A History of American Literature

by Percy Holmes Boynton

The first instance that I remember of that sort of inward, sweet delight in God and divine things that I have lived much in since, was on reading those words, 1 Tim. i. 17, Now unto the King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only wise God, be honor and glory for ever and ever, Amen. As I read the words, there came into my soul, and was as it were diffused through it, a sense of the glory of the Divine Being....

Not long after I first began to experience these things, I gave an account to my father of some things that had passed in my mind. I was pretty much affected by the discourse we had together; and when the discourse was ended, I walked abroad alone, in a solitary place in my father’s pasture, for contemplation. And as I was walking there, and looking up on the sky and clouds, there came into my mind so sweet a sense of the glorious majesty and grace of God, that I know not how to express. I seemed to see them both in a sweet conjunction; majesty and meekness joined together; it was a sweet and gentle, and holy majesty; and also a majestic meekness; an awful sweetness; a high, and great, and holy gentleness.

The striking fact about Edwards’s later development, however, is that he passed entirely from poetic mysticism to a championship of the theology of Calvin. His great period of influence was during his pastorate in Northampton, Massachusetts, from 1727 to 1750, and during his following six years at Stockbridge, Massachusetts. He was a preacher of extraordinary power—the more extraordinary because his command of audiences was obtained by the sheer quality of his discourse and not, as in the case of John Cotton and the Mathers, by pulpit presence or flights of eloquence. His sermons were at once irresistible in their logic (provided his auditors were willing to start with his assumptions) and, at the same time, irresistibly cogent in their simple, concrete methods of illustration. His most famous discourse, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” is a complete illustration of his method. Notwithstanding his sincerity and his talents as a preacher his ministerial experience was ended with a tragic downfall. His parishioners could not endure the rigor of his teachings, agreeing perversely with Dr. Johnson’s later dictum on his “Freedom of the Will”—that all theory might be for it but all experience was against it. During his residence in Stockbridge he continued with the writing of discourses which philosophers have agreed at once to applaud and reject. He died in 1758 shortly after his inauguration as president of the College of New Jersey.

His failure lay in the fact that his religion was a religion of logic rather than of faith. It was based on what learned men had theorized out from the Bible, and in a great many cases from the least important passages of the Bible, and it sternly rejected what many other equally learned men had found in the same book. Moreover, it was concerned with life on earth chiefly as a prelude to a future life of reward or punishment. In all the tide of human event which was making the eighteenth century each year more interesting as a matter of present living, men could not go on indefinitely looking everywhere but at life itself. Oliver Wendell Holmes summed up the situation in his “Wonderful ‘One-Hoss Shay’” (see p. 305). This is a pleasant story for children, but a comment on life for grown-ups; and to the grown-ups Holmes addressed his concluding couplet:

End of the wonderful one-hoss shay:

Logic is logic. That’s all I say.

Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) is the man who reflected better and earlier than other Americans the complete change from the Puritan point of view—reflecting it so unqualifiedly that he must be understood as an extreme case and not a typical one. In education and character he offered a succession of contrasts to the leaders of seventeenth-century New England. He did not come of a cultured family; he was not a college man; he did not enter any of the learned professions—ministry, law, or teaching; he was not an active supporter of the church; he did not live in the New England where he was born. In fact he was one of the first to act on the much-quoted principle, “Boston is a very good place—to come from.”

Franklin was born in Boston in 1706, the youngest son of a tallow-chandler and the fifteenth of seventeen children. He was industrious and bookish as a boy, and before he was seventeen years old he had trained himself to write in the fashion of the English essayist Joseph Addison, had been apprenticed in his brother’s printing shop, and had written many articles published in his brother’s paper, The New England Courant. In 1723, as the result of troubles with his brother, he ran away to Philadelphia. From there he went to London for two years, on the promise of the irresponsible Governor Keith to set him up in the printing business on his return. The failure of the governor to keep his word did him no harm in the end, for he established his own printing house in 1728, and in 1748, at the age of forty-two, he was able to retire with a moderate fortune. During this time he had not only succeeded in Philadelphia but had combined with partners in New York, Newport, Lancaster (Pennsylvania), Charleston (South Carolina), Kingston, Jamaica, and Antigua.

The activities of his life were so crowded and interwoven that they may best be summarized under a few simple heads. As a public-spirited citizen of Philadelphia he organized a debating society, the Junto, in 1727; published The Pennsylvania Gazette in 1729; founded the first circulating library in America in 1731; conducted Poor Richard’s Almanac from 1732 to 1748; organized the American Philosophical Society in 1744; and in 1749 founded the academy which developed into the University of Pennsylvania. As an inventor he perfected the Franklin stove in 1742 and contrived methods of street paving and lighting which were widely adopted. As a scientist he proved the identity of lightning and electricity in 1752, and went on from that to further investigations which sooner or later brought him election to the Royal Academy of London and their Copley gold medal, an appointment as one of the eight foreign associates of the French Academy of Sciences, and medals and diplomas from other societies in St. Petersburg, Madrid, Edinburgh, Padua, and Turin. As a holder of public trusts and offices he became clerk of the Assembly of Pennsylvania in 1736; postmaster of Philadelphia in 1737; deputy postmaster-general of the colonies in 1753; commissioner from Pennsylvania to the Albany Congress in 1754; colonial agent to London from Pennsylvania in 1757 and 1764 and for Massachusetts in 1770; one of the framers of the Declaration of Independence; minister to the French court from the United States in 1778; a signer of the Peace Articles in 1783; president of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania in 1785–1787; and a framer of the Constitution of the United States. Such a catalogue is not a thing to be exactly memorized. Its value is like that of an entry in “Who’s Who in America”—it should be referred to when needed. Yet it is worth reading and rereading as an evidence of the almost unparalleled variety and usefulness of occupations which filled this man’s life.

Usefulness is, without question, the idea which Franklin most emphasized in his writings and exemplified in his conduct. In comparison with the Puritan fathers he was more interested in the eighteenth century than in eternity, more actively concerned with Philadelphia and Pennsylvania and the United States of America than with the mansions prepared above. This attitude of mind was not a freakish or accidental one; it can be accounted for in the influences which affected him when he was a boy and in the kind of English and American thinking which characterized his whole century.