The ministers of the county were the first to feel the effects of disharmony and disorder. Throughout the early part of the eighteenth century the Hampshire clergy had seemed a fit counterpart to the county's secular leadership, a well-ordered, unified body led by the forceful personality of Solomon Stoddard. Stoddard had given his colleagues a common organization and a common ecclesiastical practice that bound them together and helped them stand apart from the rest of the New England ministry. Moreover, he had provided an impressive model of the minister as patriarch and evangelist, always able to maintain the delicate balance between institutional stability and spiritual activity. By the 1730s, however, the position of other county ministers became increasingly unsteady. Stoddard was dead, and there was no one, not even his grandson Jonathan Edwards, who could take his place above the rest. Ironically enough, as Edwards led Hampshire ministers in the widespread religious revivalism Stoddard had hoped to achieve, the local clergy experienced an increasing loss of confidence and consensus. The heightened religious upsurge that swept the county in the late 1730s and early 1740s led also to heightened religious unrest, creating disorder in the ministers' respective congregations and division in their collective organization. In many ways the Great Awakening proved to be a rude awakening for members of the Hampshire clergy, and they began to realize just how vulnerable they could be.