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Puritanism had lost its vitality, and for years, the "friends of vital piety" had prayed for revival. Finally, in the late 1730s and early 1740s, a great spiritual dam seemed to break in New England. Streams of Christian conviction and conversion rushed through the land.

One historian has compared the emotional force of the Great Awakening to the radical furor of the 1960s, with its civil rights demonstrations, campus disturbances, and urban riots.

The new excitement and new ideals of the awakened brought with them controversy and divisiveness—much of it over the nature of religious experience.

The controversy is easy to understand. Some converts claimed new religious insight. Others erupted in emotional outbursts. Still others censured their pastors for lack of spiritual fervor. Even friends of the revival could see that not all the fruit of this new season came from the Spirit.

But how to distinguish genuine religious experience from counterfeit? The question haunted Jonathan Edwards as he pondered the meaning and results of the Awakening.

Two short-lived revivals in his Northampton parish (1734-35, 1740-41) provided the laboratory for Edwards to observe what the Puritans had always called "experimental" (that is, experiential) religion.

For more than a decade, Edwards researched the fruits of revival. He publicized the results and his conclusions first in letters describing the revival in his own congregation, then in several sermons, and finally in his book-length treatise, Religious Affections (1746).

When the excitement had died down, Edwards emerged from this period with an insightful, biblically rooted scheme of evidences by which revival participants might discern the true meaning of their religious experiences.

Edwards did not want merely to describe the mental and spiritual state of the awakened. He sought to establish "signs" or indicators of those truly regenerated by the Spirit of God. Drawing from the Bible, traditional Puritan use of heart-language, and Calvin's notion of sensus suavitas—a sense of God's beauty, sweetness, or holiness that saints apprehend or taste—he developed a new psychology by which to understand the regenerating work of God's Spirit.

In "Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God" (first written as a letter in 1735 and then published in 1737), Edwards chronicled the events that triggered the revival of 1734-35, including several deaths that seemed to impress locals with seriousness about the state of their own souls.

Then he described the unusual number of conversions that ensued and sketched the changes he observed in the lives of the converted. Outwardly, the saved abandoned old vices and contentious ways; inwardly, they testified to a new or "lively" sense of the divine presence and a new "disposition" toward religious things.

"More than 300 souls were savingly brought home to Christ," exulted Edwards.

Yet, several occurrences marred the orderly work of the Spirit. In a state of spiritual despondence, Edwards's uncle committed suicide. Two people in nearby towns went mad "with strange enthusiastic delusions." Others "[broke] forth into laughter, tears often at the same time issuing like a flood, and intermingling a loud weeping."

Despite these incidents, in his "Faithful Narrative" and his subsequent "Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God" (1741), Edwards defended the revival as God's work by demonstrating the authenticity of the conversions.

"In the main, there has been a great and marvelous work of conversion and sanctification among the people here," he reported.

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