Remarks on Edwards and His Theology

By George P. Fisher

In the Yale Alumni Catalogue, in the list of the ten who compose the class of 1720, stands the name of Jonathan Edwards. He was the only son in a family of eleven children. On graduating, he was not quite seventeen years of age. The valedictory address was assigned to him. In this address the College is warmly praised. The prediction is even ventured that the day will come when students will resort to it from foreign lands. The accession in recent years of students from oriental countries is a verification of the prophecy in a sense then wholly an unconscious element in the author’s vaticination. His father, by whom he was fitted for college, was the minister of East Windsor, Connecticut, was a graduate of Harvard, and had kept up his habits of study. He was respected as a preacher, and was regarded as a man of polished manners. Intellectually he was thought to be excelled by his wife, who was educated in Boston, and was highly esteemed for her mental vigor and her acquirements, as well as for her gentle and affable ways. The son remained in New Haven nearly two years, engaged in studies preparatory for the ministry. The greater portion of the next two years he spent in preaching to a small Presbyterian church in New York. In the closing part of this interval he was again at his studies in college, where he was a tutor for a third period of two years. It was in New Haven, when at the age of twenty, that he married the beautiful and saintly young woman whom, when she was thirteen years old, he had depicted, not in verse, yet in a strain which recalls the lines of Milton in H Penseroso, —

With, even step and musing gait,
And looks commercing with the skies,
Thy rapt soul sitting in thine eyes.

“They say” — thus he wrote — “there is a young lady in New Haven who is beloved of that great Being who made and rules the world, and that there are certain seasons in which this great Being in some way or other invisible, comes to her and fills her mind with exceeding sweet delight, and that she hardly cares for anything except to meditate on Him; that she expects after a while to be received up where He is, to be raised up out of the world and caught up into heaven; being assured that He loves her too well to let her remain at a distance from Him always. There she is to dwell with Him, and to be ravished with His love and delight forever. Therefore if you present all the world before her, with the richest of its treasures, she disregards and cares not for it, and is unmindful of any pain or affliction. She has a strange sweetness in her mind, and singular purity in her affections; is most just and conscientious in all her conduct, and you could not persuade her to do anything wrong or sinful if you would give her all the world, lest she should offend this great Being. She is of a wonderful calmness, and universal benevolence of mind, especially after this great Grod has manifested Himself to her mind. She will sometimes go about from place to place singing sweetly, and seems to be always full of joy and pleasure, and no one knows for what. She loves to be alone, walking in the fields and groves, and seems to have some one invisible always conversing with her.” 1

When she was seventeen, shortly after the ordination of Edwards at Northampton, she became

1 Dwight, Works of Eckocwdsp with Memoir Vol. I., p. 114.

his wife. The description given above of her traits shows us likewise the traits and spirit of its author. It discloses the qualities which developed in her a type of religious experience closely akin to his own. At last, a little before his death, he sent this message to her, who was at a distance and could not be with him, by his daughter who was at his bedside: “Give my kindest love to my dearest wife, and tell her that the uncommon union which has so long subsisted between us, has been of such a nature, as, I trust, is spiritual, and therefore will continue forever.” l

For two or three months prior to his death, which occurred in 1758, he held the office of President of the College of New Jersey — now Princeton University. With this exception New England remained the exclusive theatre of his life and work.

Edwards is one of the most astonishing examples of precocious mental development of which we have any record. One parallel instance is furnished in the early life of Pascal. If Edwards did not exhibit the mathematical talent so marked in the boyhood of Pascal, he manifested, in connection with other remarkable intellectual traits, a surprising capacity for observations in natural

1 S. E. Dwight, Works of Edwards, with Memoir, Vol. I., p. 578.

science. Before he had reached his twelfth birthday, he wrote a paper on the Flying Spider which is really a well-reasoned scientific essay on the habits of this insect. He ascertained these by his own most accurate observations. Of this paper, a competent scientific authority, Dr. Packard of Brown University, remarks: The writer “has anticipated modern observers, who so far as I know have not added much to his statements.”

It was not the sphere of matter in itself considered, but predominantly the phenomena of mind, that excited his interest and fascinated his attention. In his fifteenth year he read that epoch-making book, Locke’s “Essay concerning Human Understanding.” To use his own words, he read it with a delight greater “than the most greedy miser finds when gathering up handfuls of silver and gold from some newly discovered treasure.” * When a Sophomore in College, fourteen years old, he wrote down reflections under the title “Being,” in which he brings out the idealistic conception of matter. Not long after he reproduced it in a more full and careful form. While in College, he opened note-books, one of which was entitled “Mind,” and another was upon” Natural Philoso-

1 Dwight, ut supra, Vol. 1^ p. 30.

phy.” Both give evidence of extraordinary powers of reasoning and of observation, and this in the sections the composition of which falls within the limit of his undergraduate days.

These early manuscripts contained outlines and specific heads of a projected work on the universe, material and mental. Through life, he was accustomed to do as Pascal did in the case of the Pens6es — to set down thoughts and outlines to serve as materials for works to be composed later. In the interesting letter which he wrote to the Trustees of Princeton College, giving the reasons why he felt reluctant to take the office of President — which he concluded to accept — he explains that he had always been accustomed to study with pen in hand, recording his best thoughts on countless subjects. One of the uses to which they were put I have just stated. The spirit in which he studied is seen in the resolutions and diaries which have been preserved. Among the resolutions which, before he was twenty, he wrote for his own benefit is this: “Resolved, when I think of any theorem in divinity to be solved, immediately to do what I can toward solving it, if circumstances do not hinder.” We meet with this entry in his diary a little later; “I observe that old men seldom have any advantage of new discoveries, because they are beside the way of thinking to which they have been so long used. Resolved, if ever I live to [advanced] years, that I will be impartial to hear the reasons of all pretended discoveries, and receive them if rational, how long soever I have been used to another way of thinking.” l

Edwards, his life long, was an interested reader, not only of standard works of his time, as well as of earlier treatises, and was diligent in the examination of the writings of authors against whom he contended, but likewise of productions, not a few, of a non-theological class. In a manuscript quarto, entitled, in his own hand-writing, “Catalogue,” we find, with titles of books which he heard of, lists of books “to be read or to be inquired for.” 2 In the earliest of these records, among such books as Baxter’s Life, and Watts’s Poems, are The Guardian, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Luther’s Colloquies, Quarles’s Poems, Newton’s Principia and Opticks, Plutarch’s Lives, Cowper’s Anatomy, Walter Ealeigh’s History. Some — Locke, for instance — are probably set down to be re-read.

1 Dwight, ui supra, Vol. I., p. 94; comp. p. 71. 3 Its contents are set forth by Professor Dexter, The Manuscripts, of Jonathan Edwards pp. 15, 16.

Books to be obtained include “the best” books on Geography, Church History, Chronology, Historical Dictionary, of the nature of Bayle’s work, the Lives of the Philosophers. Later entries are Pope’s Homer, and his Miscellaneous Works, The Spectator, Addison’s Writings, Young’s Night Thoughts, Richardson’s Clarissa and Pamela, F6nelon’s Telemachus, Fielding’s Amelia, and, later, an Abridgment of Johnson’s Dictionary.

That Edwards stands, as he deserves to stand, in the front rank of philosophical thinkers and of theologians is too generally conceded at the present day to require any demonstration.

Unquestionably he is to be associated with Berkeley and Hume, as one of the three greatest metaphysical thinkers of the English race in the eighteenth century. The verdict written a good while ago by Dugald Stewart will be sanctioned by judges qualified to speak. After the remark that Edwards is the only philosopher of note whom America had produced, Stewart adds: “In logical acuteness and subtility, he does not yield to any disputant bred in the universities of Europe.” l His power of subtle argument is pronounced by Sir James Mackintosh, who was not given to over-

1 Progress of Philosophy (1820), p. 206, statement, “to have been unmatched, certainly unsurpassed, among men.” 1 Robert Hall, one of the ablest English preachers of the last century, a fellow-student of Mackintosh, in the enthusiasm of his admiration of the genius of Edwards, styled him “the greatest of the sons of men.” “I have long esteemed him,” wrote Chalmers, one of the princes among Scottish divines, “as the greatest of theologians.” 2 One of the most emphatic of the eulogists of Edwards is the leader of a school quite diverse from that of Chalmers, Frederic D. Maurice. Critics, of whom Sir Leslie Stephen and Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes are examples, with commendable candor, in conjunction with an unmingled antipathy to Edwards’s theological system and to a class of inferences deduced by him from it, recognize his intellectual superiority and his exalted moral worth. 3 Stephen speaks of him as “the ablest of American thinkers,” and, like many others, couples his name with that of Franklin as the two foremost writers of the earlier period. If, says Stephen, qualities are to be traced to inheritance, then the element of mother wit, characteris-

1 Progress of Ethical Pfiilosophy, p. 69.
’ 2 Works, Vol. I., p. 285.

8 Holmes, in Pages from an Old Volume of Life (1891), XI.; pp. 365, etal.; pp. 395, 400.

tic of “the Yankee,” lias its normal representative in Franklin, and that of “transcendental enthusiasm” in Edwards. The same author writes that on “the living truths” that formed a part of his theory is founded “a religious and moral system of morality which, however erroneous it may appear to some thinkers, is conspicuous for its vigor and loftiness. Edwards often shows himself a worthy successor of the great men who led the moral revolt of the Reformation ... he grasps the central truths on which all real noble morality must be based.” Stephen not only pays honor to “the logical keenness of the great metaphysician,” but, also, has words of praise for one who was an exception to the ordinary fact in that the solemn resolutions relative to character and conduct, made when he was “almost a boy,” had in his case a meaning and bore corresponding results. 1 Dr. Holmes remarks that “of all the scholars and philosophers that America had produced” before the beginning of the nineteenth century, two only- [Franklin and Edwards] had established a considerable and permanent reputation in the world of European thought. 2 In com-

1 Stephen, in Fraser’s Magazine, Nov., 1893, pp. 531, 536, et at. 9 Holmes, p. 362.

paring Edwards and Pascal, lie expresses the “hope that their spirits have met long ago in a better world, for each was a saintly being.” He adds: “The feeling which naturally arises in contemplating the character of Jonathan Edwards is that of deep reverence for a man who seems to have been anointed from his birth; who lived a life pure, laborious, self-denying, occupied with the highest themes, and busy in the highest kind of labor, — such a life as in another church might have given him a place in the c Acta Sanctorum.’” x

The influence of Edwards has not only been powerfully felt in Scotland by leaders in theological thought. It has been felt likewise by prominent theologians in England. One of them in the century lately closed was Andrew Fuller. Vastly more might be said of the power exerted by him on theology in America. This is far from being limited to New England, although naturally it has been preeminent in this part of the country. The historian, Bancroft, writes: “He that would know the workings of the New England mind in the middle of the last p.&, the 18th] century, and the throbbings of its heart, must give his days and nights to the study of Jonathan Edwards.” To

1 Holmes, p. 462.

this remark Professor Allen subjoins the just observation: “He that would understand the significance of later New England thought, must make Edwards the first object of his study.” 1 Dr. Holmes quotes with apparent approval from Bancroft — respecting the relations of Edwards to his “theological successors” — the names of Kirkland and Channing being included in the list, the remark that “his influence is discernible on every leading mind.” 2 At home and abroad the influence referred to in these citations was potent in spiritual life as well as in the particular province of theological opinion.

In the critical analysis of the mental outfit of Edwards, it would be a gross mistake to overlook the spiritual insight and capacity of feeling, which is one part of the truth in the remark of Mackintosh concerning him, that he was a rationalist and a mystic. If these appellations are to be taken in the literal, current meaning, they require modification. He was a rationalist, if the purport of’ the statement be that he had no low estimate of reason as an endowment of man. He has full confidence in the native powers of reason. He does not fly

i Allen, Jonathan Edwards (an interesting and valuable biography), p. vi. 9 Holmes, vi supra p. 362.

from reason to betake himself to Scripture. In controversy he does not appeal from reason to any other tribunal. His position is that if reason is read aright there is no discord in it with Scripture, but that the two authorities are in concord. The objection, coming from friend or foe, that a thesis or an argument is based on metaphysics or drawn from that source, he treats with disdain. He speaks of it as ridiculous. It were as proper, he says, to object to a course of argument on account of the language in which it is expressed. “The question is not, whether what is said be metaphysics, physics, logic, or mathematics, Latin, French, JEngHsTi, or M6ha%o but whether the reasoning bet good, and the arguments truly conclusive.” *

Yet, with all his confidence in the reasoning faculty, he is at a heaven- wide remove from any low esteem of distinctively spiritual intuitions and such experiences of the soul as, when fairly tested, are seen to be clear of morbid imagination or emotion. Few, if any, theologians have thought and written in a more independent spirit. He is subservient in his intellectual verdicts to no leader. He received more stimulus from Locke than from

1 Treatise ontheWill, p. iv., §xiii.; Dwight, ut supra, Vol. IL, p. 275.

any other philosopher. To him he owed fertile suggestions. But he differs from Locke on fundamental points in philosophy. He rejected, for example, nominalism. His view of the sources of knowledge is the antipode of that of Locke. To his theological system in its central tenets he was directly adverse. Admitting that he might be called a Calvinist as distinguished from an Arminian, he disclaimed a dependence on Calvin, and at the same time asserted that with some of his inculcations he did not agree. 1 He did not under: take to confute adversaries in opinion without a thorough personal examination of their writings. To be sure, he did not feel bound, nor was it practicable for him, situated as he was, to read all the adherents of doctrines at variance with his own. To the accusation that on the question of free-will and necessity he was in agreement with Hobbes, he replies that he cannot answer the imputation, since “it happens” he had not read Hobbes. 2 Elsewhere, to the imputation that a certain proposition or argument of his may be read in some heretical author, he says that the objection has no force: everything that a heretic believes is not of course erroneous.

1 Treatise on the Will, Preface, p. 13. 2 Ibid.^ p. iv., § vi.

As remarked above, on the nature of matter the idealism, which remained his creed through life, appears in his early essay on “Being,” and it is definitely stated and advocated in one of the papers in the Notes on Mind, — in a part written probably while he was still a tutor in College.

This belief was, to quote his own words, that “the substance of all bodies is the infinitely exact, and precise, and perfectly stable idea, in God’s mind, together with His stable will that the same shall be gradually communicated to us and to other minds, according to certain fixed and exact established methods and laws; or, in somewhat different language, the infinitely exact and precise Divine Idea, together with an answerable, perfectly exact, precise and stable will, with respect to correspondent communications to created minds and effects on their minds.” What is called the “substance” of material existences is asserted to be a fiction put in the place of God, of His ideas and consistent, constant will. Minds alone have substantial being; the Infinite Mind, and finite minds, which in Him “live and move and have their being.”

Edwards provided in his expositions a caveat against Pantheism, on which his theory of matter seems to verge.

In the proposition that material things have no being independent of the perception of them either by God or by other mental beings whom He empowers to perceive them, Edwards is at one with Berkeley in the mature expression which Berkeley gave to his theory-The coincidence of the idealism of Edwards with that of Berkeley is so striking that not unnaturally it has been conjectured by critics, including Professor Fraser, his able and learned biographer, that it was from Berkeley that the youthful American philosopher imbibed his views. This, I may be allowed to say, was once my own impression. Further investigation of the question, however, has proved it to be in the highest degree probable that this inference is a mistaken one. 1 It was owing to the powerful stimulus imparted to the young Yale student by the writings of Locke that he was prompted to move on in a path of his own, quite beyond any conclusion reached in Locke’s quickening essay. The “new philosophy” to which Edwards afterwards refers with approval, appears to have been the publications

1 In his recent edition of Berkeley’s writings, Dr. Eraser says: “I am now less disposed to this conjecture than formerly.” Vol. III., p. 393.

of Sir Isaac Newton, the influence of which, in connection with that of Locke, was a notable spur in his intellectual progress. Nevertheless, the coupling of the names of Edwards and Berkeley in Yale University is for more than one reason justified.

It is fit and proper that the two most conspicuous memorial windows in the front wall of Battell Chapel should commemorate these two illustrious philosophers. The noble Bishop of Cloyne, a man lifted above all ecclesiastical prejudice, having been disappointed as to his project for founding in Bermuda a college for the education of Indians, not only established at Yale a Scholarship which bears his name, but also sent over to the College a gift of one thousand well-chosen volumes, — the largest single collection of books that had ever been brought to America. On the window devoted to his honor, the words are inscribed, “Hie Monumenta Posuit Animi Sui Liber alis” — “Here he placed memorials of his liberal spirit.” He might smile, but his liberal mind would not be offended were he to read the words from the pen of Professor Thacher, on the Edwards window, the mate of his own: “Summi in Ecelesia OrcHnis Vates? President Dwight wanted to have the building that took the surname of “North Middle” called Berkeley Hall. It is well that Yale now has a dormitory building named after the prelate, to whom, as Pope tells us, was “ascribed every virtue under Heaven.” President Clap was evidently disposed to adopt Berkeley’s doctrine concerning matter. “This College,” says the President “will always retain a most grateful sense of his Generosity and Merits; and probably a favorable Opinion of his Idea of material Substance; as not consisting in an unknown and inconceivable substratum but in a stated Union and Combination of Sensible Ideas, excited from without, by some Intelligent Being.” The good President would have been gratified to see the modern trend of philosophical thought toward objective idealism, a tendency probably not without sympathy at Yale, even though the reasons for it and for the consequent homage to the genius of Berkeley, are not the presents he made to the College.

I may be permitted to say that, time and again, as I have returned to the writings of Edwards, I have been increasingly struck with the variety as well as the superiority of his powers. In reading him I have called to mind by a natural association exalted names in the history of Christian Doctrine — names of men who have illustrated this rare blending of light and heat, — such as Augustine and Aquinas, and, above all, Anselm. The treatise on the Will, a masterpiece of logic though it be, does not outrank in merit some other products of his pen of a different class. The essay on the Last End of God in Creation, and the essay on the Nature of True Virtue, stand fully as high in the scale.

Other productions of Edwards are also on the same high plane, but are likewise in a different vein from the more famous treatise on the “Will. Let any discerning student take up this treatise and observe the sharp, unrelenting logic with which the author hunts down his opponents, and then let him take up the same author’s sermon on the Nature and Reality of Spiritual Light, or passages in his book on the Affections, or some of the extracts from his Diary. It is like passing from the pages of Scotus or Aquinas to Thomas k Kempis, or St. Francis of Assisi.

Those to whom the name of Edwards calls up only the image of a dry reasoner or of an austere preacher, presenting detailed pictures of the sufferings of lost souls, should read the meditations on the “beauty and sweetness” — I use his own words — of divine things, when to his almost inspired vision the whole face of nature was transfigured. When still in his youth, there sprang up “a sense of divine things,” after which, he tells us, “the appearance of everything was altered; there seemed to be, as it were, a calm, sweet cast, or appearance of divine glory in almost everything; in the sun, moon and stars; in the clouds and blue sky; in the grass, flowers, trees; in the water and all nature, which used greatly to fix my mind. I often used to sit and view the moon for a long time; 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.” 1 He would have sympathized with Wordsworth’s Lines above Tintern Abbey, only infusing into them a more theistic

tinge:

I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Gf elevated thought; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man.

“I spent most of my time,” He continues, “thinking of divine things, year after year; often walking alone in the woods and solitary places, for meditation, soliloquy and prayer,” and converse with God. I was almost constantly in ejaculatory prayer, wherever I was.”

When a very young preacher in New York, as he relates, he “frequently used to retire into a solitary place on the banks of the Hudson River, at some distance from the city, for contemplation on divine things and secret converse with God, and had many sweet hours there. 1 Experiences of this character did not terminate. He speaks thus of an incident that occurred at Northampton: “Once as I rode out into the woods for my health, in 1737, having alighted from my horse in a retired place, as my manner commonly has been, to walk for divine contemplation and prayer, I had a view, that for me was extraordinary, of the glory of the Son of God, as Mediator between God and man, and his wonderful great, full, pure and sweet grace and love, and meek and gentle condescension. This grace that appeared so calm and sweet, appeared also great above the heavens. The person of Christ appeared ineffably excellent, with an excellency great enough to swallow up all thought and conception — which continued, as near as I can judge, about an hour; which kept me, the greater part of the time, in a flood of tears, and weeping aloud; I felt an ardency of soul to be, what I know not otherwise how to express, emptied and annihilated; to lie in the dust and be full of Christ alone. To love him with a holy and pure love; to trust in him; to live upon him; to serve and follow him; and to be perfectly sanctified and made pure with a divine and heavenly purity. I have, several other times, had views very much of the same nature, and which have had the same effects.” 1

His Puritan ancestry, the character of his training, and the circumstances of the time conspired to make it natural and almost inevitable that he should become the champion of Calvinism. The first settlers of New England — that is to say, the twenty-nine thousand Englishmen who planted these shores during the interval between the landing of the Pilgrims in 1620 and the assembling of the Long Parliament in 1640, when the immigration practically ceased — shared to the full in the interest which prevailed in the home country in

iPwight, Vol. I., p. 133 the discussions, not merely on Church polity, but also on Christian theology. They were firm adherents of the Genevan type of doctrine. This had held almost undisputed sway in England through the reign of Elizabeth. The Institutes of Calvin had been virtually the text-book of the English Protestant Clergy. Even Hooker, the noblest expounder and champion of the Anglican Ecclesiastical system, while he deprecates the unmeasured deference paid in England to Calvin’s authority, pronounces a glowing eulogy upon him and his writings — declaring him to be “incomparably the greatest man whom the French Church” — the Protestant Church of France — “had produced.” Calvin had achieved what no other before him had accomplished. He had organized the Protestant teaching into a compact and coherent system. It involved the complete abjuring of human merit in the process of salvation. It attributed to God and not to man’s agency not only the Atonement, the ground of forgiveness, but also and equally the process of the victory over sin in the soul, from first to last. It discarded the idea that anything could occur, either in the world without or in the mind within, independently of the will and purpose of the Ruler of the universe. In this proposition was embodied what was the creed alike of the Genevan school, and of Luther and the early Lutherans. In the view of the Calvinists, predestination was presupposed in the sense of man’s absolute dependence, in trust in the universal control of Divine Providence, and in unmingled gratitude for grace as the fountain of all that is good in the soul.

Whatever may be said of the Calvinistic creed, it breathed into its humblest adherents humility and courage, and inspired with valor and fortitude the heroic leaders, like Coligni, and William III., of whom Macaulay says: “The tenet of predestination was the keystone of his religion. He even declared that if he were to abandon that tenet he must abandon with it all belief in a superintending Providence, and must become a mere Epicurean.” 1 Calvinists have not piled tome upon tome of polemical writings, they have not pined in dungeons and faced death on the battle-field, for a merely speculative notion. It was the practical truth which they identified with it as the logical equivalent of that belief, which made them cling to it with unyielding tenacity. But no wonder that unanimity in this solution

‘History of England, Vol. II. (Am. Ed.), p. 149.

of the old problem of liberty and necessity, a theme of debate since the dawn of speculation, could not be kept up in the ranks of those who had accepted it.

When New England was colonized, not only disagreement with minor features of Calvinism but open dissent from the characteristic principle of unconditional election, was gaining ground in Calvinistic communities. As late as 1618, delegates had been sent by James I., himself a Calvinist, to Holland, to aid at the Synod of Dort in the erection of barriers to the spread of the Arminian revolt. But as far as the Church of England was concerned, such resistance was ineffectual. Independently of their Calvinism, the New England colonists of Massachusetts and Connecticut, in common with the whole body of Puritans in the motherland, were sworn foes of an illiterate ministry. This antipathy, more than ever reasonable in the circumstances in which they found themselves, far away from the ancient seats of learning, was mixed with a well-founded fear lest their posterity should sink into ignorance and be cursed with unenlightened teachers of the Gospel. This apprehension was keenly felt by the not less than eighty ministers, of whom not less than half had been trained in the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge, and who, it is not an exaggeration to say, beyond any other source of influence made New England what it became.

This was the prime cause of the founding of Harvard in 1636, and, when, at the close of the century, the distance of western New England from Cambridge was felt to be too great, it was the prime motive in the founding of Yale. Both at Harvard and Yale, theology naturally had the place of honor in the curriculum. The text-books in doctrine — for example, Wollebius and Ames — are chiefly known at present only to inquisitive theological students. These books were not wanting in acumen and logical strength, but they belong among the dry products of the waning era of Protestant Scholasticism, and were long ago consigned to the sepulchre of that solid but unpalatable species of literature.

In the first period after the foundation of Yale, Hebrew, like Greek and Latin, was a required study. In the College laws printed in 1748, it was ordained that systematic divinity should be taught to all the classes, and that the Westminster Confession should be one of the text-books that all the classes, “through the whole time of their college life “should recite. This branch, the proper name of which is dogmatic theology or philosophical theology, had a very marked precedence in the circle of studies for the ministry. The natural direction of thought, especially in the conflicts of the early days, will account for the pre-eminence accorded to this discipline. Under this head, in American Church history, the movement which was styled, from the place of its origin and principal seat, New England Theology, at the outset often called the a New Divinity,” is the most original development, and, on the whole, the most influential. With this movement, in its inception and its later stages, Yale College is identified. There all of its noted leaders, with one exception, were educated. It is the movement the rise of which stands in historic connection with the so-called Great Revival of 1740, and is linked to the name of the most illustrious of American philosophers and divines. At a very early date, if not from the beginning, the custom arose for resident graduates to prosecute studies preparatory for the ministry. From the year 1755, this class of pupils were able to receive theological instruction from the Professor of Divinity.

In the youth of Edwards the reaction against the characteristic points of Calvinism was well under way even in New England, especially in the eastern portion. Arminianism in the preceding century, planted and nourished by leaders of the talents and learning of Arminius, Episcopius, and Grotius, had planted itself in England and spread, under the Stuarts, among the clergy of the Established Church. When Edwards came forward as an author it had gained ground in England in the Puritan ranks, and affected certain honored leaders, among whom were Eidgley, Watts, and Doddridge. It is not too much to say that in the two last-named authors the Calvinistic definition of Election and kindred topics was emasculated. Where there was no thought of an ecclesiastical separation from the Puritan churches, yet a nominalistic, or what might be styled a Lockeian, Calvinism — although Locke’s religious creed was at swords’ points with that of orthodox Puritanism of every grade — took the place of the Augustinian philosophy. The English Arminian authors, and the class of dissenters just referred to, won partial and decided converts in New England, where the symbols of Puritan theology, the Westminster Confessions and Catechisms, had formerly held an undivided sway. The time had come when Calvinism on this side of the water, as well as in Great Britain, if it was to hold its own, stood in need of competent defenders.

The fundamental principle in the philosophical and religious system of Edwards is the doctrine of the Absolute. The existence and necessary existence of a Being, eternal, infinite and omnipresent, a being self-conscious, yet not dependent for self-consciousness on aught exterior to Himself, was propounded with emphasis in the youthful essay, the title of which is “Being.” This principle was ever after the groundwork of his teaching. In his mind God was the supreme and absorbing object of contemplation and study. His supremacy, the independence of His being and perfections, was the groundwork of his creed. The “sovereignty “of God he insisted on and emphasized. At times, in one sermon in particular, he uses language of which the natural interpretation, and one that has been not infrequent, is that election is an arbitrary selection on the part of God — purely a matter of will. This would make it a separate peculiar attribute, standing by itself — an attribute without which God would lose one of His distinguishing perfections. But this is not the idea of sovereignty which in various places he explicitly states and defends. His affirmation is that the wisdom and holiness of God lie back of His decrees.” It is fit,” he says, “that He who is absolutely perfect, and infinitely wise, and the Fountain of all wisdom, should determine everything by his own will, even things of the greatest importance. 1 He is a “being in everything determined by his own counsel, having no other rule but his own wisdom.” 2 The infelicity of using language, at least occasionally, implying that “sovereignty” is nothing more than will without reason back of it, is a fault of not a few Calvinistic teachers in the past, and even of Calvin himself. Yet Calvin distinctly avers — “dare affirmo” are his words — that the decrees of God are dictated by wisdom.

It was when Edwards was in the midst of his labors as a missionary to the Indians that he composed his treatise on the Will. 3 Of this work we will speak after a few words relative to this period in his life.

In 1735, Rev. John Sergeant, who graduated at

Dwight’s ed., Vol. III., p. 506.

2 Ibid., Vol. II., p. 229. See other declarations made in the strongest terms, on pp. 227, 230, 232.

8 His work as a missionary followed his dismissal at Northampton. On this event, which is closely connected with theological controversies, see Appendix, Note i.

Yale in 1730, and succeeded Edwards as a tutor, began his work among the wandering Mohegans and other Indians in Stockbridge and the neighborhood. He mastered their language and prosecuted his labors, under varied obstacles, with perseverance and success, until his death in 1749. Two years after, Edwards, on leaving Northampton on account of the troubles there, accepted the post thus left vacant and held it for six years. He attended faithfully to his task. A letter from him to Sir William Pepperel, Governor of the Province, respecting the plan of a school for Indian girls at Stockbridge, is interesting in its enlightened views on the subject of education. 1

He speaks not only of this particular matter, but in reference to English-speaking youth in general. He wants the method of instruction for the offspring of the Indians to be free, as he expresses it, from “the gross defects of the ordinary method of teaching among the English.” As one of these grand defects, he specifies the habit of accustoming children to “learning without understanding.” They are taught to read, he says, without knowing the meaning of what they read, and this practice goes on, even long after they are capable of underi Dwight, ut supra, p. 474.

standing. They are taught the Catechism in the same way. They form the habit of repeating words without ideas. The child, he declares with emphasis, in reading the Bible should be taught to understand things as well as words. Questions should be put to the young in the same familiar manner as “they are asked questions commonly about their ordinary affairs.” He asserts that “the common methods of instruction in New England” are grossly defective. He goes on to say that children should be taught in a plain way Scriptural history, and Bible stories of the most interesting and important events in the Jewish nation and in the world at large, since secular history is connected with the story of Israel. He would have children, moreover, taught “something in general of ecclesiastical history, of the chronology of events, and of historical geography.” If it be thought that all children do not need instruction so extended, he still maintains that “children of the best genius” might at least enjoy this advantage. “All would serve,” he insists, the more speedily and effectually, to change the taste of Indians, and “to bring them off from their barbarism and brutality to a relish for those things which belong to civilization and refinement.”

Music especially he recommends, as a school for sensibility and affection. He writes to his father (January 27, 1752): “The Indians seem much pleased with my family, especially my wife. They are generally more sober and serious than they used to be. Besides the Stockbridge Indians, there are above sixty of the Six Nations, who live here for the sake of instruction. Twenty are lately come to dwell here, who came from about two hundred miles beyond Albany.” x Greed of gain on the part of certain whites, anxious to enrich themselves, and elements of opposition from other sources, were harmful to the mission at Stockbridge. But the ideal of Edwards, possibly unpractical in some of its features, was a high one, and he bent all his efforts to the realization of it.

Edwards was thoroughly persuaded that the arguments of Whitby and other Arminian polemics were flimsy and capable of easy refutation. On the other hand, the conspicuous English writers on the Calvinistic side were perceived by him to be half-hearted and vacillating in their reasoning and were considered to have virtually given up the key of their position into the hands of the

1 Dwight, ut swpra, Vol. I., p. 486.

enemy. Edwards proposed to bring the confident adversaries “to the test of strictest reasoning.” On the other hand, he challenged for his own arguments the severest scrutiny, and only deprecated the charge that they were “metaphysical,” as being a vague and impertinent objection.

In a few months, at Stockbridge, he wrote his book on the Will. In this discussion of the problem of liberty and necessity, he undertook to establish the doctrine of determinism, — the established, uniform connection of the specification or particular direction of the will in the act of choosing, with its mental antecedents — more definitely, with the state of feeling respecting the relative desirableness of the one and the other object presented for choice.

The opposite view, he contends, is equivalent to a doctrine of chance and, if carried out, would land its advocates in atheism. The points of coincidence between his reasoning in behalf of that “moral necessity,” — which, with many ancient and modern leaders in philosophy and theology, he denied to involve “constraint,” in any proper sense of the term — with other writers, are nothing more than coincidence. They imply no borrowing on his part from other supporters of a like thesis. There is reason to believe that he had never read Collins. While he was unquestionably influenced by suggestions of Locke on the significance of liberty and choice, his independence in thought is equally manifest.

In common with so many advocates of the doctrine of necessity, he insisted on the law of cause and effect and its application, without shrinking or evasion, to the acts of the will The certainty of their being what they are results from their antecedents. With unsparing rigor he hunts down his opponents in their real or probable, or even possible, retreats. This causal relation as pertaining to the will is declared to be universal. It holds true of good and evil choices. Not men alone, but all moral beings without exception, are subject to it. In this declaration Edwards departs from Augustine and the more general Calvinistic teaching, as in the Westminster creeds, which attributes to Adam a certain liberty of will or power of contrary choice. According to Edwards, God himself is not only under a necessity to be morally perfect, but the same moral necessity which is predicable of saint and sinner, is likewise predicable of all the choices and volitions of the Supreme Being. Edwards maintains in his Letter to his Scottish correspondent, Erskine, 1 that “men are to-day in possession of all the liberty which it has entered into the heart of man to conceive.”

In order to comprehend the theory of Edwards it is needful to get at his view of the nature of causation. In his early writing, “The Mind,” he explains, “Cause to be that, after, or upon, the Existence of which, or the Existence in such a manner, the existence of another thing follows.” He defines, also, Power as “the Connection between these two existences, or between the Cause and Effect.” 2 The question cannot fail to occur to the student of Edwards, whether he connects with the idea of Power, as related to choices, more than Hume’s and Mill’s notion of uniformity of succession. In Part IL, Section III., of the Treatise on the Will, he enters into a full exposition of his use of the word “Cause.” A frequent use, he says, makes it include “a positive efficiency or influence to procktce a thing “; but, he adds, it may signify an indispensable antecedent. “In the same connection, he says: Moral “Causes” — i.e., antecedents of choice — “may be Causes in as proper a sense as any Causes whatsoever,” and “may be

1 Dwight’s Works, etc., Vol. II., p. 293. 2 Dwight, ibid., Vol. II., p. 681.

as truly the reason and ground of an Event’s coming to pass” (p. 50). In the course of his treatise he speaks of motives as exciting to choice or volition, as tendmg to produce choice. It is, therefore, probable that he connected efficiency with the operation of motives. 1 Moreover, he says that the distinction between “natural” and “moral” necessity is not that in the latter case “the nature of things is not concerned in it,” as well as in the former. “The difference does not lie so much in the nature of the connection as in the two terms connected, and in the effect, which in the latter case is ’ voluntary action.’” 2

Now, in Edwards’s idealistic opinion as to all external things, perception by created beings is owing to the stable will of God, which not only produces ideas but, as to things perceived, causes them to be objects of perception. The question naturally arises whether motives, the antecedents of voluntary action, and their relative “strength,” are not likewise understood by him, as the effect of the stable, constant exercise of the divine will? It must be borne in mind that his usual answer to the objection that if there were no power of alternative choice we should not be responsible for

* Dwighfs Ed., Vol. II., p. 25. »/&&., pp. 33, 34.

wrong moral choices, is that the wrong of a choice ies not in its cause, but in its nature.

The Idealism of Edwards, his view of the Imnanence of God, and his doctrine of moral necesity as connected with voluntary action, would eem to involve Pantheism. In fact, in earlier and ater writings, he uses language which identifies Tod with the world. In his early “Notes on the Mind “he writes:” God and real existence are the same; God is, and there is none else. ... It s impossible that God be otherwise than excellent,! or He is the infinite, universal and all-comprehendng excellence.” He speaks of God’s “infinite imountxxr quantity of existence” In his late, posihumous, treatise on the End of God in Creation, le says of God that His “being and beauty is, is it w T ere, the sum and comprehension of all exstence and excellence “much more than the Sun s” the comprehension of all the light and brightless of the sky.” In his treatise on Virtue, he vrites that God “is, in effect, being in general, and jomprehends universal existence.” “When still in lis youth, he speaks of striving for as clear a mowledge of God’s action “with respect to spirit md mind as he has of his operation concerning natter and bodies.” He writes: “Man’s reason and conscience seem to be a participation of the divine essence.” As we have seen that in his view of voluntary action the antecedents of what we call choice, and the consequent are subsumed under the principle of cause and effect.

Nevertheless Edwards was a Theist and not in the least shaken in his conviction. He believed without misgiving in the personality of God. Even in some of the foregoing citations it is the Excellence of God, meaning His Moral Excellence, to which he refers. Of the responsibility of men and of the unspeakable guilt of sin he had not the shadow of a doubt. He holds that creation is not necessary to the happiness of God, which is infinite. His delight in self-communication — what is termed His “communicative” disposition, a “diffusive” disposition — not His personal need of creation, if one may so say, which moves Him. The existence of creatures does not militate against the infinitude of that love of himself which is called for by the infinitude of His being. Their relation to Him is such that it is not abridged by their existence. It is undeniable that he has to deal with a problem which is not completely solved. 1

1 !For a criticism of Edwards on this topic, see the observations of Prof. Allenj Jonathan Udwards, Period III., Ch. Vwas practically not confused or disturbed by j seeming inconsistency between certain aspects his theology, in the strict sense of this term, and ;heistic creed and the anthropology associated ih it.

[n another polemical treatise — that on Original l, which did not see the light until after his ith, Edwards confronts the Arminian authors reference to the strongest point in their contenn, to wit: that the Calvinistic doctrine of the ponsibility of the posterity of Adam for his sin, dch is not their act, and that they are truly iged to be sinful from the start, is untenable.! plunges into the thick of the conflict on the L-time subject of the spread and dominion of pral evil in the race of mankind. He sought to iarm the opponents of orthodox doctrine, and lift the veil on the mystery of sin — the one ‘stery, as Coleridge said, which makes all other ngs clear. He discards everything in the curit beliefs which savors of legal fiction, and seeks found the responsibility of the individual on a il spiritual continuity of the race, a view which seeks to fortify by a disquisition on the meanl of personal identity and of sameness of substance, which he makes equivalent to constantly-repeated acts of creation. It is evident that Locke’s curious chapter on “Identity and Diversity” put Edwards on the track on which he advanced to his novel opinion. But here likewise the metaphysical doctrine was worked out in an original way, and the opinions in theology were at absolute variance with the tenets of Locke. Edwards undertakes in his own way to establish Augustine’s proposition of an act of the race. It is strictly true? he asserts, that all participated in the act by which “the species first rebelled against God.” x We are condemned not for another’s evil choice, but for our own — for real participation in that act by which “the species first rebelled against God.” The continuance of the individuals of the race and of sin in them is affirmed to be as truly a fact as the sameness of substance in the individual. The individuals sprung from the first man are the continuation of Adam. There is no question as to the sincerity of Edwards in this bold speculation.

Edwards denies the opinion that God is the author of sin by any positive act introducing it in the race. His agency in the case of the first

Edwards’s Works, etc, Dwight’a Ed., Vol. II., p. 543.

a, as in every other, did not go beyond the withuwal of the helps of grace, in consequence of hich his native propensities are left to operate ithout the effectual help of these aids. His gument on this subject he fortifies by copious ferences to sayings and events recorded in the sriptures. 1 He seeks to illustrate his meaning by Le simile of the Sun in relation to darkness and pld, which it does not cause because these follow f allibly on the withdrawal of its beams. When n occurs God “wills it to occur, considering all 3 consequences.” God brings to pass the fact of n in a way to make it obvious that He is not the Dsitive cause and real source of it. 2 He sancons the usual Calvinistic idea of “the secret and wealed will of God, and their diversity from one lother.” His reasoning as to the negation of :>sitive divine agency in the existence of moral ril is parallel with that of Aquinas and his school., comes to pass by the disposal of God, not by His :>sitive exertion. Most men will not hesitate to rev that he who should extinguish the heat and 2;ht of the sun may properly be styled the author id cause of the night and cold. The treatise of Edwards on” Keligious Affec-

Dwight’s Ed., II., 250. 2 Ibid., p. 263.

tions “presents the author’s ideal of religious experience. This book was occasioned by his perception of the abuses which attended the” Great Revival,” especially the morbid enthusiasm and various extravagances that marred its beneficent influence. One design was to sift the converts and to distinguish between sound religious feelings and such as are unhealthy and spurious. His analysis was sometimes pushed to an extreme that afterwards engendered in the churches a good deal of self -distrust, thus depriving not a few Christian believers of the Assurance which the Reformers counted a special blessing brought in by the Protestant teaching. Nevertheless, this treatise comprises many of the author’s best thoughts on the subject expressed in the title. It opens to view the mystical element in Edwards, the elements of insight and intuition in his religious thoughts. A masterly work of Edwards is that on the Nature of True Virtue, a posthumous publication. He sets forth the nature of moral goodness in the concrete. This he finds to be Benevolence, or love to intelligent being. It is love to the entire society of intelligent beings according to their rank, or, to use his phrase, the “amount of being “that belongs to them. It is supreme love to God, limited as regards inferior beings. Ethics and religion are thus inseparably associated. This all-embracing Benevolence — love to” being in general “— is the fountain and essence of all specific virtues deserving of the name. He who exercises this Love delights in it when perceived in others. This delight excites a special affection for them — the love of complacency. This u relish” is an experience possible only to the actually virtuous. 1 But there is a rectitude — a fitness of Benevolence to the soul and the nature of things. The perception of it is a ground of obligation, the basis of conscience, in all, even in such as discern not the spiritual beauty of Benevolence and are incapable of it. This essay of Edwards calls out from the younger Fichte the warmest eulogy. This he concludes with the words: “So has this solitary thinker of North America risen to the deepest and loftiest ground which can underlie the principle of morals” — with more in the same vein. 2

In another posthumous essay, Edwards considers “God’s Last End in Creation.” The dis-

The priority of benevolence to complacency in the ideal of Virtue was the first and the last teaching of Edwards, although in the interval for a while he held to the reverse opinion.

2 System d. Mhik., Vol. I., p. 69.

cussion includes an answer to the question, “why God called the universe into being.” He rejects every idea of need, insufficiency, from the possibility of being a motive in the mind of a Being who is declared to be infinitely happy. He is not dependent on the creature for the infinitesimal part of His bliss. Pantheism is thus ruled out from the list of possible solutions of the problem. God estimates the sum of His own excellence at its real worth. His supreme regard for His own glory, or His own glorious perfection, does not partake in the least of selfishness. The disposition to communicate his own fulness of good inheres in Him and incites Him to create the world. His delight in creatures is delight in what emanates from Himself. It is equivalent to a delight in Himself. His love to creatures is love to Him self, u because God’s being, as it were, comprehends all.” This would seem to subtract something from the strict reality of creation. This difficulty is not dealt with. Some aid is afforded in this direction by the thesis that for the elect part of mankind, it is that the creation is given its being. The absolute and perfectly sincere disowning of Pantheism lacks an entirely lucid and logically complete maintenance.

Edwards left among his manuscripts a collection of Papers, not recast or revised for publication, which bear the title, which was attached later, of “Miscellaneous Observations.” They are on topics of theology and, some of them in particular, are striking proofs of his genius as a theological thinker. One of them treats of the Atonement, or “The Satisfaction of Christ.” He starts. with the admission that if Repentance could be answerable to the guilt of sin, it might be received by God as an adequate compensation, but affirms it is not possible. The qualifications of Christ for the function of a Mediator, or for acceptable Intercession, are set forth. Christ enters fulhf into the mind of the offended party and the distress of the offender. His sympathy with each is complete. He identifies Himself in feeling with each: with God’s spiritual condemnation of the sinful man, while He is, at the same time, fully alive to man’s criminality and forlorn situation. His prayer in man’s behalf is in an absolute sense intelligent The substitution of Christ is in his own heart primarily. Edwards shows his independence and his depth in propounding the statements that this two-fold feeling of Christ is perfected through His own experience, including suffering and death, and that in and through death and the spiritual perceptions thus developed, there was in Him, although sinless, an increase of holiness, reaching absolute perfection. He gave proof of his thorough approval of the righteousness of the divine law and of the penalty for the remission of which he prayed.

In his letter to the Trustees of Princeton College, before he consented to accept the presidency, Edwards speaks of being at work on a theological production peculiar in its plan. 1 Although unfinished at his death, it was published. The subject is “Redemption,” and it professes to contain a new View of Church History. In its conception it is not unlike Augustine’s “City of God.” The design illustrates the breadth of his mind, for it is nothing less than an essay on the philosophy of History, an interpretation of the course of Divine Providence. Although the compass of the author’s learning fell short of the adequate realization of his idea, and so it would have been had he lived to do his best, it is yet a truly suggestive and an instructive handling of the capacious

1 This letter is interesting for its frank expressions respecting himself. See Appendix, Note II.

theme. The book is a worthy monument of
the variety of his powers.

Of the writings of Edwards which, in modern days, are offensive to readers, not a few are those which pertain to the character and destiny of the class included under the head of the unregenerate, and to the way in which they are said to be regarded by God. The first comment to be made on the specially obnoxious passages is that the Eschatology of Edwards is essentially identical with that of the symbols of the Protestant churches of the period, the Socinians excepted — e. g., with the Westminster Confession — and it is not essentially diverse from the creed of the followers of Augustine in the preceding centuries. When Edwards says of infants that, while seeming innocent to us, “they are in God’s sight young vipers,” he casts into a figure of speech a dogma not dissonant from the creeds referred to — however distasteful both dogma and figure may be. The abhorrence with which the wicked are said to be regarded by the Divine Lawgiver and Judge is expressed in terms as intense as the English vocabulary furnishes, and through similes of equal severity. In the Enfield Sermon, it is said that God “abhors them and is dreadfully provoked,” and that even now they are in His hand, held over the fire, as one holds a loathsome insect. The wicked are “Useful in their destruction only”: so runs the title of one of his sermons. Their penal sufferings hereafter were held by him, in agreement with organized churches generally, to be an allotment of retributive justice, which is considered an attribute of God, worthy of approval and fitted to excite feelings of satisfaction in the beholder. Hence the saints above, seeing the inflictions on the condemned, will “make heaven ring with the praises of God’s justice towards the wicked and his grace towards the saints,” who are conscious that they deserve the same “penalty,” from which they have been delivered.

It is a pity that so many of the class which Newman calls the “merely literary” appear to know nothing of Edwards save from his Enfield sermon on the torments to be expected by the wicked hereafter. 1 His sermons generally were in a different style. They were addressed to the under-

1 This Sermon was first prepared for his own people at Northampton in June, 1741, and preached at Enfield in the following month. It was then not entirely written out. In print it was about three times as long as it is in the MS. Other MSS. of Edwards show how much they were expanded in delivery or in printing. I owe these facts to the careful examination of Professor Dexter. See his publication. The Manuscripts of Jonathan Edwards (1901), pp. 6, 7.

standing of his hearers. It was his method occasionally in popular addresses and appeals, to confine the attention to one side of the shield. He could discourse on the mercy of God and the joys of heaven with equal force and effect. The Protestant pulpit was slow to discard that medieval habit of depicting the terrors of the law of which the Inferno of Dante furnishes a classic example. But the Inferno, we may be told, was a product of the imagination. So are the offensive epithets and figures in Edwards. But Dante, it is added, did not stand in the pulpit; he was a poet. True, and, himself a poet, he did not hesitate to leave Virgil, from whom he professes to have derived his “beautiful style,” 1 in hell — in the outer circle, to be sure. 2 His poem, moreover, has for its doctrinal basis the dogmatic teaching of the “Doctor Angelicus,” Thomas Aquinas.

It must not be assumed that Edwards stood alone in a mode of teaching which was judged to be wholesome and necessary to excite alarm and impel to repentance. This fact is exemplified in the case of Jeremy Taylor, to whom no one thinks of imputing cruelty of feeling. His discourses are not free from passages describing the

1 Inferno c. i., 85-88. 2 Doomed with unbaptized

infants to sorrow, if not to torment. Ibid.y c. iv., 25 seq.

torments of the lost which are almost on a level with those in Edwards that are so bitterly denounced. It is not the only, but it is the principal, source of regret that passages of this class in Edwards, especially in certain revival addresses from the pulpit, should not be connected with remarks in which the love of God, co-existing with His abhorrence of evil, is spoken of, and with illustrations of this love from the Scriptures. The words of Jesus on the spirit of fatherliness in God, as expressed in the saying, He “is kind to the evil and unthankful,” and in the parable of the Prodigal Son, had they been even alluded to, might have prevented, certainly in part, the seeming ascription of vindictiveness and of unqualified anger to the Creator and Judge. It would be a signal injustice, however, to impute to Edwards the absence of a profound faith in the love of God. The various heartfelt expressions on the duty of forbearance and of forgiveness, contained in the record of his early “resolutions” and written reflections, reveal the depth of this faith. The treatise on the Nature of Virtue, wherein a fundamental principle is that the character of God at the core consists in love to all intelligent beings, whether morally good or morally evil, shows that its author — perhaps with special depth of conviction in the closing period of life — recognized the all-comprehending Benevolence of God towards mankind, whatever their guilt. 1 Moreover, despite the defective Anthropology of the prince of American theologians, he was one of the sources and promoters of the humanitarian movement in which Channing was so prominent a leader, for he was inspired with this temper in no small degree by Hopkins, the foremost pupil and disciple of Edwards, who was the pastor of Channing, and who in his youth had made disinterested Benevolence a central article in his system, being himself a pioneer in the public condemnation of the slave-trade, of which Newport, the place of his residence, was one of the marts.

The reader of this volume may be referred to the notice, at the close of the Preface, of the Essay of Edwards on the Trinity. Its general character is such as it is natural to expect from an author like Edwards, with his absorbing devotion both to metaphysics and Biblical study. It is a discussion in the same category as a class of philosophical expositions and arguments on

* His book on Charity is full of teaching to this effect.

this theme, of which Augustine was a precursor, that are found in the scholastic literature and down to the date of recent German theologians. 1 The student of theology who would inform himself respecting this section of Doctrinal Historymay resort to the works in this branch, and to Corner’s work on Systematic Theology.

The Essay of Edwards is so careful in its statements and so lucid in style that a recapitulation of its contents would have to be in the main a repetition. The author himself presents as follows, a brief summary of the purport of his dissertation.

“This I suppose to be that Blessed Trinity that we Kead of in the Holy Scriptures. The Father is the Deity subsisting in the Prime, unoriginated and most absolute manner. The Son is the Deity subsisting in act, or the divine essence generated by God’s understanding, or having an Idea of himself and subsisting in that Idea. The Holy Ghost is the Deity subsisting in act, or the divine essence flowing out and Breathed forth in God’s Infinite love and delight in himself. I believe the whole divine essence does Truly and distinctly subsist both in the divine idea and divine Love, and that they are properly distinct persons.”

1 On Augustine’s views, see Appendix, Note III.

Thus, according to Edwards, neither of the divine persons is God without each of the other two. Each person exists in and with each of the others.

Without critically examining the theory thus sketched by Edwards, I think that it must be allowed to include what may not improperly be styled tri-personality, with the avoidance of tritheism.

Edwards agrees with Nicene orthodoxy in teaching the priority of the Father along with co-equality of the persons in divine attributes. In the Divine oeconomy, the work of redemption and administration, the priority of the Father continues.

On the Holy Spirit, and the relations of the Holy Spirit in the immanent trinity and in redemption, Edwards discourses at length in the posthumous treatise on Grace. 1

Edwards maintains that if man had as perfect an idea of his thoughts, mental acts — in short, all his mental states, — as God has, it would be true of man that one is two. This Idea of God is the

1 This was first printed in 1865. A clear exposition of the theory of Edwards may be read in Professor Park’s Second Article in the Bibliotheca Sacra, Vol. XXXVIII., p. 342, seq., and — especially on the topic of the Holy Spirit, in the First Article, p. 157, seq.

Xoyos of the Scriptures. The never ceasing of God, the overflowing of his essence, in Love is the arf&irq of the Scriptures. An objection is met by the contention that the Love of God is a person, since His Love is unceasingly active and comprehends in itself the understanding and will of the Father and the Son.

Edwards abjures the intent to meet all the objections that may be made to the doctrine which he has undertaken to set forth, or to solve “puzzling doubts and questions” that may be raised. “I do not pretend,” he says, “to explain the Trinity so as to render it no longer a mystery.... I think it to be the highest and deepest of all divine mysteries still, notwithstanding anything I have said or conceived.” At the same time he thinks that progress in knowledge on this subject is not to be excluded, and that if new difficulties and queries are started by any such advance, the same is the case when new light is gained by investigation of the objects in nature which science seeks to understand.

As the effect of the influence of Edwards and of his writings there arose a type and school of theology which at the outset received the name of

New Divinity, to distinguish it from the traditional type of Calvinism into which were introduced certain modifications. The new system was styled New England Theology, since New England was the place of its origin and the place where it was developed in diversified forms by its expounders and advocates. The creed of these was, to a considerable extent, moulded by Edwards, and his influence affected, beyond the special catalogue of such teachers, the preaching and tone of thought of a wider circle.

The choir-leaders of the New England school were disciples, but not servile disciples, of Edwards. They built on foundations which he had laid. His writings were too fruitful of suggestion to secure unity of opinion among his followers. One principal aim continued to be to put an end to the apparent conflict between human dependence and personal responsibility. So to formulate Calvinism as to do away with popular objections and to frame a system better adapted to the pulpit was a concurrent aim. The treatise on the Will, on one hand, furnished the premises for a class of inferences on the nature and origin of sin and of conversion. On the other hand, what Edwards had taught on the necessity of spiritual light imparted directly from God, led a school of divines to accordant corollaries relative to the new life and spiritual experience.

The question of the theodicy — How is evil, especially moral evil, consistent with infinite power and love in the Deity? — was discussed in writings of Bellamy and other adherents of the “New Divinity,” as it was then called. Samuel Hopkins, whom President Stiles couples, as a “great reasoner,” with President Edwards, was graduated at Yale in 1741. He went to Northampton to study for the ministry with Edwards. From his doctrine of the extension of the reign of law over choices and volitions, Hopkins did not shrink from the distinct enunciation that the acts of the will are to be referred to divine efficiency. This thesis was adopted by Nathaniel Emmons, a graduate of Yale in 1767. Emmons, when his premises were assumed, reached his conclusions by an inevitable march of logic. Moreover, Hopkins propounded the doctrine of disinterested love which he deduced from the treatise of Edwards on the Nature of Virtue, — the doctrine, namely, of the obligations to love self, not as one’s own self, but only as a fraction of strictly limited value in the sum total of rational beings, — what Edwards had termed “being in general.” The duty, as an element of thorough repentance, of unconditional resignation to the just penalty of sin, should it be the will of God to inflict it, was an inference. This was inculcated not merely as a theoretic dogma, but even as a practical demand to be addressed by the Christian pastor to the individual seeking a place in the kingdom of God. The same idea is in Mystics of earlier days, for example in the little book, the “Deutsche Theologie,” so highly prized by Luther.

Destitute altogether of the graces of style and of speech required to interest an audience, despite what was thought a harsh* tenet, Hopkins was revered by all for the depth of his piety, and the exalted purity and benevolence of his character. One of his hearers in his parish at Newport, as already stated, was a youth destined for a distinguished career, — William Ellery Channing. Channing had not a little intercourse with the venerable pastor, the effect of which was permanent. “I was attached to Dr. Hopkins,” writes Channing, “chiefly by his theory of disinterested love.” The intrepid minister lifted his voice against the African slave-trade. He published in 1776 an earnest appeal to his countrymen to emancipate their slaves. Thus, Jonathan Edwards was an indirect agent in inspiring with zeal in the cause of humanity the leading founder of New England Unitarianism.

Emmons, whose name has been mentioned, on most points was in accord with Hopkins. Yet he was not without peculiarities of opinion which spread mainly through the fifty-seven pupils whom he trained in his family for the ministry. He was an active pastor for fifty-four years, and lived to the age of ninety-five.

The younger Edwards, if he did not rise to the level of his father as an original thinker, was a keen logician. He was the one conspicuous representative of the New Divinity who was not graduated at Yale, his father having been recently President at Princeton. But he studied for the ministry with Bellamy, and with the school of theologians trained at Yale, followers of his father, he was, by birth and life-long association, closely affiliated. To him New England theology was indebted for its governmental view of the Atonement, which had been anticipated in the main by the great Arminian jurist, Hugo Grotius. Thereby the end and aim of the sacrifice on the cross were so extended as to exclude the objection that it was a provision meant for only an elect portion of the race. Thus, although divine sovereignty was proclaimed with an almost unexampled emphasis, no exception could be taken to the compass of divine love as related specifically to the mission and death of Christ.

The opening of the century which has lately reached its end found in the presidential seat at Yale, and in its Chapel pulpit as Professor of Divinity, the grandson of President Edwards, the first President Dwight. An instance of his power in the pulpit was the effect of his sermons two years after his accession to the presidency, on the Nature and Danger of Infidel Philosophy, which turned the tide against the imported French Deism, then prevalent in College. He was a man whose catholic temper and intellectual habit caused him to shun one-sided formulas in theology and to avoid extreme statements in homiletic discourse. The system of President Dwight, moreover, which was presented in a consecutive series of sermons in the College pulpit, steered clear of the meta. physical dryness prevalent in the preaching of the day. They were enlivened by a rhetorical quality which met an increasing popular demand. In his youth he had been a tutor in College. In this office, along with a contemporary tutor who also became a distinguished Congregationalist divine, Joseph Buckminster, he had done much to foster a literary taste in the institution. It was the first stage in the grafting of the Renaissance culture on the Puritan type of education. Johnson, Addison and other writers of that epoch were read with delight. Through Dwight’s sermons, the “new divinity,” shorn of later shibboleths and clad in a comely dress, was widely diffused both in this country and in Great Britain. It was acceptable to many, as a type of modern Calvinism which, while it made no war upon the Westminster symbols, deviated from them in certain definitions of doctrine.

Numerous editions of Dwight’s system were published in Scotland and in England. Down to a time not far back, not a few pilgrims from these countries, some of them preachers of high repute, who had learned theology from the writings of Dwight, were led to visit New Haven and the grave of their revered teacher. Edwards himself did not cease to be read in Great Britain. He stamped his impress, on the two principal theologians in the early part of the last century, Andrew Fuller and Thomas Chalmers, of whom mention has been made. Among the American theologians who sat at the feet of Dwight was James Murdock of the Class of 1797. An accurate and erudite scholar, Dr. Murdock filled for a number of years the chair of Ecclesiastical History at Andover. He deserves special honor for the work done by him in fostering this department of learning.

Another pupil of Dwight, and by this channel linked to Edwards, was Lyman Beecher. He lived to attain to eminence in the pulpit, besides being a professor of Theology. The fame of his children should not be suffered to eclipse the distinction of the father. On the list of the Yale Class of 1790 is the name of a theologian whose influence in promoting Biblical studies in America is unrivalled. I refer to Moses Stuart, first a tutor and a pastor in New Haven, and then for many years a professor at Andover. There his stimulating instruction in the class-room excited the enthusiasm of his pupils, while his numerous writings gave him distinction with scholars abroad as well as at home.

After the death of Dr. Dwight, one of his cherished designs was carried out. The Yale Divinity School was established by the Corporation.

The chair of “Didactic” or Dogmatic Theology in the new department was filled by the appointment of one who did more than any other to give it celebrity, Dr. Nathaniel W. Taylor, who remained in office until his death, in 1858. He had been a beloved pupil of Dr. Dwight. His influence, externally not so wide-spread as that of his instructor, was more radical in its effect on theological opinion. He was a most inspiring teacher. As a metaphysician, Dr. Taylor ranks higher than any other leader of the New England school after the elder Edwards. With an acuteness and vigor which commanded universal respect, he combined an eloquence rarely to be met with either in the lecture-room or the pulpit. At his side stood his colleagues, Dr. Eleazer T. Fitch, likewise a master in the field of metaphysical theology, and, in his prime, a profound as well as attractive preacher, the successor of President Dwight in the College pulpit, and Dr. Chauncey A. Goodrich, who for a good while was the chief conductor of the Christian Spectator, the review in which many of the expositions of the “New Haven Divinity,” as it was then called, were given to the public. Associated in the Faculty with the trio just named — in his distinctive traits a complement to them — was a scholar, and a ripe and good one, Josiah W. Gibbs, cautious and candid, and deeply learned in linguistic and biblical science.

It was the life-long purpose of Dr. Taylor to eliminate from the Edwardsean theology remaining elements which he believed to be incompatible with a fair view of human responsibility, the truth which from the first it undertook to vindicate. He did not mean to subtract from the prevailing tenets anything that is really involved in the sense of dependence at the basis of piety, and as such ever cherished by Calvinism with sedulous care. His aim was so to rectify the conception of the liberty of the will as to make room for a theodicy that should leave untouched the free and responsible nature of man and the moral attributes of God, not less than His omnipotence. Edwards had made prominent his idea of the certainty of the actual determination of the will as in each case the consequence of the antecedent motives. Dr. Taylor followed him far, but linked to this proposition the concomitant assertion of the power of contrary choice. He propounded the doctrine of “Certainty with power to the contrary,” as a summary statement — a ph/rase which, as he told the present writer, he adopted, as descriptive of his opinion, from a passage which he met with in Father Paul Sarpi’s History of the Council of Trent, where it is ascribed to one of the participators in the conciliar debate concerning the freedom of the will. Thus Dr. Taylor coincided with Edwards in attributing to motives a certain causal relation, but it was & peculiar species of causation, giving certainty but not necessity. This theory of the will was adopted in the so-called “New-School” New England theology. A younger contemporary of Dr. Taylor, a very acute instructor in theology, with a singular power of accurate and felicitous statement, was Professor Edwards A. Park, a devoted student of Edwards and an accomplished writer on the New England Theology. He, too, held to the “power of contrary choice,” and conceived this to be a legitimate interpretation of Edwards. This is not the time or the place to weigh the merits of Dr. Taylor’s system, only a portion of which has ever appeared in print. As to the manifest subtlety and intellectual grasp it exhibited, there could be but one opinion. 1

1 Among the numerous descendants of Edwards, one of the most distinguished and one of the most competent to discuss his character-From the time of the elder Edwards, the school which he originated turned its attention more and more to subjects embraced under the term anthropology. The origin of sin, its nature, why it should be permitted to exist under the divine administration, the connection of human agency with divine agency in conversion, and kindred topics, were uppermost. Even in the heat of the Unitarian controversy, this did not cease to be the case. Latin theology in its characteristic drift, in contrast with the favorite themes of ancient Greek speculation, was still in the foreground. But before many decades had passed in the century just brought to an end, there were marked signs of a change in the point of view.

Theology, in the etymological sense of the term, began to draw to itself a renewed and increasing attention. In this movement the master-spirit in England was Coleridge. Under the stimulus emanating from him, the apologetics of the previous century began to be superseded by a more spiritual method of defending the truths of natural and revealed religion. The time had come when Dr. Johnson’s satirical remark that the four evangelistics as a man and a writer, is the late President Theodore D. Woolsey. For a notice of an address by him, see Appendix, Note IV, ists were tried weekly in the pulpits of England for forgery, was ceasing to be applicable. The value of the proof which Christianity carries in itself had begun to be more justly discerned. Thought and investigation were directed more and more to the Incarnation of Christ, to His person, life and character. A few of the most gifted pupils of Dr. Taylor became deeply interested in writings of Coleridge, which were introduced into this country by President Marsh, of the University of Vermont. A new vista was opened before them. Ratiocination began to lose its charm, the authority of logic to give place to that of intuition. One of the pupils of Dr. Taylor responded with especial sympathy to the new influence.

The time has gone by when opinion was divided on the question whether Horace Bushnell was a visionary, or a man of genius with a spiritual outfit rarely to be found in students and teachers of religion. There was in him, moreover, as all who knew him well were aware, a vein of common sense, which was not seldom manifest in the homely vigor of his public and private utterances. Dr. Bushnell was graduated at Yale in 1827. It was not until 1831, while he was tutor in college, that he reached the turning point in his religious convictions and experience. At that time, it is right to remember, Dr. Taylor was still at the height of his power, not only in the theological class-room, but as a preacher both in college and in the churches elsewhere. He was a wise counsellor to undergraduate students in the matter of personal religion. It was an epoch when the entire institution was pervaded by a remarkable attentiveness to the Gospel.

The spirit of honesty and independence, native qualities of Bushnell, were not discouraged, but were fostered, by the example, as well as by familiar sayings, of Taylor. But from the outset of his ministry, Bushnell lifted the anchor and steered his own way. In the first of his printed works, the book on “Christian Nurture,” he struck out a new path. In contrast with a dependence on occasional revivals as a means of building up the churches and keeping alive the spirit of devotion, he exalted the family as the heavenappointed birthplace of piety in its youngest members, and family nurture as the great instrument of its growth. The same ardor which was signally manifest in his subsequent writings, perhaps tempted him now and then to overstatement, and more often to unguarded declarations which provoted attack and called for explanation. But he was able to appeal from contemporary criticism to the authority of the Puritanism of an older date, and by the freshness and reasonableness of his teaching to make an immediate and lasting impression on the churches. The work on “Nature and the Supernatural,” perhaps, on the whole, the best of his writings, was the product of a seed falling into his fertile mind from a definition in Coleridge’s “Aids to Reflection.” The final chapter on the character of Jesus, whether or not it justified to the full extent the inference which he drew from the premises, is one of the most impressive portraitures of the character of Christ which the plentiful literature on this subject in the latter days has furnished.

Later, in a series of writings, Dr. Bushnell set forth with characteristic frankness and warmth his thoughts respecting the central topics of the Trinity and the Atonement. At the outset he broached a view respecting language which involved as an inference the necessary vagueness and inadequacy of all abstract terms; a theory equivalent in substance to the idea of Occam and the mediaeval Nominalists who followed him. The conclusion drawn was the denial of the possibility of scientific theology, and of mental philosophy as well. Theology and philosophy, being in the same boat, must sink or swim together. Unwarranted as was the exclusion of studies not having to do immediately with things material from the category of sciences, Bushnell had at heart a distinction which is valid and of practical worth. He insisted justly on the supreme importance which the conception of personality has in the contents of Christianity. In this feature of his teaching he might have cited Edwards, who sets what he terms “notional knowledge” in contrast with the living perceptions that flash on the soul by an illumination within. The awakening, suggestive power of the writings of Bushnell has been recognized everywhere by candid readers. They propounded opinions considerably at variance with cherished beliefs. Yet no one could doubt the author’s religous earnestness.

Bushnell took up his pen, when from time to time he was inwardly moved to communicate new light that his restless intellectual activity kindled within him. He was not habituated to scholarly research. His continued reading had the effect gradually to modify earlier conclusions. Then he felt the impulse to recast them. No passion for consistency was allowed to qualify the frankness of his expressions. On the subject of the Trinity, in his earlier writings there was a near approach to the Sabellian conception, suggested to him by a translation by Professor Stuart from Schleiermacher. In his mature, final exposition of the Trinity, he approximated, as he avowed, to the ancient, orthodox conception of Athanasius and the Nicene Creed. His thought thus, unconsciously, took the direction of the opinion, not then published, of Edwards. In his article in “The New Englander” on the Trinity as a Protestant truth, he reverted with esteem to Athanasius, and, in speaking of God as eternally “threeing Himself,” he placed himself on ground akin to that of Edwards, whose unpublished essay he was anxious to have given to the public. On the Atonement, as a supplement to his inculcation of what is sometimes called the “Moral View,” he declared his conviction that a certain propitiatory element, which is imbedded in different forms in the creeds and liturgies of the Church from the outset, is not without a real basis, and he sought an explication of it in a peculiar form of a piece with the patripassionist drift of his theology — a form, which he deemed more satisfactory than the t KEMAKKS ON EDWARDS AND HIS THEOLOGY

‘aditional modes of interpreting it. We may despiate these changes as retractations — which is le title Augustine gave to the work in which, in is “Reconsiderations” — for this, and not “Re- ■actations,” is the meaning of the title — we find not inconsiderable amount of retrogression from is earlier teaching.

The reader will gather from the foregoing com-Lents that Bushnell, notwithstanding a sharp reugnance to certain features of the contemporary Tew England divinity, having a genetic connecon with Edwards, Bushnell had himself more oints of affiliation with its founder than he was imself fully aware.

The originality and felicity of presentation r hich mark the sermons of Bushnell have won pr them numerous appreciative readers in Engmd as well as in America. If admiration is not lisplaced when bestowed on one who unites the btributes of the poet and the philosopher, it will ot fail to be evoked by the character and genius E Horace Bushnell.