no mention in its records of any Barber occupying its pulpit. But then, he would not have been at all "regular" and the clerk might have been a stickler for form. Town files disclose his signature as a witness to three deeds, between "yeoman and husbandman" and "husbandman and cordwain," of lands "situate in Oyster Ponds Lower Neck," the habitat of the Barbers. On one of these conveyances the name of Sarah Barber is appended and she may have been to Jonathan what the first Sarah was to Abraham.

On the other hand, Davenport was a man of consecrated lineage and thorough education. His grandfather, the first James, was a noted London minister who came to be one of the founders of New Haven and pastor of its first

church. His father, the Rev. John Davenport, born in Boston and graduated from Harvard College, was settled at Stamford, Connecticut, when James the second was born in 1710. This third generation of preachers was reckoned second "socially" in his class of twenty-three at Yale in 1732. While in college he suffered a breakdown and was treated by a Dr. Hubbard for a physical malady that probably underlay his mental aberrations later on in life.

The eastern end of Long Island was settled by Colonists crossing the Sound from Connecticut long before Englishmen presumed to set foot upon the island of Manhattan. Southold was a place of solid Christian brotherhood, at least three denominations uniting in common worship under the rooftree of the First Church Society. Their first pastor was the Rev. John Young whose sacred dust reposes in God's Acre nigh the second edifice, built in 1803. The pastorate of James Davenport dates from 1738 to 1746, though the last six years of it were mostly in absentia.

For Jonathan Barber touched off the fuse that detonated an explosion of super-sanctification. James Davenport strode out from his parsonage in his shirtsleeves into the main thoroughfare one morning and startled Southold. "Thieves, liars, adulterers and hypocrites!" he cried in execration of his peaceful people. It was an amazing day and yet only a beginning. "Signs" pointed the way to Davenport. He tried his hand at healing,—fasting and praying for the recovery of an insane woman. On the day he set for her restoration she died. Taken to heaven in answer to prayer, he said.

More prayer, and then his eyes lit upon the Scriptural passage telling how Jonathan and his armor-bearer attacked the Philistines. Taking unto himself an armor-bearer, he climbed the hill to Easthampton on his hands and knees,

fulfilling the Word though the snow was deep. Twenty were converted. That clinched the "call" of James Davenport.

He went where the revival fire was blazing hottest and had been preaching in Philadelphia and New Jersey with the Tennents, Samuel Blair and others when Whitefield rejoiced to meet him at New York in October, 1770. The next Spring he landed at Stonington for a conquest of Connecticut. His first sermon struck down a hundred and in the course of eight days he added another hundred gospel scalps, including those of twenty Indians. More success at Westerly, Rhode Island, less at Lyme, Connecticut, and then he struck out on the high road of martyrdom, starting at Saybrook, thundering through New Haven, and finding his Sanhedrin in the State Legislature at Hartford.

The while he was calling sinners to repentance, it seems his special commission was to bring unconverted ministers to an accounting. "He will bless the House of Aaron," his Scriptural direction read, but Aaron's brethren resented being branded "wolves in sheep's clothing" and seeing their flocks drawn off by the strange shepherd. Davenport demanded of every parson his "experience" and, failing to elicit a satisfying reply, invoked the wrath of heaven even upon some of the patriarchs of the pulpit.

In May, 1742, Davenport and his "armor-bearer," Benjamin Pomroy, were hailed with a writ of arrest before the State Assembly, which had just passed an Act curbing the intrusions of itinerant exhorters as fomenting disorders and abuses. Defying this law, Davenport had added to his lashings of the clergy the prophecy that the end of the world was near at hand.

At the close of the first day of his examination, Daven

port undertook to harangue the crowd, but the sheriff importuned his departure. Thereupon the prisoner cried out: "Lord, Thou knowest somebody's got hold of my sleeve. Strike them, Lord, strike them!" To this Pomroy added: "Take heed how you do that heaven-daring action!" Partisans rushed the sheriff, but he stood his ground. That night a mob ranged round the house of confinement and it required two hours for the magistrates to disperse it.

Till dawn clashing prayers arose from the excited town of Hartford. Then the militia was ordered out and muskets kept peace to the conclusion of the trial on June 3. The Assembly decided that Davenport's mental faculties had been disturbed by "enthusiastical impressions and impulses" and that, deserving of pity, he should be sent home to Long Island. Committing Connecticut to the Lord's care "in spite of all the malice of earth and hell," Davenport suffered himself to be transported.

By the end of the month Davenport appeared in Boston, declaring that "the Lord sent me," and assailed the unregenerate of the pulpit with redoubled fury. The very ministers who had sponsored Whitefield in Boston united in a drastic reproval of the intruder and the Grand Jury indicted him for "slanderous and reviling speeches against the godly and faithful ministers of this Province, viz.: that the greatest part of said ministers were carnal and unconverted men; that they were leading their people blindfold down to hell; and that they were destroying and murdering souls by the thousands."

Brought to trial, Davenport was adjudged "non compos mentis" and so "not guilty." Having planted the seed of separatism in Massachusetts, Davenport betook himself to New London, Connecticut, for the same purpose. Here he reached the climax of his career. Acting upon "holy intui