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Show Page 16 25 religious frenzy. But New Lebanon took no corner on revolutionary religious ideas, and clerics throughout New England and the Northern States were setting fires which would lead ultimately to the repudiation of many age-old concepts. In the 1820s, the fight was earnest between those who held tight to the iron rod of Calvinistic theology, which had dominated New England for two hundred years, and those influenced by Eighteenth Century deistic liberalism. In Boston, William Ellery Channing was gearing up to preach the Unitarian gospel, denying the determinism of Calvin and exalting the freedom of man. The wave of revivalism which engulfed New York state in 1819-20 derived partially from this controversy, as well as from the tension between pragmatic frontier "free-willers" and more orthodox docents of the seminaries, flaming westward to "revive" the exiles in the fiery tradition of Jonathan Edwards. The young Orson Pratt circulated among these sectaries and was doubtless thoroughly captivated by the clash of theologies that surrounded him. This was an era in which denominational distinctions were tightly drawn, when the zealots of the churches were energetic in mutually denying the "glory road" to each other, and Orson Pratt's distaste for selective salvation, so apparent in his later works, must have been kindled at this time. By contrast, his search for religious certainty may also have originated in all the confusion - his family, he 26 says, would have embraced the "Church of Christ, if it could be found." Poverty was, however, a more immediate problem than salvation, for a national panic hit the Pratts just as they were struggling out of debt. The country's economy, becalmed since sharp breaks in 1816 and 1819, drooped into depression with very little promise of upswing well into the next decade. In addition, the Bank of the United States, the federal government's central banking institution, had initiated a policy of tight |