As the Spirit gave them utterance

In 1773, Ann Lee and other Shakers were arrested for causing a disturbance during a service at Christ Church in Manchester. Afterwards she was questioned by ministers. Richard Francis, Ann the Word: > Once when recounting the tale of this religious interrogation, Ann said she spoke for four hours and the ministers - the ‘greatest in those parts’ (suddenly we hear the illiterate daughter of a blacksmith talking) - ‘said that I spoke in seventy two different tongues, and that I spoke them more perfect than any in their knowledge were able to do. After this they tried to persuade me to teach the languages; but I did not regard their flatteries.’ » These priests, ‘great’ or not, seem to have been rather more naive than was Timothy Dwight, President of Yale, when he went to visit the Shaker community in New Lebanon in upstate New York more than a quarter of a century later, in 1799. He heard a woman speaking in tongues and pointed out to her that she was making sounds that were not…