Probably he saw no cause to alter his opinion as to Mr.Whittlesey's amount of grace, and he stoutly refused to retract his words, whereupon he was found guilty of insubordination, and actually expelled from Yale.

A council of ministers who assembled at Hartford petitioned for his restoration, but were refused, the authorities deeming themselves well rid of a dangerous fanatic.
Still, as a youth of blameless life and ardent piety, he was encouraged by his friends to continue his preparation for the ministry, and he persisted in reading hard, and going out between whiles to meditate in the depths of the glorious woods.

It is curious that while his homely and rigid system precluded any conscious admiration of the beauties of nature, it is always evident from his journal that the lightenings of hope and joy which relieved his too frequent depression and melancholy, were connected with the scenery and the glories of day and night.

Sunrise and the aurora borealis seem to have filled him with spiritual bliss, and he never was so happy as when deep in the woods, out of the sight of men; but his morbid, sensitive, excitable nature never seems to have been understood by himself or by others.
Just as John Eliot's missionary zeal was the outcome of the earnestness that carried the Puritans to New England, so the fresh infusion of religious life, brought by Whitfield, produced an ardent desire on the part of David Brainerd to devote himself to the remainder of the Indians; and in the year 1742, at twenty-five years old, he was examined by an assembly of ministers at Danbury, and licensed to preach the Gospel, when he began at once with a little settlement of Indians at Kent, with such a sinking of heart at his own unworthiness that he says he seemed to himself worse than any devil, and almost expected to have been stoned rather than listened to.

Indeed, something of this diffidence and sadness seems always to have weighed him down when he began to preach, though the fervour of his subject and the responding faces of his audience always exhilarated him and bore him up through his sermon.