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Show Page 23 he nevertheless questioned and probed for answers, mumbling in his half-sleep his pleas for understanding. The questions which inflamed the young Orson Pratt were burning over the whole region. In fact, Orson's family village of New Lebanon became the focus of a sweeping religious controversy in 1827, as the town hosted a summertime conference of evangelists. The most famous preachers of the day converged on the Columbia Hall, ostensibly to create a solid bloc against both Calvinism and Unitarianism. However, the conference smoldered with confrontation and turned into the greatest revival show ever seen. Lyman Beecher, fresh from the fury of his pulpit in Boston, engaged the greatest evangelist of them all, Charles Grandison Finney, in hot arguments over the liberal party he represented. The uncompromising Finney is recognized as the first of the great cross-denominational evangelists, having made his reputation with the mass conversion that attended his 1826 revival in Buffalo. Finney brought his iron-rod perspective of the gospel to New Lebanon and paralyzed the conference. Whether Orson Pratt was aware that his neighborhood served briefly as the epicenter of the religious tremors of the age is unknown, but certainly he went to the 37 buzzing meetings and heard Finney's fire whip the crowd into howling converts. In the ensuing years, Canaan and neighboring New Lebanon "got religion." The Presbyterians, following Finney's lead, split with a vengeance from an indifferent union with the Congregationalists, for whom Orson's employer, Joshua Lord, served as deacon. A new Baptist meetinghouse went up in 1830 not far from Canaan Four Corners. Frequent Methodist revivals led to the construction of the Canaan Methodist Episcopal Church near Queechy on the borders of the township - Orson Pratt visited the whole Babel of uhem. Between the spiritualistic ecstasies of the Shakers and the revivalism of the Protestants, Orson Pratt was verily bathed in the clairvoyance and fire Rhat would later cTRrisacterize his own crusade.0 |
