The influence of the mother church of that dreary period and the influence of the official rings around every royal governor were all too potent in the same direction.

The Propagation Society's missionaries boasted, with reason, of large accessions of proselytes alienated from other churches by their distaste for the methods of the revival.

The effect on the Episcopal Church itself was in some respects unhappy.

It "lowered a spiritual temperature already too low,"[177:1] and weakened the moral influence of the church, and the value of its testimony to important principles which there were few besides efficiently to represent--the duty of the church not to disown or shut out those of little faith, and the church's duty toward its children.
Never in the history of the church have the Lord's husbandmen shown a fiercer zeal for rooting up tares, regardless of damage to the wheat, than was shown by the preachers of the Awakening.

Never was there a wider application of the reproach against those who, instead of preaching to men that they should be converted and become as little children, preach to children that they must be converted and become like grown folks.[178:1] The attitude of the Episcopal Church at that period was not altogether admirable; but it is nothing to its dishonor that it bore the reproach of being a friend of publicans and sinners, and offered itself as a _refugium peccatorum_, thus holding many in some sort of relation to the kingdom of Christ who would otherwise have lapsed into sheer infidelity.
In all this the Episcopal Church was affected by the Awakening only by way of reaction.