A long dynasty of acute and strenuous argumentators has continued, through successive generations to the present day, this distinctly American school of theological thought.

This is not the place for tracing the intricate history of their discussions,[182:1] but the story of the Awakening could not be told without some mention of this its attendant and sequel.
Not less notable than the new theology of the revival was the new psalmody.

In general it may be said that every flood-tide of spiritual emotion in the church leaves its high-water mark in the form of "new songs to the Lord" that remain after the tide of feeling has assuaged.
In this instance the new songs were not produced by the revival, but only adopted by it.

It is not easy for us at this day to conceive the effect that must have been produced in the Christian communities of America by the advent of Isaac Watts's marvelous poetic work, "The Psalms of David Imitated in the Language of the New Testament." Important religious results have more than once followed in the church on the publication of religious poems--notably, in our own century, on the publication of "The Christian Year." But no other instance of the kind is comparable with the publication in America of Watts's Psalms.
When we remember how scanty were the resources of religious poetry in American homes in the early eighteenth century, and especially how rude and even grotesque the rhymes that served in the various churches as a vehicle of worship, it seems that the coming of those melodious stanzas, in which the meaning of one poet is largely interpreted by the sympathetic insight of another poet, and the fervid devotion of the Old Testament is informed with the life and transfigured in the language of the New, must have been like a glow of sunlight breaking in upon a gray and cloudy day.

Few pages of biography can be found more vividly illustrative of the times and the men than the page in which Samuel Hopkins recites the story of the sufferings of his own somber and ponderous mind under the rebuke of his college friend David Brainerd.