campaigns, stores of loose camp vices, and recklessness, which soon
flooded the land with immorality and infidelity. The church was
neglected, drunkenness fearfully increased, and social life was sadly
corrupted."[32]

It is not, therefore, a matter of surprise that bundling should, in the
increased laxity of public morals, become more frequently abused. Its
pernicious effects became constantly more apparent, and more decidedly
challenged the attention of the comparatively few godly men who
endeavored to stem and to control the rapidly widening current of
immorality which threatened to overwhelm the land.[33] The powerful
intellect of Jonathan Edwards thundered its anathemas upon it; pious
divines prayed against it in their closets, and wrestled with it in
their pulpits; while many attempted by a revision of their church
polity, by greater carefulness in the admission of members; by rules
more stringently framed and enforced, to preserve, as best they might,
the purity of the churches committed to their charge, and to make them,
if it were possible, beacon lights amid the surrounding darkness of the
times.[34] The task, however, was well nigh hopeless. The French wars
were succeeded by that of the American Revolution, and not before the
close of that struggle, may the custom of bundling be said to have
received its deathblow, and even then it _died hard_.

Its final disuse was brought about by a variety of causes, among which
may be named the improved condition of the people after the Revolution,
enabling many to live in larger and better warmed houses, and in the
very few places where the ministers dared to touch the subject in the
pulpit, as in Dedham, already referred to, a decided effect was
produced, but it was confined to the neighborhood, having very little
effect on the general custom. Probably no single thing tended so much to