In the later Puritan age such use was reckoned an infringement on the entire and exclusive authority and sufficiency of the Scriptures, and a constructive violation of the second commandment.
By the adoption of the new psalmody the Puritan and Presbyterian churches, perhaps not consciously, but none the less actually, yielded the major premiss of the only argument by which liturgical worship was condemned on principle.

Thereafter the question of the use of liturgical forms became a mere question of expediency.

It is remarkable that the logical consequences of this important step have been so tardy and hesitating.
* * * * * It was not in the common course of church history that the period under consideration should be a period of vigorous internal activity and development in the old settled churches of America.

The deep, often excessive, excitements of the Awakening had not only ceased, but had been succeeded by intense agitations of another sort.

Two successive "French and Indian" wars kept the long frontier, at a time when there was little besides frontier to the British colonies, in continual peril of fire and scalping-knife.[184:1] The astonishingly sudden and complete extinction of the French politico-religious empire in Canada and the West made possible, and at no remote time inevitable, the separation of the British colonies from the mother country and the contentions and debates that led into the Revolutionary War began at once.
Another consequence of the prostrating of the French power in America has been less noticed by historians, but the course of this narrative will not be followed far without its becoming manifest as not less momentous in its bearing on the future history of the church.