JONATHAN EDWARDS[7]
Two of the ablest thinkers whom America has yet produced were born in New England at the beginning of the eighteenth century. The theorists who would trace all our characteristics to inheritance from some remote ancestor might see in Jonathan Edwards and Benjamin Franklin normal representatives of the two types from which the genuine Yankee is derived. Though blended in various proportions, and though one may exist almost to the exclusion of the other, an element of shrewd mother-wit and an element of transcendental enthusiasm are to be detected in all who boast a descent from the pilgrim fathers. Franklin, born in 1706, represents in its fullest development the more earthly side of this compound. A thoroughbred utilitarian, full of sagacity, and carrying into all regions of thought that strange ingenuity which makes an American the handiest of all human beings, Franklin is best embodied in his own poor Richard. Honesty is the best policy: many a little makes a mickle: the second vice is lying, the first is running in debt; and—
'Get what you can, and what you get hold;
'Tis the stone that will turn all your lead into gold.'
These and a string of similar maxims are the pith of Franklin's message to the world. Franklin, however, was not merely a man in whom the practical intelligence was developed in a very remarkable degree, but was fortunate in coming upon a crisis admirably suited to his abilities, and in being generally in harmony with the spirit of his age. He succeeded, as we know, in snatching lightning from the heavens, and the sceptre from tyrants; and had his reward in the shape of much contemporary homage from French philosophers, and lasting renown amongst his countrymen. Meanwhile, Jonathan Edwards, his senior by three years, had the fate common to men who are unfitted for the struggles of daily life, and whose philosophy does not harmonise with the dominant current of the time. A speculative recluse, with little faculty of literary expression, and given to utter opinions shocking to the popular mind, he excited little attention during his lifetime, except amongst the sharers of his own religious persuasions; and, when noticed after his death, the praise of his intellectual acuteness has generally been accompanied with an expression of abhorrence for his supposed moral obtuseness. Mr. Lecky, for example, whilst speaking of Edwards as 'probably the ablest defender of Calvinism,' mentions his treatise on Original Sin as 'one of the most revolting books that have ever proceeded from the pen of man' ('Rationalism,' i. 404). That intense dislike, which is far from uncommon, for severe reasoning has even made a kind of reproach to Edwards of what is called his 'inexorable logic.' To condemn a man for being honestly in the wrong is generally admitted to be unreasonable; but people are even more unforgiving to the sin of being honestly in the right. The frankness with which Edwards avowed opinions, not by any means peculiar to himself, has left a certain stain upon his reputation. He has also suffered in general repute from a cause which should really increase our interest in his writings. Metaphysicians, whilst admiring his acuteness, have been disgusted by his adherence to an outworn theology; and theologians have cared little for a man who was primarily a philosophical speculator, and has used his philosophy to bring into painful relief the most terrible dogmas of the ancient creeds. Edwards, however, is interesting just because he is a connecting link between two widely different phases of thought. He connects the expiring Calvinism of the old Puritan theocracy with what is called the transcendentalism embodied in the writings of Emerson and other leaders of young America. He is remarkable, too, as illustrating, at the central point of the eighteenth century, those speculative tendencies which were most vitally opposed to the then dominant philosophy of Locke and Hume. And, finally, there is a still more permanent interest in the man himself, as exhibiting in high relief the weak and the strong points of the teaching of which Calvinism represents only one embodiment. His life, in striking contrast to that of his more celebrated contemporary, ran its course far away from the main elements of European activity. With the exception of a brief stay at New York, he lived almost exclusively in the interior of what was then the thinly-settled colony of Massachusetts.[8] His father was for nearly sixty years minister of a church in Connecticut, and his mother's father, the 'celebrated Solomon Stoddard,' for about an equal time minister of a church at Northampton, Massachusetts. Young Jonathan, brought up at the feet of these venerable men, after the strictest sect of the Puritans, was sent to Yale at the age of twelve, took his B.A. degree at the age of seventeen, and two years afterwards became a preacher at New York. Thence he returned to a tutorship at Yale, but in his twenty-fourth year was ordained as colleague of his grandfather Stoddard, and spent at Northampton the next twenty-three years of his life. It may be added that he married early a wife of congenial temper, and had eleven children.[9] One of his daughters,—it is an odd combination,—was the mother of Aaron Burr, the duellist who killed Hamilton, and afterwards became the prototype of all Southern secessionists. The external facts, however, of Edwards' life are of little interest, except as indicating the influences to which he was exposed. Puritanism, though growing faint, was still powerful in New England; it was bred in his bones, and he was drilled from his earliest years into its sternest dogmas. Some curious fragments of his early life and letters indicate the nature of his spiritual development. Whilst still almost a boy, he writes down solemn resolutions, and practises himself in severe self-inspection. He resolves 'never to do, be, or suffer anything in soul or body, more or less, but what tends to the glory of God;' to 'live with all my might while I do live;' 'never to speak anything that is ridiculous or matter of laughter on the Lord's Day' (a resolution which we might think rather superfluous, even though extended to other days); and, 'frequently to renew the dedication of myself to God, which was made at my baptism, which I solemnly renewed when I was received into the communion of the Church, and which I have solemnly ratified this 12th day of January 1723' (i. 18). He pledges himself, in short, to a life of strict self-examination and absolute devotion to what he takes for the will of God. Similar resolutions have doubtless been made by countless young men, brought up under the same conditions, and diaries of equal value have been published by the authors of innumerable saintly biographies. In Edwards' mouth, however, they really had a meaning, and bore corresponding results. An interesting paper gives an account of those religious 'experiences' to which his sect attaches so tremendous an importance. From his childhood, he tells us, his mind had been full of objections to the doctrine of God's sovereignty. It appeared to him to be a 'horrible doctrine' that God should choose whom He would, and reject whom He pleased, 'leaving them eternally to perish and be tormented eternally in hell.' The whole history of his intellectual development is involved in the process by which he became gradually reconciled to this appalling dogma. In the second year of his collegiate course, we are told, which would be about the fourteenth of his age, he read Locke's Essay with inexpressible delight. The first glimpse of metaphysical inquiry, it would seem, revealed to him the natural bent of his mind, and opened to him the path of speculation in which he ever afterwards delighted. Locke, though Edwards always mentions him with deep respect, was indeed a thinker of a very different school. The disciple owed to his master, not a body of doctrine, but the impulse to intellectual activity. He succeeded in working out for himself a satisfactory answer to the problem by which he had been perplexed. His cavils ceased as his reason strengthened. 'God's absolute sovereignty and justice' seemed to him to be as clear as anything he saw with his eyes; 'at least,' he adds, 'it is so at times.' Nay, he even came to rejoice in the doctrine and regard it as 'infinitely pleasant, bright, and sweet' (i. 33). The Puritan assumptions were so ingrained in his nature that the agony of mind which they caused never led him to question their truth, though it animated him to discover a means of reconciling them to reason; and the reconciliation is the whole burden of his ablest works. The effect upon his mind is described in terms which savour of a less stern school of faith. God's glory was revealed to him throughout the whole creation, and often threw him into ecstasies of devotion (i. 33). 'God's excellency, His wisdom, His purity, and love seemed to appear in everything: in the sun, moon, and stars: in the clouds and blue sky; in the grass, flowers, and trees; in the water and all nature, which used greatly to fix my mind. I often used to sit and view the moon for continuance, and in the day spent much time in viewing the clouds and sky, to behold the sweet glory of God in these things; in the meantime singing forth, with a low voice, my contemplations of the Creator and Redeemer.' Thunder, he adds, had once been terrible to him; 'now scarce anything in all the works of nature' was so sweet (i. 36). It seemed as if the 'majestic and awful voice of God's thunder' was in fact the voice of its Creator. Thunder and lightning, we know, suggested characteristically different contemplations to Franklin. Edwards' utterances are as remarkable for their amiability as for their non-scientific character. We see in him the gentle mystic rather than the stern divine who consigned helpless infants to eternal torture without a question of the goodness of their Creator. This vein of meditation, however, continued to be familiar to him. He spent most of his time reflecting on Divine things, and often walking in solitary places and woods to enjoy uninterrupted soliloquies and converse with God. At New York he often retired to a quiet spot—now, one presumes, seldom used for such purposes—on the banks of the Hudson river, to abandon himself to his quiet reveries, or to 'converse on the things of God' with one Mr. John Smith. To the end of his life he indulged in the same habit. His custom was to rise at four o'clock in the morning, to spend thirteen hours daily in his study, and to ride out after dinner to some lonely grove, where he dismounted and walked by himself, with a notebook ready at hand for the arrest of stray thoughts. Evidently he possessed one of those rare temperaments to which the severest intellectual exercise is a source of the keenest enjoyment; and though he must often have strayed in to the comparatively dreary labyrinths of metaphysical puzzles, his speculations had always an immediate reference to what he calls 'Divine things.' Once, he tells us, as he rode into the woods, in 1737, and alighted according to custom 'to walk in Divine contemplation and prayer,' he had so extraordinary a view of the glory of the Son of God, and His wonderful grace, that he remained for about an hour 'in a flood of tears and weeping aloud.' This intensity of spiritual vision was frequently combined with a harrowing sense of his own corruption. 'My wickedness,' he says, 'as I am in myself has long appeared to me perfectly ineffable; like an infinite deluge or mountains over my head.' Often, for many years, he has had in his mind and his mouth the words 'Infinite upon infinite!' His heart looks to him like 'an abyss infinitely deeper than hell;' and yet, he adds, it seems to him that 'his conviction of sin is exceedingly small.' Whilst weeping and crying for his sins, he seemed to know that 'his repentance was nothing to his sin' (i. 41). Extravagant expressions of this kind are naturally rather shocking to the outsider; and, to those who are incapable of sympathising, they may even appear to be indications of hypocrisy. Nobody was more alive than Edwards himself to the danger of using such phrases mechanically. When you call yourself the worst of men, he says, be careful that you do not think highly of yourself just because you think so meanly. And if you reply, 'No, I have not a high opinion of my humility; it seems to me I am as proud as the devil;' ask again, 'whether on this very account that you think yourself as proud as the devil, you do not think yourself to be very humble' (iv. 282). That is a characteristic bit of subtilising, and it indicates the danger of all this excessive introspection. Edwards would not have accepted the moral that the best plan is to think about yourself as little as possible; for from his point of view this constant cross-examination of all your feelings, this dissection of emotion down to its finest and most intricate convolutions, was of the very essence of religion. No one, however, can read his account of his own feelings, even when he runs into the accustomed phraseology, without perceiving the ring of genuine feeling. He is morbid, it may be, but he is not insincere; and even his strained hyperboles are scarcely unintelligible when considered as the expression of the sentiment produced by the effort of a human being to live constantly in presence of the absolute and the infinite.
The event which most powerfully influenced Edwards' mind during his life at Northampton was one of those strange spiritual storms which then, as now, swept periodically across the Churches. Protestants generally call them revivals; in Catholic countries they impel pilgrims to some devotional shrine; Edwards and his contemporaries described such a phenomenon as 'a remarkable outpouring of God's Holy Spirit.' He has carefully described the symptoms of one such commotion, in which he was a main agent; and two or three later treatises, discussing some of the problems suggested by the scenes he witnessed, testify to the profoundness of the impression upon his mind. In fact, as we shall presently see, Edwards' whole philosophical system was being put to a practical test by these events. Was the excitement, as modern observers would say, due to a mere moral epidemic, or was it actually produced by the direct interposition in human affairs of the Almighty Ruler? Unhesitatingly recognising the hand of the God the very thought of whom crushed him into self-annihilation, Edwards is unconsciously troubled by the strange contrast between the effect and the stupendous cause assigned for it. When the angel of the Lord comes down to trouble the waters, one would expect rather to see oceans upheaved than a trifling ripple in an insignificant pond. There is something almost pathetic in his eagerness to magnify the proportions of the event. He boasts that in six months 'more than three hundred souls were savingly brought home to Christ in this town' (iii. 23). The town itself, it may be observed, though then one of the most populous in the country, was only of eighty-two years' standing, and reckoned about two hundred families, the era of Chicagos not having yet dawned upon the world. The conversion, however, of this village appeared to some 'divines and others' to herald the approach of the 'conflagration' (iii. 59); and though Edwards disavows this rash conjecture, he anticipates with some confidence the approach of the millennium. The 'isles and ships of Tarshish,' mentioned in Isaiah, are plainly meant for America, which is to be 'the firstfruits of that glorious day' (iii. 154); and he collects enough accounts of various revivals of an analogous kind which had taken place in Salzburg, Holland, and several of the British Colonies, to justify the anticipation 'that these universal commotions are the forerunners of something exceeding glorious approaching' (iii. 414). The limited area of the disturbance perhaps raised less difficulty than the equivocal nature of many of the manifestations. In Edwards' imagination, Satan was always on the watch to produce an imitation, and, it would seem, a curiously accurate imitation, of the Divine impulses. As De Foe says, in a different sense—
Wherever God erects a house of prayer,
The devil always builds a chapel there.
And some people were unkind enough to trace in the diseases and other questionable products of the revival a distinct proof of the 'operation of the evil spirit' (iii. 96). Edwards felt the vital importance of distinguishing between the two classes of supernatural agency, so different in their source, and yet so thoroughly similar in their effects. There is something rather touching, though at times our sympathy is not quite unequivocal, in the simplicity with which he traces distinct proofs of the Divine hand in the familiar phenomena of religious conversions. The stories seem stale and profitless to us which he accepted with awe-stricken reverence as a demonstrative testimony to the Divinity of the work. He gives, for example, an anecdote of a young woman, who, being jealous of another conversion, resolved to bring about her own by the rather naïf expedient of reading the Bible straight through. Having begun her task on Monday, the desired effect was produced on Thursday, and she felt it possible to skip at once to the New Testament. The crisis ran through its usual course, ending in a state of rapture, during which she enjoyed for days 'a kind of beatific vision of God.' The poor girl was very ill, and expressed 'great longings to die.' When her brother read in Job about worms feeding on the dead body, she 'appeared with a pleasant smile, and said it was sweet to her to think of her being in such circumstances' (iii. 69). The longing was speedily gratified, and she departed, perhaps not to find in another world that the universe had been laid out precisely in accordance with the theories of Mr. Jonathan Edwards, but at least leaving behind her—so we are assured—memories of touching humility and spirituality. If Abigail Hutchinson strikes us as representing, on the whole, rather a morbid type of human excellence, what are we to say to Phebe Bartlet, who had just passed her fourth birthday in April 1735? (iii. 70). This infant of more than Yankee precocity was converted by her brother, who had just gone through the same process at the age of eleven. She took to 'secret prayer,' five or six times a day, and would never suffer herself to be interrupted. Her experiences are given at great length, including a refusal to eat plums, 'because it was sin;' her extreme interest in a thought suggested to her by a text from the Revelation, about 'supping with God;' and her request to her father to replace a cow which a poor man had lost. She took great delight in 'private religious meetings,' and was specially edified by the sermons of Mr. Edwards, for whom she professed, as he records, with perhaps some pardonable complacency, the warmest affection. The grotesque side of the story of this detestable infant is, however, blended with something more shocking. The poor little wretch was tormented by the fear of hell-fire; and her relations and pastor appear to have done their best to stimulate this, as well as other religious sentiments. Edwards boasts at a subsequent period that 'hundreds of little children' had testified to the glory of God's work (iii. 146). He afterwards remarks incidentally that many people had considered as 'intolerable' the conduct of the ministers in 'frightening poor innocent little children with talk of hell-fire and eternal damnation' (iii. 200). And indeed we cannot deny that when reading some of the sermons to which poor Phebe Bartlet must have listened, and remembering the nature of the audience, the fingers of an unregenerate person clench themselves involuntarily as grasping an imaginary horsewhip. The answer given by Edwards does not diminish the impression. Innocent as children may seem to be, he replies, 'yet if they are out of Christ, they are not so in God's sight, but are young vipers, and are infinitely more hateful than vipers, and are in a most miserable condition as well as grown persons; and they are naturally very senseless and stupid, being born as the wild ass's colt, and need much to awaken them' (iii. 200). Doubtless they got it, and if we will take Edwards' word for it, the awakening process never did harm in any one instance. Here we are touching the doctrines which naturally excite a fierce revolt of the conscience against the most repulsive of all theological dogmas, though unfortunately a revolt which is apt to generate an indiscriminating hostility.
The revival gradually spent its force; and, as usual, the more unpleasant symptoms began to assume greater prominence as the more spiritual impulse decayed. In Edwards' phraseology, 'it began to be very sensible that the Spirit of God was gradually withdrawing from us, and after this time Satan seemed to be set more loose, and raged in a dreadful manner' (iii. 77). From the beginning of the excitement, the usual physical manifestation, leapings, and roarings and convulsions (iii. 131, 205), had shown themselves; and Edwards labours to show that in this case they were genuine marks of a Divine impulse, and not of mere enthusiasm, as in the externally similar cases of the Quakers, the French prophets, and others (iii. 109). Now, however, more startling phenomena presented themselves. Satan persuaded a highly respectable citizen to cut his throat. Others saw visions, and had fancied inspirations; whilst from some hints it would seem probable that grosser outrages on morality resulted from indiscriminate gatherings of frenzied enthusiasts (iii. 284). Finally, people's minds were diverted by the approach of his Excellency the Governor to settle an Indian treaty, and the building of a new meeting-house altered the channel of enthusiasm (iii. 79). Northampton settled down into its normal tranquillity.