1762 Octavo Pamphlet A Letter To Rev. Alexander Cumming To Show Him It’s Not Blasphemy To Say “No Man Can Love GOD, While He Looks On Him As A God Who Will Damn Him” By Andrew Croswell

Importance: Andrew Croswell was a Congregational minister and revivalist, was born in Charlestown, Massachusetts, the son of Caleb Croswell and Abigail Stimpson. He trained for the ministry at Harvard, receiving a B.A. in 1728 and an M.A. in 1731. He was called to the Second Church of Groton, Connecticut, in 1736, and there he was drawn into the emergent world of evangelical Protestantism... Croswell was drawn further into the revivalist fold after the New England swing of the heralded English evangelist George Whitefield in 1740. As controversy began to mount around the practices of itinerants like Whitefield and his host of colonial imitators, Croswell rose to the defense of the new evangelism in his first published tract, 'An Answer to the Rev. Mr. Garden's Three First Letters to the Rev. Mr. Whitefield' (1741)... Croswell continued his defense of the revivals in one pamphlet after another in the 1740s...Notwithstanding the crumbling of his ministry during the years of the American Revolution, Croswell had been a crucial player in the advent and perpetuation of the evangelical movement in New England, especially in its radical separatist form. He helped legitimize new patterns of ministry and evangelism that pointed ahead to the democratic ferment in the religious world of the early republic. He also helped provide theological articulation for an evangelical piety of dramatic new birth and full assurance, pushing aside Puritan anxiety and pilgrimage and pointing ahead to the world of nineteenth-century revivalists like Charles Grandison Finney who similarly saw little place for Puritan doubt in evangelical spirituality. Few other radicals matched Croswell's polemical output or were such consistent gadflies of New England's standing order.

Source: *American National Biography.

Binding: Disbound Octavo Pamphlet.

Provenance: Recto of the half-title is signed EH & 46

Collation & Notes: A4 ([A1r] H.T. & [A2r] G.T.P.), B4, C4, D4 (ends D4r). [16] ff. 31, [1] p. (32 pages).

Complete, with an original half title & title page. Vertical chain lines. WorldCat & OCLC records 13 copies.

Condition: Leaves (7” x 4.375”). Some for-edges worn.