Not only that men disagreeing in their convictions of truth would be enrolled in different bodies, but that men holding the same views, in the same statement of them, would feel free to go apart from one another, and stay apart.

There was not even to be any one generally predominating organization from which minor ones should be reckoned as dissenting.

One after another the organizations which should be tempted by some period of exceptional growth and prosperity to pretend to a hegemony among the churches--Catholic, Episcopalian, Presbyterian, Baptist, Methodist--would meet with some set-back as inexorable as "the law of nature that prevents the trees from growing up into the sky." By a curious paradox, the same spiritual agitation which deepened the divisions of the American church aroused in the colonies the consciousness of a national religious unity.

We have already seen that in the period before the Awakening the sole organ of fellowship reaching through the whole chain of the British colonies was the correspondence of the Quaker meetings and missionaries.

In the glow of the revival the continent awoke to the consciousness of a common spiritual life.