Forgotten Voices. Carolyn Wakeman

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      Rev. Jonathan Parsons traveled to Boston in 1742 to deliver a sermon Wisdom justified of her Children defending the incendiary minister James Davenport, who had been jailed after his deliberately provocative preaching and his denunciation of fellow clergymen.

      In Lyme’s north parish the great danger that concerned Rev. George Beckwith in August 1741 was not the problem of unsaved souls but the authorizing of anyone displaying a “divine impulse” to pass judgment on other brethren. In two strongly worded sermons Beckwith warned against following the “dictates of man’s wild fancies” and denounced those “who usurped God’s judgment and presumed to act in His place.” A group from his congregation, together with a few from Parsons’s west parish, funded the printing of the paired sermons. Influential among the contributors was Dr. Eleazar Mather (1716–1789), a Yale graduate and local physician who later quipped that Lyme had been favored during the Great Awakening “with the lights of several wandering stars, viz. traveling Tennant, singing Davenport … whining Whitefield.”