Ann Lee Shaker Quotes

You can't kill the Devil with a sword.

Enthusiastic expressions of conversion abounded in the Burned-over District and, depending on the denomination, were encouraged and expected. Revival meetings, at which ministers exhorted sinners to convert and change their ways, became the scene of shouts and whispers, shakings and quakings, hand clapping and singing, speaking in tongues and falling down in trances. Women joined men in exuberant prayer. Smaller religious groups, including the Shakers and the Community of the Publick Universal Friend, also established sites for their members in western New York. Jemima Wilkinson, a woman known as the Publick Universal Friend, like Mother Ann Lee of the Shakers was believed by her followers to embody a divine spirit. Of more enduring significance than the Friend, in the 1820s an entirely new religion was born in Palmyra, New York, a town only ten miles from Hydesville, when the young visionary Joseph Smith claimed to discover two golden tablets on a hilltop near his home. The angel Moroni, Smith reported, had sent the tablets, which contained new revelations. Although no one except Smith ever saw the tablets, his assertions and teachings led to the formation of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the members of which are popularly known today as Mormons.