spectators. . the smile of heaven shone in the countenance of the subject.’ The ‘laughing exercise’ was loud, hearty laughter. . . it excited laughter in none else. The subject appeared rapturously solemn, and his laughter excited solemnity in saints and sinners. It is truly indescribable.’ There was also a running exercise, the subject motivated, apparently, by fear, and a singing exercise, ‘not from the mouth or nose but entirely in the breast, the sounds issuing from thence such music silenced every thing.’ such descriptions conjure up, not only the realities of many medieval (and, indeed, sixteenth-century sects), but forms of religious enthusiasm visible in Tertullian's day - run by the same kinds of prophets, attracting the same categories of people, criticized by the same kinds of purists and for similar reasons. But of course in America they were allowed to manifest themselves, for the first time in history, virtually without supervision by the State or by a State Church. Most of the cults sprang from Methodist or Baptist trees; and they were a spontaneous rediscovery of ancient forms of Christian enthusiasm. But some could trace a long history. Thus a French medieval sect of Shakers, which became Huguenot in the sixteenth century, and was expelled by Louis XIV after 1688, settled in England, where they rechristened themselves the 'Shaking Quakers', and were brought to the United States in the eighteenth century by the visionary daughter of a Manchester blacksmith, Anne Lee Stanley. They profited from the second Great Awakening to establish a number of utopian centers, distinguished by separation of the sexes and community spiritualist seances, and they continued to shake, in the form of a wild group dance derived from Huguenot camisards. Hundreds of such communities were founded in the nineteenth century. As Emerson wrote to Carlyle in 1840: 'We are all a little wild here with numberless projects of social reform. Not a reading man but has a draft of a new community in his waistcoat pocket.’ One of the more rational ones was Brook Farm, in West Roxbury, founded by a Unitarian minister from Boston, George Ripley. It included Nathaniel Hawthorne on its agriculture committee, produced books, pottery and furniture and ended in bankruptcy. Carlyle wrote its epitaph by describing Ripley as ‘a Sicilian minister who left the pulpit to reform the world by growing onions’. Many central and east European sects successfully established themselves, and still flourish today. Others proved unstable: the German pietistic group, under George Rapp, which settled at Harmony, Pennsylvania in 1804, practiced auricular confession, opposed procreation and marriage, and contrived to dogmatize itself out of existence. And the Oneida Community of western New York State, which combined socialism with free love or ‘complex marriage’ - procreation as distinguished from other sexual 'transactions' was decided communally, and the children brought up in a kibbutz - flourished by making steel-traps, lost its faith and eventually became a prosperous Canadian corporation, thus justifying Wesley's worst fears. As in the first and second centuries, some groups of enthusiasts ceased to belong to the prophetic or Montanist type and moved into forms of Gnosticism, which is, claimed to have discovered secret codes, texts or systems of knowledge which provided keys to salvation. As such, they tended to part company with Christianity since they replaced Revelation with arcane documents of their own. In about 1827, for instance, Joseph Smith Junior was given by the Angel Maroni a new Bible in the form of golden plates inscribed in ‘reformed Egyptian’ hieroglyphics, with a set of seer-stones, called Urim and Thummim, with which to read them. The Book of Mormon, as Smith translated it, was put on sale in 1830, after which the angel removed the original plates. Its SOO-page text describes the religious history of America's pre-Columbian people, who originally crossed from the Tower of Babel in barges, surviving only in the form of Mormon and his son, Maroni, who buried the golden plates in AD 384. The text clearly derived from the King James Bible, but it fitted into some of the social realities of the frontier, and its early rejection, harassment by authority, and difficulties created by ‘wicked men’, followed by great success, soon gave the movement a genuine tribal history. Smith was providentially murdered by a mob in Illinois in 1844, after which Brigham Young was able to take the sect on a great exodus to Salt Lake City in 1847. Even at this stage Mormonism had crossed the farthest frontiers of Christianity, but it did so in a more obvious sense when Young introduced polygamy. 116