...the religious intensity of 1741 could not long be maintained. The dreadful concerns, the traumatic awakenings, the accelerated devotion - these by their nature are of limited duration. The fever pitch must soon pass, else the patient dies... The ebb of this flood of revivalism would seem then to require no elaborate explanation: it declined simply because it had to, because society could not maintain itself in so great a disequilibrium.
Sam Storms, Signs of the Spirit: An Interpretation of Jonathan Edwards' Religious Affections, p. 31. quoted from Gaustad, Great Awakening in New England, p. 79
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