● ● ● of primitive Christianity and recapturing a religious enthusiasm which their critics did not hesitate to call fanaticism. New England was spared the worst features of frontier revivalism, and the New Englanders’ respect for intellect kept them from embracing wholeheartedly the frontier view that piety and book larnin’ were natural enemies. Nevertheless the Methodist and Baptist churches in New England did change the religious emphases of that region. Until the time when they themselves grew conservative and intellectually respectable, they illustrated the observation of a German Reformed Church writer of the period: “A genuine sect will not suffer itself to be embarrassed for a moment . . . by the consideration that it has no root in past history. Its ambition is rather to appear in this respect autochthonic, aboriginal, self-sprung from the Bible, or through the Bible from the skies.”57
Mary Baker had connections with Methodism from her earliest years. Father Hinds, Methodist elder at Bow, was a family friend and one of the early spiritual guides to whom she later paid tribute. There was a Methodist church in Sanbornton and periods of revival which swept the town. At one time, possibly during a revival, she wanted to join the Methodist Church but was dissuaded by her father from this dangerous departure from Congregational orthodoxy. It may have been on this occasion, or perhaps during a revival within the Congregational Church itself, that Albert wrote her:
Abi informs me that there has lately been a protracted meeting at Sandbornton, and that you cherished a hope, that you had been brought to embrace the doctrines of that religion, the strange influences of which have thus far puzzled philosophy to solve. I know the anxiety you will feel to know how this intelligence will affect me; and the timidity you will feel to speak of it. But why should you? Though I may differ with you in all these matters of belief, it is far from my wish to discountenance religion. Indeed, in my view, a woman can hardly live without it; and it would be strange philosophy, to deny that a place in our affections without which, we seem like strangers in a strange land. You never need fear a repulse, or that it will not be ● ● ●
57 John W. Nevin, quoted in Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York: Knopf, 1963), p. 83.