Evangelicalism Term Analysis

Absent, ignorant, and cruel fathers had degraded poor women and children and left a moral void. City missions would fill that void, mainly (in the case of the Female Missionary Society) through the ministrations of middle-class women.

Frances Folger and her friends were perfectionists […] to them, all time was holy, and women and men were being judged every day.

Elijah and Sarah prayed with the Holy Club for three years, and in 1828 Elijah began talking with the Holy Ghost. He had always been a man of prayer, and had always asked God for help when he had to make some decision. But it was only in 1828 that God began answering him in English.

The doctors now told him there was nothing they could do. Their diagnosis was consumption brought on by exhaustion and malnutrition: Sarah had literally worked and fasted herself to the edge of death.

Despite all of his protestations of faith, [Matthews] was violating the most basic precepts of evangelical manhood, with his unsteady work habits, his self-glorification, and his domestic tyranny.