Congregational Churches. 
 
 Massachusetts. 
 
 Berkshire Conferences, 
 
 1903 
 
 Jonathan Edwards 
 
 
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 Jonathan Edwards. 
 
 UNION MEETING OF THE BERKSHIRE NORTH AND 
 SOUTH CONFERENCES. 
 
 Stockbridge, Massachusetts, 
 
 OCTOBER FIFTH, 1903. 
 
 ORATION 
 
 BY 
 
 JOHN De WITT, 
 
 Professor of Church History, Princeton Theological Seminary . 
 
 ^AND OTHER ADDRESSES. 
 
 Published by the Berkshire Conferences. 
 
 1903. 
 
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Edwaiids House at STocKBRinoE. 
 Where he wrote The Freedom of the Will. 
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 iKTRODrCTIOX 
 
 Rev. Hejsry Hopkins, D.D., LL. D., 
 
 President of Williams College. 
 Address of WELCOiiE — ■ 
 
 Rev. Elbert S. Porter. Pastor of the Stockbridge Church. 
 The Edwards Family- 
 Rev. George Wakeman Andrews, Ph. D., Dalton. 
 The Modern Note in Edwards — 
 
 Rev. I. C. Smart, Pittsfield. 
 The Other Side of Edwards — ^ 
 
 Rev. X. S. Rowland, D.D., Lee. 
 Oration — Jonathan Edwards — A Study — 
 
 Rev. John DeWitt, D.D., LL.D., 
 
 Prof, of Church History at Princeton Theological Seminary. 
 Edwards at Stockbridge — 
 
 Rev. William Edwards Park, D.D., Gloversville, N. Y. 
 
KESENT BUILDING IN THE BACKGROUND WAS ERECTED IN 1824. 
 
INTRODUCTION. 
 By Rev. Henry Hopkins, D.D., LL. D. 
 
 It is not in the Valley of Chamouni but from Geneva, 
 sixty miles away, that one gains the truest impression of the 
 comparative size and majesty of IMont Blanc. Against the 
 distant horizon the soaring, snowy outlines of the monarch 
 of mountains are plainly seen far above the surrounding peaks. 
 
 Distance is likewise necessary for a just, comparative 
 estimate of men. That a man should be visible above the hori- 
 zon at all two hundred years after his birth' is in itself a sign 
 of greatness. Certainly the fact that groups of thoughtful 
 persons should gather together in various places after that 
 lapse of time for the study, appreciation, and commemoration 
 of a man proves his pre-eminence. No one today of any school 
 or creed can doubt the intellectual and moral greatness or 
 spiritual elevation of Jonathan Edwards, nor can the student 
 of religious and educational development in our country doubt 
 the exceeding beneficence and fruitfulness of the movements 
 in the world of thought and life which had their origin in him. 
 It is worthy of note also, as indicated in one of the papers of 
 
this volume, that through the "unparalleled group of his dis- 
 tinguished descendants", as well as by his own dynamic force 
 of thought and character, he has greatly blessed the world. 
 
 That some of his theological conclusions are utterly ab- 
 horrent to the intelligent modern mind is freely acknowledged. 
 The most conservative Christian opinion of today has revolt- 
 ed from them. There is an Edwardian paradox. He elabor- 
 ately, persistently, and eloquently insists upon love as the last 
 end in creation ; and yet he taught that from all eternity God 
 had foreordained the vast majority of the human race to 
 eternal suffering for his own glory. He had the yearning love 
 of a devoted pastor for his flock. He sought to reveal the 
 love of God to them ; he had a tender care for the children and 
 for the humble and the ignorant, as for the Indians in his 
 Stockbridge parish, and yet he preached and believed the En- 
 tield Sermon. 
 
 May we not say that being the logician that he was, and 
 the courageous and honest man that he was, with the premises 
 from which he started, it could not be otherwise, taking only 
 logic for his guide? Did he then take the wrong guide? Of 
 this much we are certain : he walked with firm and fearless 
 steps along whatever way his inexorable logic led him. But 
 did any man ever discover the secret of the heart of God by 
 reasoning? With faultless and magnificent precision he laid 
 out the path for his feet, and then unfalteringly followed it 
 to the end. He had the courage of his metaphysics, and so it 
 came to pass that, like Dante, whose guide was a sublime 
 poetic imagination, he trod the burning marl amid lurid fires, 
 and walked in Paradise. He made a survey of the territory 
 and put upon his chart, to be handed down to posterity, an 
 infinite heaven and an infinite hell. 
 
 But may we not, without disrespect to his genius, ask: 
 Can any man, with any human instrument, triangulate the In- 
 finite, or can any man, by his logic and his dialectic, find out 
 God to perfection? Certainly the AAjonderful and almost ec- 
 static vision of God, of which he has left the record, did not 
 come to him through his logical faculty. It was direct vision. 
 It was the fulfillment to him of the promise, "Blessed are the 
 pure in heart for they shall see God." It was perception as 
 direct and immediate as that through which he so keenly re- 
 joiced in the beauties of earth and skv. 
 
Is it not possible, then, that the service of Jonathan Ed- 
 wards to this generation may be, in part at least, as an illus- 
 tration of the futility of any attempt, even by the strongest 
 and most acute intellect, to discover and define a fact of life, 
 a vital relation, by the process of formal reasoning? Religious 
 truth is inseparable from life, and life perpetually eludes 
 analysis. This wonderful marksman aimed at the highest, but 
 it is not to be wondered at that he could not shoot his arrow 
 into the sun. It is no discredit to this peerless reasoner that 
 he could not accomplish the impossible. It still remains true, 
 reversing the saying of Lord Bacon, that the Kingdom of 
 Heaven can be entered in no otherwise than the Kingdom of 
 Nature, in the spirit of a little child. 
 
 The exercises at the Edwards commemorative services at 
 Stockbridge on the fifth of October, held for four straight 
 hours the undivided interest of an audience that filled the his- 
 toric church of the plain. The addresses then delivered, which 
 are reproduced in this volume, are of permanent value as dis- 
 criminating interpretations of a phenomenal man, and as a 
 substantial and most interesting contribution to the religious 
 history of New England. 
 
ADDRESS OF WELCOME. 
 
 By. Rev. Elcert S. Porter. 
 
 Oliver Wendell Holmes once remarked that St. Annivers- 
 ary is the patron saint of New England. It was, I think, 
 Professor George P. Fisher who said that Jonathan Edwards 
 ,is the patron saint of i\ew England. Your presence here to- 
 day tends to prove the truth of both of these assertions. 
 
 You certainly do us great honor in gathering in our quiet 
 village, when you might have chosen for this union meeting 
 of all the Congregational clans in Berkshire some larger ami 
 more bustling center. It is not, however, to honor us or our 
 town that you come, but to remember gratefully that man of 
 God who here wrought at the forge of truth, striving like 
 Siegfried in the forest to fashion again with mighty blows, 
 his broken sword, and to make it a better weapon than ever 
 for the contest with error and evil. The size of a place is 
 better measured by the magnitude of the men who make it, 
 
than the number of its inhabitants,, the amount of its product, 
 or the riches that it represents. Chios, Stratford, Epworth, East 
 Windsor and Bethlehem were little places, but I have never 
 heard that the men born there were small. No one grudges 
 to Stockbridge the title which the poet gave to the English 
 auburn, "Loveliest Village of the Plain;" nor I suppose, will 
 any dispute the fact that she has reared up illustrious men and 
 women, in numbers an-d influence, far out of proportion to her 
 modest limits. 
 
 Certainly among all the honored names, associated with 
 this ancient town, patriots, jurists, judges, divines, philan- 
 thropists, physicians and authors, none is more famous or 
 revered than that of Jonathan Edwards. He was a student of 
 deep things. In philosophy an idealist, in theology a deter- 
 minist, in ethics a hedonist, in personal religion a_ mystic, he 
 found in communion with God, in the reverent study of His 
 Word, in the contemplation of his works and in an earnest 
 endeavor to make the lives of men better and more fit for 
 heaven, the solace, joy and constant employment of his eager 
 life. 
 
 btockbridge presented to him superior charms to the calls 
 that came to him to labor in other fields. Here among the 
 ever lasting hills, he found refuge from the strife of tongues, 
 and in the language of Eloly Writ, inscribed upon the tablet 
 erected in his memory at Northampton, "He Walked With 
 God." We must given him credit for good judgment in choos- 
 ing for his place of rest and residence, the lovely hills and 
 valleys of Berkshire in preference to the fertile fields of Vir- 
 ginia, or the noble mountains of Scotland. When, too, he 
 was summoned to what appeared to his advisers, a wider 
 sphere of influence, as President of Princeton college, it is 
 small wonder that the usuallv calm, self-contained man of gi- 
 gantic intellect, should have vielded to the unbidden influence 
 of the feelings which he could not control as he covered his 
 face with his hands and wept, to think that he must leave be- 
 hind this dear retreat, these glowing forests, the quiet studv, 
 and the friends who had bidden him welcome and who were 
 reluctant to say to him "Farewell." 
 
 Jonathan Edwards' judgment has been re-affirmed to a 
 surprising extent by a succeeding age. Evervone is now 
 
10 
 
 agreed that he was right in his demand at Northampton, that 
 an earnest purpose and a moral Hfe should characterize those 
 who would become members of the Christian church. 
 
 Dr. George Gordon, speaking of his theology, apart from 
 his anthropology, has declared that it is living, powerful and 
 bound to become a new and profound influence. 
 
 His judg^ient that the heights, the lakes and streams of 
 Berkshire, afford a good place in which to rest, to meditate 
 and to refresh the weary spirit, is confirnled by the constantly 
 increasing numlsers of those who seek these picturesque scenes 
 and bracing atmosphere, rear mansions upon the hills, or 
 throng- hospitable caravanseries, in order to gain here health 
 and inspiration for labors and influence to be exerted in wider 
 fields. 
 
 We honor, today a man who was essentially a student. 
 Every moment possible was given to research, meditation and 
 composition. Much paper was requisite for him to inscribe 
 his thoughts. But that commodity was scarce and high in 
 those early colonial days. Therefore, he utilized every scrap 
 or stray piece that came within his reach, even pasting to- 
 gether the edges of newspapers, and from them forming blank- 
 books in which to write. 
 
 As if in response to this need of the man of mind, there 
 was begun about a hundred years ago at a point about two 
 miles east of this spot, the manufacture of waiting paper. 
 Clear mountain springs furnished an abundant supply of clear 
 water with which to wash the rags laboriously pounded by 
 hand into pulp. By using a score of mortars, a hundred 
 pounds of pulp was thus produced in a day. 
 
 Careful estimates reveal the fact that at present in a single 
 day twenty-five tons of writing paper and ten tons of other 
 papers are produced in our county— a total of 7,500 tons of 
 writing and 3,000 tons of other goods, or a total of 10,500 tons 
 in a year. If Jonathan Edwards had been able to write ten 
 sheets an hour for ten hours a day, calculating 125 sheets to 
 the pound and three hundred working- days per annum he 
 would have had in the writing- paper now annually produced 
 in Berkshire enough material to last him a hundred thousand 
 vears. 
 
11 
 
 No doubt the billions of sheets which issue from our val- 
 leys are put to excellent uses, in furnishint^ materia! foi our 
 national currency and the medium for correspondence and 
 literary composition, but it may be doubted if the tons of finest 
 paper that go forth to counting" rooms, boudoirs, studies and 
 universities are put to any higher uses than were the stray 
 scraps upon which Edwards wrote his thoughts of God. 
 
 In the name of this ancient church of which he was the 
 second pastor, I have the privilege of welcoming you most 
 heartily to a share in the two hundredth anniversary of the 
 birth of a man to whom honor is due, as a laborious student, 
 an ingenious meta-physician, a resolute moralist, a mighty 
 theologian, a devoted missionary, a pioneer in modes of 
 thought that have led to much advance in knowledge, a faith- 
 ful and loving husband and the noble ancestor of a splendid 
 race of descendants. May we be refreshed by our fellowship 
 and strengthened in our faith through our meeting here today. 
 
 Stockbridge Congregational Church. 
 
THE EDWARDS FAMILY. 
 By Rf.v. G. W. Andrews. 
 
 Professor Allen of the Episcopal Theological School of 
 Cambridge in his biography of Jonathan Edwards says of him : 
 "Among the great names in America of the last century, the 
 only other name which competes in celebrity with his own is 
 that of Benjamin Franklin, who labored for this world as as- 
 siduously as Edwards for another world". Robert Hah, who 
 only knew him by his books, said : 'T regard him 'as the great- 
 est of the sons of men". These words may seem extravagant 
 to those who only know of the man through some of his ex- 
 treme theological views. Yet these are the statements of men 
 who were estimating his services to the world in the realm 
 of theology. Great as these services were, they are small 
 when compared with the larger service he has rendered 
 through his posterity. 
 
 A study of the Edwards family reveals the great value 
 of a Christian home to a nation and to the world. All families 
 into which children have come, transmit their characteristics 
 to succeeding generations. But righteousness has such a pe- 
 culiarly energizing property that it is perpetuated longer than 
 unrighteousness. The sins of the father are visited upon the 
 
13 
 
 children to the third and fourth generation, but the mercy of 
 God passes down to the thousandth generation. The Christian 
 family therefore, being based upon righteousness and recog- 
 nizing its need and seeking to be controlled by it, transmits 
 a larger power than do other families. 
 
 The Protestant Reformation, among other valuable ser- 
 vices to mankind, bestowed an important service in rescuing 
 the clergy from a celibate life and establishing them in the 
 home, where by reason of better opportunities to know and 
 practice the virtues of the Christian life, they could not only 
 illustrate the teaching which they preached, but they could 
 also transmit tendencies to righteous living and vigorous 
 thinking. This statement finds a ready proof in the after life 
 of the large majority of children who have been trained in the 
 parsonages of this and other Christian countries. No one 
 who is at all conversant with the facts now cavils at ministers' 
 sons and deacons' daughters. The proportion that go astray 
 is so very small that they are classed as the rare exceptions. 
 
 The statement also finds a most convincing proof in the 
 history of the Edwards family. Dr. A. ,E. Winship of the 
 Journal of Education has done a rare service in his mono- 
 graph entitled "J^^^es — Edwards", in which he makes a con- 
 trast between the Jukes tribe and the Edwards family. Many 
 of the facts here presented are gleaned from this book. No 
 one can read it without saying that the parsonage of East 
 Windsor, Conn., has been a blessing to this nation. 
 
 The first persons to dwell in that parsonage were the Rev. 
 Timothy Edwards, a grandson of William Edwards, one of 
 the first settlers of Hartford, a thrifty man of Welsh ancestry, 
 and his wife Esther Stoddard. The strength of the Cambrian 
 Hills was imparted to the character of Timothy Edwards. 
 Such were his extraordinary attainments in learning that Har- 
 vard. College bestowed upon him, on the same day, the rare 
 honor of the degrees of bachelor of arts and master of arts. 
 Nor was his wife inferior to her husband in ancestry, intel- 
 lectual vigor or Christian life. She was the daughter of the 
 Rev.. Solomon Stoddard, a Harvard graduate, a learned man, 
 well versed in the religious controversies of his day, and an 
 independent thinker. She is described as "tall, dignified and 
 commanding in appearance, afifable and gentle in her manner, 
 
14 
 
 and regarded as surpassing her husband in native vigor of un- 
 derstanding." 
 
 To this man and his wife, so well born, so well educated, 
 and so full of Christian virtues, there were given eleven chil- 
 dren, ten daughters and one son. It would be of great interest 
 to follow the career of all the children and estimate their influ- 
 ence, but we must confine ourselves to one. Jonathan Ed- 
 wards was the fifth in this family. His training at home un- 
 der the direction of his parents and sisters emphasizes the 
 value of the feminine influence in education, and inferentially 
 throws some light upon the problem of coeducation, which is 
 sc much derided at present by some of our modern exponents 
 of pedagogics. If ever a lad had female rivals in the class 
 room that lad was Jonathan, and so far as we can determine 
 he was none the worse for it, and there is no evidence that his 
 sisters v:eire hurt. And that was nearly two hundred years 
 ago. However, the world moves, and perhaps today the mas- 
 culine mind is more susceptible to the pernicious influence of 
 femininity. 
 
 This lad entered Yale College at twelve, was graduated 
 in due season, and then took a post-graduate course. At 
 twenty-three, he became associate-pastor at Northampton with 
 his grandfather, the Rev. Solomon Stoddard. A year later he 
 was married to Sarah Pierpont. She was descended from the 
 choicest of the Pierpont stock in England and America. She 
 was the daughter of one of the principal founders and pro- 
 fessors of Yale. Her great-great-grandfather was the Rev. 
 Thomas Hooker, first pastor of the church at Hartford, who 
 finds a place in a series of volumes on "The Makers of Amer- 
 ica", with the names of John Winthrop, Alexander Hamilton, 
 Thomas Jefferson and Robert Morris. She was to the "manor 
 born" in culture and Christian grace. Her husband's descrip- 
 tion of her when she was but thirteen has been frequently 
 quoted and is worth requoting. "She is of wonderful sweet- 
 ness, calmness, and universal benevolence of mind. She will 
 sometimes go about from place to place singing sweetlv ; and 
 seems to be always full of joy and pleasure ; and no one knows 
 for what." George Whitefield wrote in his diary "that he some- 
 times wondered if it was not the Lord's will that he should 
 marry, that he might thereby be more useful; and that if it 
 
,15 
 
 was the Lord's will that he should marry, he wished to be rec- 
 onciled thereto ; but he did hope the Lord would send him as a 
 wife such a woman as Mrs. Edwards, whom he considered the 
 most beautiful and noble wife for a Christian minister that he 
 had ever known." 
 
 As in his father's family, so there came into the home of 
 Jonathan Edwards and his wife, eleven children. It is of the 
 influence of these children and their descendants that we are 
 to treat. As the choice of a life partner is a good test of char- 
 acter, the husbands of the daughters may properly be reckoned 
 as belonging to the family. Had one a complete record of all 
 the lineal descendants, he could safely ignore these husbands 
 in the general treatment of the family. The showing would 
 certainly be marvellous enough. There is no need to ask those 
 who do not have the Edwards blood to add lustre to the 
 family. 
 
 Among the chief elements of national development, we as- 
 sign education a high place. Whatever and whoever aids in 
 the mental training of the young are important factors in na- 
 tional life. Here we may place the college, the school, the col- 
 lege president and professor and the school teacher. Now it 
 is worthy of note that the father of Jonathan Edwards was 
 one of the Connecticut pastors who met at Branford and 
 brought some of the most valuable books from their libraries 
 and placed them on the table saying: "I give these books for 
 the founding of a college in this colony." This was the begin- 
 ning of Yale college, an institution that has sent over 20,000 
 graduates into the world. The son of a founder of this mag- 
 nificent institution of learning, and the husband of the daugh- 
 ter of another founder, Jonathan Edwards through his de- 
 scendants, has contributed three presidents to Yale, who ad- 
 ministered the office in the three periods when Yale made her 
 greatest advances — Timothy D wight 1794- 18 17, Theodore 
 Dwight Woolsey 1 846-1 871 and the later Timothy Dwight 
 1 886- 1897. The first of these is called one of "the most emi- 
 nent Americans." Of the second, President Hayes once said 
 "that he was greatly perplexed at one time as to the line of 
 public policy to pursue until it occurred to him that President 
 Woolsey was the one American on whose judgment he could 
 rely, and after he had consulted him his course was clear and 
 his action wise." 
 
16 
 
 In the days before a college president became a business 
 manager of a great corporation, and his teaching talent had 
 full exercise, the influence over student life was beyond reck- 
 oning. The personal influence of these men, like that of Hop- 
 kins of Williams, McCosh of Princeton, Finney of Oberlin, 
 and Seelye of Amherst was one of the great assets of the col- 
 lege and of unspeakable value to the student body. 
 
 Nor did this remarkable family confine itself to Yale. It 
 gave presidents to Princeton, Union, Hamilton, Amherst, The 
 University of Tennessee, Johns Hopkins, the Columbia Law 
 School, and Andover Theological Seminary. 
 
 The college professor shares with the head of the institu- 
 tion the honors of its success and contributes to it. This fam- 
 ily had sixty-five worthy occupants of professorial chairs. The 
 academies and seminaries have contributed to the college 
 ranks, and there have been several of this family who have 
 been at the head of such institutions. Add to these the number 
 who have been teachers in different kinds of schools. Then 
 again add the money which they have given for the support 
 of schools and colleges — one member alone giving a quarter 
 million dollars to the endowment of Yale — and then one may 
 get a fair appreciation of the services of this family to the edu- 
 cation of the nation. 
 
 The press occupies an important place among the insti- 
 tutions which have contributed to our national greatness. One 
 may very well be given to flights of rhetoric when speaking of 
 the influence of the press, and he will probably not soar much 
 beyond the simple truth. The printed page whether in the 
 form of newspaper, magazine or book of fact or fiction, has 
 been everywhere present and like the poor is ever with us. Ed- 
 itors and authors, obscure and eminent, even the ubiquitous 
 reporter, have guided public opinion and stimulated human 
 thought. To have worthily contributed to the ranks of the 
 members of the press is one of the honors that have fallen to 
 this family. More than sixty of its members have been prom- 
 inent in authorship or editorial life. Dr. Winship says: "I 
 have found 135 books of merit written by the family, and 
 eighteen considerable journals edited by them, — several im- 
 portant ones were founded by them." Among the papers ed- 
 ited may be mentioned "The New York Daily Advertiser," 
 
17 
 
 ''The Interior," Chicago, "The Hartford Courant." Among 
 the books written are "The Conquest of Canada," "The Span- 
 ish Conquest of America," "Greece and Roman Mythology," 
 "History of Virginia," "Five Years in an English University," 
 and Kichard Carvel." These are not the most important, 
 but they represent the type of authorship outside the purely 
 theological. 
 
 There are those who are inclined to rate the legal mind 
 as the highest type. Others may not fully agree with them. 
 But no one will dispute that it requires a very clear intellect 
 to deal with matters of jurisprudence. That there have been 
 those in this family who- possessed this clear intellect is shown 
 by the legal eminence of some of them. Professor Brice placed 
 one of them. Prof. Theodore William Dwight, at the head of 
 legal learning in the United States, and said : "It would be 
 worth an English student's while to cross the Atlantic to at- 
 tend his course." He was called by another English writer 
 "the greatest living American teacher of law." Prof. Dwight 
 was the legal editor of Johnson's Encyclopedia. 
 
 The list of lawyers among them is amazingly long. Per- 
 haps it is this quality of mind that has led so many of them 
 into public life. Two of them were members of the Conti- 
 nental Congress, one a member of the Convention that framed 
 the Constitution of the United States, several were members 
 of conventions that framed constitutions for the several states, 
 three were United States Senators, several were members of 
 the National House of Representatives, one a Vice-President of 
 the United States who barely lost an election as President. He 
 is said to be the only one for whom the family had cause to 
 blush. I refer to Aaron Burr, the grandson of Jonathan Ed- 
 wards. One of them in the person of Mrs. Roosevelt has en- 
 tered the White House as its mistress. Others have been 
 mayors of cities, members of state legislatures, Governors of 
 such states as Ohio, Connecticut, South Carolina. From the 
 time of the Revolution to the Civil War they have furnished 
 brave soldiers who have sustained the honor of the nation. 
 
 The health of the people who form a nation must be con- 
 sidered when forecasting its future. The man who aids in 
 preserving health and in breaking the power of disease is a 
 public benefactor. Such is the skillful physician. The Ed- 
 
18 
 
 wards family has been strikingly long lived and vigorous. In 
 this way they hav» added to the strength of the nation. But 
 they have done more than this. Sixty of its members have 
 been physicians of more than ordinary skill. Who will esti- 
 mate the amount of suffering that has been relieved, the num- 
 ber of hearts tliat have been made glad through their minis- 
 trations? They have tenderly cared for the insane, have 
 soothed the fevered brow, have wrought wonders through sur- 
 gery. Like the Great Physician, they have gone about doing 
 good. 
 
 When we ask what were their contributions to the Chris- 
 tian Church, the queen of all institutions, we are overwhelmed 
 with the answers. The life-blood, the clear intellect, the calm 
 and steadfast trust in God, the gracious sweetness of character 
 and confident belief in the supremacy of righteousness have 
 been the Edwards gift to many denominations. The family 
 has given to the churches some of the most eminent names 
 on the ecclesiastical roll. More than a hundred clergymen are 
 in their ranks. It has given professors to schools of theology. 
 It has sent missionaries to successful work in Asia Minor, 
 India, Africa, China, Hawaii and the South Sea Islands. Truly 
 it may be said that their line has gone out in all parts of the 
 earth. The family has had a genius for religion and this 
 genius has been put to magnificent service in the Kingdom of 
 God. 
 
 We might well pause here. But there is much more to be 
 said. The Edwards mind is versatile. It adapts itself to all 
 conditions of life. Therefore we find its members at the head 
 of great industries, directing financial institutions, managing 
 mines, controlling corporations. It is said that fifteen Amer- 
 ican systems of railway have had as president, superintendent, 
 or otherwise active in the management, one of the family. 
 The wealth that has come to some of the members has swelled 
 the great stream of benevolence and made the world happier. 
 Such a family as this is the nation's strength. We may well 
 pray that it be duplicated a thousand fold. It is an ideal to 
 which other families may aspire but to which none can attain 
 except by the same God-consciousness, spirituality and belief 
 in the ultimate supremacy of virtue which were so notable 
 characteristics of Jonathan Edwards. 
 
% 
 
 ^ 
 
 irlAli-^ 
 
 i^A 
 
 THE MODERN NOTE IN EDWARDS. 
 By Rev. I. Chipman Smart. 
 
 Modern notes one might almost say, for there is a whole 
 gamut of them, but if I should try to sound them all, with 
 such a program as this ahead of us, I should deserve to become 
 a proof text for Edwards' sermon on "Wicked Men Useful 
 in Their Destruction Only." I shall try to avoid such a fate 
 by respecting a saying of the wise, "Truth is the most valuable 
 thing we have, therefore let us economize it." 
 
 Edwards had a reasoned, sure, warm feeling that God 
 comes straight to men and illumines their minds, straight as a 
 sunbeam comes to the eye. Tennyson had the same feeling. 
 
 "Speak to him, thou, for he hears. 
 And spirit with spirit can meet ; 
 Closer is he than breathing, 
 
 And nearer than hands and feet." 
 
 A sermon of Edwards on the Reality of Spiritual Light 
 expresses that feeling. The sermon might be preached this af- 
 ternoon, and with all our theological dialects we should hear, 
 
20 
 
 every man in his own tong-ue, the wonderful works of God. 
 1 take one paragraph from the sermon: "Men have a great 
 deal of pleasure in human knowledge, in studies of natural 
 things, but this is nothing to that joy which arises from this 
 Divine light shining into the soul. This light gives a view of 
 those things that are immensely the most exquisitely beautiful, 
 and capable of delighting the eye of the understanding. This 
 spiritual light is the dawning of the light of glory in the 
 heart. There is nothing so powerful as this to support per- 
 sons in affliction, and to give the mind peace and brightness in 
 this stormy and dark world." 
 
 The feeling that God comes straight to the mind is a cur- 
 rent that runs far and deep and wide through the serious life 
 of our day, and it is a healing stream. Men lose leprosies in 
 it — leprosies of doubt — doubt arising because God has been 
 shown to them as an idol in a cage, a cage of Bibliolatry, a cage 
 of mediaeval superstition. A dash of the healing stream 
 clears men's eyes of dust ; a drink of it washes the dust from 
 their throats. Life is magnificent now, just that, a time of 
 great doing, but it raises a dust. Some people call the dust 
 materialism, some commercialism, some worldliness, some 
 ostentation ; it has many names. The magnificence is greater 
 if you can get rid of the dust. 
 
 The feeling that God comes straight to the mind is dan- 
 gerous. Even when it is justified by real experience, it is often 
 overwhelming. It may make a man awkward and absent and 
 careless in some common matters where we are bound by 
 chains of reason and morality to this world, but the feeling in a 
 prophet who has seen no vision, the feeling snatched by the 
 shallow who confidently misunderstand and misrepresent and 
 caricature it, is a pestilence. It was in Edwards' day. It leads 
 to pride, to extravagance, to insanity, to silliness — silliness 
 giddily sporting in the ground-up dust and cinders of the 
 world's burned-out and refuse superstitions, like the eddying 
 whirlwinds in the wake of a flying train. And yet the feeling is 
 good. The truth in it is too great to be left alone in the 
 mind. Nothing can keep it in its place and proportion but 
 another great truth demanding equal room a,nd sway. The 
 possibility is easy in many directions that there may be too 
 much of a good thing. If the air were all oxygen we should 
 
21 
 
 die. If the air were all hydrogen we should die. But since 
 it is both oxygen and hydrogen it is breath of life. The feel- 
 ing that God comes straight to our minds needs to be bal- 
 anced by the feeling that He comes straight to other minds, 
 that He has been coming for ages and will come when we 
 have gone. The feeling needs to be balanced also by the 
 trudging moralities of common sense and gentlemanly con- 
 sideration and even by some very homely gravel in the shoe 
 when one steps. 
 
 Of course this feeling that God comes straight to the 
 mind is not modern only. It is not Edwardian only. It is as 
 old as the noonday meeting at the door of Abraham's tent. 
 You feel great throbs of it in St, Paul. St. John beats with 
 almost nothing else in the rythmic music of his heart. It 
 shakes Augustine at his mother's death bed. It smites the nail 
 prints into St. Francis' hands. Cromwell, the man of iron, 
 melts under it. It ravishes the soul of Edwards in the loneli- 
 ness of the forest. A Harvard professor of psychology not 
 long ago confessed to Scotchmen that he had had twinges of 
 the feeling himself. And John Fiske — how far is it from 
 Jonathan Edwards to John Fiske^ — has any one a string in his 
 pocket? Thank you, but I see we should need a rope factory 
 and there is no time. And yet in some ways, I think, that 
 Fiske goes with Edwards. He blew a blast on the trumpet 
 which Edwards set to his lips. When we call Edwards great, 
 when we call any man great who thinks about personal life, 
 do we not mean that he takes up a trumpet about which the 
 lips of men are always busy, sometimes with feeble gurg- 
 lings, sometimes with ringing tones, and blows a blast on it 
 at which both the ears of every man who hears it tingle as if 
 the God of hosts marched in with the sound. 
 
 Ecstacy is not necessary to this feeling. Whoever is aware 
 of a wonderful light shining in his mind to make the great 
 truths, the great meanings, the great duties of life stand clear 
 in their proper beauty and strength and eternal worth, walks 
 with Edwards on the height where one may lift St. Agnes' 
 prayer for "a heart as pure and clear as are the frosty skies." 
 I do not assess the value of this feeling. I do not pretend 
 that it is general. I only call attention to it and speak my 
 conviction that it is a current which runs far and deep and 
 
22 
 
 wide in the serious life of our day, and that on the whole, in 
 spite of some hemlock afloat in it, it is a healing stream. 
 
 I have a friend who, when I ask him how he does, replies : 
 ''Pretty well, considerin_g." Edwards was one of those men, 
 plenty now as drops in a shower, nicknamed idealists who will 
 give us no peace but keep saying that "Pretty well consider- 
 ing" is a perilous state. It accommodates itself too easily to 
 the existing situation. It is simply clever politics. It is sav- 
 ing your skin. You must fight the existing situation. You 
 must hack away the edges of circumstance and get elbow 
 room. You must make unattained goodness not your dream- 
 land but a law to clutch your wills. You must have a reach 
 beyond your grasp, you must seek the Holy Grail, you must 
 hitch your wagon to a star. If you believe that man has no 
 second life, pitch this one liigh, or as Edwards said, you must 
 do the will of God. "But you can't do the will of God," he 
 added. No man can, and so you are just fuel for burning. 
 God here and there snatches out a brand ; the rest go up in 
 smoke. 
 
 Once when the sons of a prophet were hungry, they set 
 on the great pot and boiled pottage, but some one put in wild 
 gourds by mistake, and as they were eating, they came to 
 Elisha and said : "Oh, man of God ! there is death in the pot." 
 Elisha threw in a handful of meal, and there was no harm in 
 the pot. But when there was death in Edwards' pot, he said, 
 "I know it but I can't help it." "It will have to stay." And 
 it did. Death of hope, despair of human nature, and tragical 
 personal despair. There is always death in the idealist's pot 
 until the right kind of meal is flung into it. 
 
 Modern thinking and modern stories abound in gloomy 
 views of human nature, and yet the ideal of manhood was 
 never pitched higher than it is today. If you look to life out- 
 side of books, you find the same thing. There in the coal 
 mines, men pursuing an end which glowed before them as a 
 kind of Holy Grail ; but some of them turned to tigers when 
 they saw a hand threatening to snatch the cup from their lips. 
 
 You know what Edwards' despair was. The moan of it 
 is on all the shores of his life like the moaning of the sea. How 
 like a horror of darkness hell gloomed in his mind. He de- 
 scribed it with a kind of desperate fascination. You feel in 
 
23 
 
 some of his awfullest passages the shuddering" recoil of a 
 splendid mind at the mouth of a fiery furnace, but since the 
 furnace was there, he strode through thoroughly like a Puri- 
 tan. 
 
 llie language of the moral idealist, is substantially the 
 language of Edtvards — Obey God's will or die and go to hell. 
 But you can't obey God's will. Enter despair. Obey your 
 fine ideal or lose the life of your life and suffer the pains of 
 hell. But you can't obey your fine ideal. Enter despair. Cur- 
 tain. Second Act. God choosing some and taking them with 
 him to paradise. But we can match that too. We have our 
 doctrine of election. Environment, we call it, and it is arbi- 
 trary like election. The winds which carry seeds are very 
 arbitrary. They drop some in green pastures, beside still wa- 
 ters ; they drop some in the yellow scurf beside a dead sea. 
 Enter more despair. 
 
 But what is the door of hope? Edwards opened it in his 
 sermon on Spiritual Light, but he neither went in himself nor 
 suffered those who were entering to go in. He even slammed 
 the door in the face of those who needed it most. He slammed 
 it in one small sentence where he distinguished common grace 
 from special grace as if God were a kind of double personal- 
 ity, Mr. So So and Mr. Very Good Edwards left all but the 
 elect to the care of Mr. So So. If he had dropped that mis- 
 chievous distinction and believed and taught that one God for 
 one end of love sends His one spirit into the minds of men for 
 every good service, he would have flung wide the door of hope. 
 Pie did not need to darken the glory of God's sovereign will 
 by so much as the shadow of a hair. He did not need to im- 
 agine the slightest quaver in the magnificent call of God to 
 man. All he needed was to hear in that call deep calling unto 
 deep. All he needed was to believe and teach that God comes 
 straight to the mind in every motion of duty and love and 
 comes to save, and then his beautiful sermon on Spiritual Light 
 would be a Gospel for the da3^ 
 
 I started out to pick up a feather from an eagle's wing. 
 If I keep on, I shall be flapping my own wings and — you are 
 very kind, my friends, I thank you for thinking so, but really 
 thev are not eagles' wings, and I fold them. 
 
THE OTHER SIDE OF EDWARDS. 
 
 Rev. Lyman S. Rowland. D. D. 
 
 There are sides of the character of Jonathan Edwards 
 so apparent and universallv recognized as to be ahnost beyond 
 he scope of fttrther debate,-his surpassing greatness n. at 
 east two directions-as a philosophic theologian and as a 
 Saintly Christian man. After the consentn.g verdict of two 
 centuries to his eminence on these sides he nnist be a boW 
 ,nan indeed who will venture to cha lenge it today. If the 
 ludgment of men like Thomas dialmers, and Robeit Hall 
 ind^Sir Tames Mackintosh, and Dugald Stewart, -d George 
 Bancroft, and Theodore D. Woolsey, and Edward A. Park 
 and George P. Fisher, is not to be accepted as f\nal, then there 
 is no such thing as finality of judgment with regard to any 
 human greatness. Ai^istotle and Plato and Kant may yet be 
 thrust from their pedestals. Paul's epistles and Shakes- 
 peare's plays may be suffered to go out of print and become 
 lost to the memory of men. _ 
 
 But men are sometimes the victimes of their own great- 
 ness. Their eminence in some directions leads them to ques- 
 
25 
 
 tion or oversight of it in other directions. The first impression 
 naturally from the sight of the giant redwoods of California 
 is that of altitude. Their magnitude seems to be of one dimen- 
 sion only, until it is discovered that their footing on the ground 
 is proportionate to their .upreach toward the sky, that a coach 
 and four can be driven through their excavated trunks and a 
 house built upon their stumps. As the sequoia among the 
 trees of the wood, so is our Edwards among the sons of men^ 
 All men are impressed by his altitude, but in the minds of 
 many it is height at the expense of breadth; a great theo- 
 logian indeed, but a narrow one, inclined to shut the gates 
 of mercy on mankind, so severe and even cruel in his opinions 
 as to be hardly worth the serious attention of men in this en- 
 lightened and kindly age. That such is a very general opin- 
 ion of Edwards, I am confident. Said a gentleman driving 
 through Stockbridge with a clerical friend of mine some time 
 ago. as they passed the Edwards' monument, "That's the man 
 who used to preach that hell is paved with infant skulls." 
 Oliver Wendell Holmes in one of his occasional poems writ- 
 ten in his later years speaks of Edwards as stamping in 
 Princeton "his iron heel," and his long prose essay on Edwards 
 is in much the same vein. Our recent and current literature 
 abounds in such utterances. They will probably be heard 
 from scores of pulpits and platforms in connection with this 
 anniversary. 
 
 To fully set forth the other side of Edwards would re- 
 quire a volume. INIy limit of time will permit only a few il- 
 lustrations, and I will give them mainly in his own words. It 
 has been my experience in the reading of Edwards to dis- 
 cover evidence of breadth of view and of sympathy in unex- 
 pected places. Take for instance the conclusion of his treatise 
 on Justification by Faith Alone. This treatise is made up you 
 know of sermons preached in Northampton at the opening 
 of the great revival in 1734-5. They proved indeed the first 
 human impulse in that great work, being followed by an inter- 
 est in religion that speedily pervaded the town and shook it 
 to its foundations. It would seein that the minds of the peo- 
 ple of Northampton must have been differently constituted 
 from those of the rest of mankind, certainly from ours today, 
 that such sermons, so searching and profound in their analy- 
 
26 
 
 sis of the principles of Christian faith, often so minute and 
 abstract in their reasoning", should have had such an eltect. 
 Thev seem as we read them now far better adapted to the 
 thelogical lecture room than to the pulpit. But the great sur- 
 prise is in the final paragraph. We should have expected, ac- 
 cording to the common view of Edwards, a conclusion that 
 would shut up men to the acceptance of his exact views, and 
 that would reduce the way of faith to the dimensions of a 
 needle's eve. Instead we are gratified by the final outlook as 
 broad as any Christian of evangelical faith will take at the 
 present time. The paragraph is a typical one in its concaten- 
 ated structure, and must be quoted entire if at all : 
 
 "How far a wonderful and mysterious agency of God's 
 Spirit may so influence some men's hearts, that their practice 
 in this regard may be contrary to their own principles, so that 
 they shall not trust in their own righteousness, though they 
 profess that men are justified by their own righteousness; or 
 how far they believe the doctrine of justification by men's own 
 righteousness in general, and yet not believe it in a particu- 
 lar application of it to themselves ; or how far that error which 
 they may have been led into by education or cunning sophistry 
 of others, may yet be indeed contrary to the prevailing dis- 
 position of their hearts, and contrary to their practice ; or how 
 far some men seem to maintain a doctrine contrary to this gos- 
 pel doctrine of justification, that really do not, but only ex- 
 press themselves dififerently from others ; or seem to oppose 
 it through their misunderstanding of our expressions, or we 
 of theirs, when indeed our real sentiments are the same in the 
 main ; or may seem to dififer more than they do by using terms 
 that are without a precisely fixed and determinate meaning ; or 
 to be wide in their sentiments from this doctrine for want of 
 a. distinct understanding of it, whose hearts at the same time 
 entirely agree with it, and if it were clearly explained to their 
 understandings, would immedately close with it, and embrace 
 it : — how far these things may be I will not determine ; but am 
 fully persuaded that great allowances are to be made on these 
 and such like accounts in innumerable instances ; though it is 
 manifest from what has been said that the teaching and 
 propagating contrary doctrines and schemes are 'of a pernic- 
 ious and fatal character." 
 
27 
 
 1 submit, my brethren, that no reasonable Christian mind 
 can demand greater breadth of appHcation for this fundament- 
 al doctrine of the Gospel than this : that we have here by plain 
 implication if not in full expression that principle of essential 
 and unconscious faith as distinguished from actual faith in 
 which we take refuge from so many of our doubts and diffi- 
 culties in this time of religious unrest. 
 
 A similar gratifying surprise awaits the reader in the 
 recognition by Edwards of the possible varieties and methods 
 of conversion under the illumination that came to him in con- 
 nection with the great revival. No mind was ever more open 
 to the convincing influence of facts than was that of Jonathan 
 Edwards. However narrow his previous views, we find him 
 in his Narrative of Surprising Conversions recognizing as 
 fully as any modern minister or evangelist the fact that there 
 are diversities of operations while it is the same God that 
 worketh all in all. He returns to the subject again and again 
 as if delighting in the discovery. One illustration must stand 
 for many equally to the point : 
 
 "There is an endless variety in the particular manner and 
 circumstances in which persons are wrought on, and an op- 
 portunity of seeing so much of such a work of God, will show 
 that God is further from confining himself to certain steps, 
 and a particular method in his work on souls, than it may be 
 some do imagine. I believe it has occasioned some good peo- 
 ple amongst us, that were before ready to make their own 
 experiences a rule for others, to be less censorious and more 
 extensive in their charity, and this is an excellent advantage 
 indeed. The work of God has been glorious in its variety, it 
 has more displayed the manifoldness and unsearchableness of 
 the wisdom of God and wrought more charity among his peo- 
 ple." 
 
 He learned not to demand from converts a statement of 
 the precise time of their conversion, and that the milder 
 forms of experience were as likely to be followed by the gen- 
 uine fruits of the Spirit in the life as the more sudden and 
 convulsive. He came to believe in the reality of the conver- 
 sion of children, of very young children. Indeed his attitude 
 toward children, notwithstanding the severity of his view as 
 to their inherited depravity, was always most tender and af- 
 
28 
 
 fectionate. He devotes a most touching paragraph to the 
 lamhs of his flock in his farewell sermon to the church in 
 Northampton, a feature I believe quite unique on such an oc- 
 casion, and proving conclusively that Edwards was as far as 
 possible from being the Moloch of the common fancy. 
 
 Edwards has been supposed to set up an almost insuper- 
 able barrier to Church membership in his Qualifications for 
 Communion. He was greatly misjudged in his own time in 
 this respect as he still it. He is supposed to put his treatise 
 on the Religious Afifections, with its almost impossible ideal 
 of the Christian life, at the portals of the church to warn off 
 applicants for admission. But he indignantly repudiates in 
 his reply to his critics such an aspersion on his Christian char- 
 ity and common sense. Instead of making the requirements 
 as high and diflicult as possible he would make them as easy 
 as possible in consistency with the reality of the Christian 
 character. What he did insist on with all the energy of his 
 nature was the fact of regenerate character as a qualification 
 for membership, in opposition to the prevailing view under the 
 Half Way Covenant that all that should be required was re- 
 spectability of outward conduct. This was the ground of his 
 quarrel with his church, and for this opinion he was willing 
 to go into exile. But as respects the formula of admission, — 
 while he would have preferred something more, — he would 
 have been content with one of three or four lines 
 like the following: '"l hope I do truly find a heart to give up 
 myself wholly to God according to the tenor of that covenant 
 of grace which was sealed in my baptism ; and to walk in a 
 way of observaruce to all the commandments of God which the 
 covenant of grace requires as long as I live," — hardly more 
 you notice than is now required for the admission of young 
 people to a Christian Endeavor Society. While he thinks 
 that some preliminary examination of candidates is desirable 
 he would make that also as simple as possible. "Neither min- 
 ister nor church," he says, "are to set up themselves as search- 
 ers of hearts, but are to accept the serious and solemn pro- 
 fession of the well instructed professor of a good life, as best 
 able to determine what he finds in his own heart." Who 
 can ask that the doors of the Christian church should be opened 
 wider than this? It seems almost a dangerous extreme in the 
 liberal direction. 
 
29 
 
 Edwards has doubtless suffered in the judgment of men 
 from nothing- so much as from what have been called his "im- 
 precatory sermons,'" that is, his sermons on the wrath of God 
 toward sinners, and the certain and terrible retribution await- 
 ing them in the future. Imprecatory is hardly too strong a 
 term to apply to these sermons. They are simply terrific in 
 their presentation of the severer elements of Christian truth. 
 I could speedily empty this church by quoting characteristic 
 passages. I suppose the impression of Edwards in multitudes 
 of minds has come entirely from these sermons. It is un- 
 fortunate for his reputation that they form so large a part in 
 the collections that have come down to us in his printed 
 volumes. They were preached, the most of them, during the 
 great revival, and were preserved I suppose, as a part of the 
 history of that remarkable movement. .Much might be said 
 in mitigation of judgment. Edwards himself defends them 
 against his critics, and on his own ground it is difficult to 
 answer him. 
 
 But my object is not defense or excuse. Let them stand 
 just as we find them like the mount that might be touched 
 and that burned with fire, and at the sight of which Moses said, 
 "I exceedingly fear and quake." What I claim is that there is 
 another side to the preaching of Jonathan Edwards, a Calvary 
 as well as a Sinai, a Paradise as well as an Inferno. He makes 
 much of heaven and its unspeakable felicities. He has a most 
 remarkable sermon on the Excellency of Christ ; one on Spir- 
 itual Light, as beautiful and suggestive as is to be found in 
 the language ; one on the Peace which Christ gives His True 
 Followers ; one on God the Best Portion of the Christian ; 
 one on the Sorrows of the Bereaved spread before Jesus. 
 Most of his treatises are made up of sermons. Among those 
 still in manuscript we are told there is a series on the Beauti- 
 tudes. He was not always preaching in the line of the im- 
 precatory sermons. They probably were a small fraction of 
 the multitude covering the whole field of Christian truth, 
 preached by him during the twenty-three years of his North- 
 ampton pastorate. He believed in what he called "afifectionate 
 appeal", and was hardly less powerful in that direction than 
 in its opposite. Everybody has heard of his Enfield sermon on 
 Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, but few I imagine 
 
30 
 
 have seen this appeal to "old sinners" who may be hindered 
 in their approaches to Christ by the thought that possibly they 
 have sinned away the day of grace, in the application of a 
 sermon on Pardon for the Greatest Sinners: 
 
 "Hath God said anywhere that he will not accept of old 
 snuiers who come to him? God hath often made promises 
 m universal terms, and is there any such exception put in? 
 Doth Christ say, All that thirst let them come to me and drink 
 except old sinners? Come to me all ye that labor and are 
 heavy laden, except old sinners, and I will give you rest? 
 Him that cometh to me, I will in no wise cast out, if he be 
 not an old sinner? Did you ever read such an exception any- 
 where in the Bible? And why should you give way to ex- 
 ceptions which, you make out of your own heads, or rather 
 which the devil puts into your heads^ and which have no 
 foundation in the word of God?" 
 
 And could there be an appeal more expressive of the in- 
 most spirit of the Gospel than this from the Sermon on the 
 Excellency of Christ, from the text in Revelation that exhibits 
 Christ as both lion and lamb? 
 
 "What is there that you can desire should be in a Saviour 
 that is not in Christ? Or wherein should you desire a Saviour 
 to be otherwise than Christ is? What excellency is there 
 wanting? What is there that is great and good?' What is 
 there that is venerable and winning? What is there that is 
 adorable or endearing? Or what can you think of that would 
 be encouraging that is not to be found in the person of Christ ?" 
 
 In the light of this other side of the preaching of Ed- 
 wards can we wonder at his success in winning souls? We 
 have been taught in recent years that the depth and richness 
 of Christ's personality are a comparatively recent discovery; 
 does not Edwards seem to have penetrated quite as far into 
 that great and gracious mystery as any of our modern 
 teachers ? 
 
 The style, we are told, is the man ; it will not therefore be 
 considered beside the mark to claim that there is another side 
 also to the style of Jonathan Edwards. Forbidding as it 
 often seems at first view, cumbrous and repetitious, we find 
 in it on closer scrutiny, such elements of power, of suggestive- 
 ness, not seldom of beauty, that we may properly class him 
 
31 
 
 with our great writers. Edwards was entirely without ht- 
 erary cuUivation. President Woolsey tells us that logic was 
 the staple study in Yale college at that time, that during a 
 portion of the course the students were reciuired to dispute 
 syllogistically five times a week while not the slightest atten- 
 tion was paid to rhetoric and composition at any time. It 
 speaks wonders for his natural genius that with such an utter 
 lack of training, he shows from the first such a power of ex- 
 pression. The poetic element in his writings has not passed 
 unnoticed ; but so nuich emphasis has been placed on his de- 
 scription of Sarah Pierpont written when he was twenty, as 
 to breed the impression that this element in his writing is a 
 rare one and confined to his youth. As matter of fact it per- 
 vades them, coming out now in passages of sweetness and 
 beauty, and now Miltonic and Dantesque in their sublimity 
 and power. There is no evidence so far as I know that he ever 
 wrote a line of metrical poetry. I doubt whether there is a 
 quoted line of poetry in all his works, or a suggestion that 
 he had ever opened Milton or Shakespeare, although it would 
 seem as if at some time in his life copies of these poets must 
 have been within his reach. And yet we cannot doubt that 
 he had in him the making of a great poet if he had received 
 early cultivation, and if his energies had been turned in that 
 direction. 
 
 But I have in mind more particularly a feature of the 
 other side of the writings of Edwards of a different nature 
 and which seems to have been almost entirely overlooked, — 
 his power of condensed expression by which great truths are 
 summed up with the terseness of proverbs, which separated 
 from their cumbrous surroundings, and made to shine in their 
 unobstructed light, remind us of the sentences of Emerson. 
 They are often sermons and treatises in a nutshell and none 
 the less so that they sometimes provoke dissent. A few quo- 
 tations must suffice for illustration : 
 
 "There can be no spiritual knowledge of that of which 
 there is not first a rational knowledge." 
 
 "There can be no love without knowledge." 
 
 "An imperfect righteousness before a judge is no right- 
 eousness." 
 
 "Praver is onlv the voice of faith." 
 
32 
 
 "To say that there is a law that does not require perfect 
 obedience to itself, is to say that there is a law that does not 
 require all that it requires." 
 
 "So far as anyone gives his love to another he gives him- 
 self." 
 
 •Faith with respect to good is accepting, and with respect 
 to evil is rejecting." 
 
 'There is a difference between having an opinion that 
 God is holy and gracious, and having a sense of the loveliness 
 and beauty of that holiness and grace. There is a difference 
 between having a rational judgment that honey is sweet, and 
 having a sense of its sweetness." 
 
 ■■Reason's work is to perceive truth, not excellency." 
 
 "It (spiritual light) is a kind of emanation of God's beau- 
 ty, and is related to God as the light is to the sun." 
 
 Sometimes there is in these utterances a tinge of sarcasm : 
 
 "The reason why many good men behave no better in 
 many instances, is not so much that they want grace, as that 
 they want knowledge." 
 
 - "When the wise man says there is a time to dance, that 
 does not prove that the dead of night is the time for it." 
 
 He indulges but little in extended comparisons, but those 
 that 'he does use are so perfect and often beautiful, that we 
 wish there were more of them, as when speaking of degrees 
 of glory in redeemed saints, he says : 
 
 "The saints are so many vessels of dift'erent sizes cast 
 into a sea of happiness where every vessel is full ; this Christ 
 purchased for all ; yet it is left to God's sovereign pleasure to 
 determine the largeness of the vessel; Christ's righteousness 
 meddles not with this matter." 
 
 Speaking of fitness for church membership he says : 
 
 "Nothing can be fitness for a durable privilege but a dur- 
 able qualification. For no qualification has any fitness or 
 adaptedness for more than it extends to : as a short scabbard 
 cannot be fit for a long sword." 
 
 Humor is the last thing we should look for in the writ- 
 ings of Jonathan Edwards, but about as perfect a specimen 
 of it as can be found in the language appears in the illustra- 
 tion in which he sums up the contradictions of the Arminian 
 theorv of th-e human will : 
 
33 
 
 "If some learned philosopher, who had been abroad, in 
 giving an account of the curious observations he had made in 
 his travels, should say, 'He had been in Terra del Fuego and 
 there had seen an animal which he calls by a certain name, that 
 begat and brought forth itself, and yet had a sire and dam 
 distinct from itself; that it had an appetite and was hungry 
 before it had a being; that his master who led him and gov- 
 erned him at his pleasure, was always governed by him, and 
 driven by him where he pleased ; that when he moved he al- 
 ways took a step before the first step; that he went with his 
 head first, and yet always went tail foremost ; and this though 
 he had neither head nor tail ; — ^it woul'a be no imprudence at 
 all to tell such a traveler, though a learned man, that he him- 
 self had no notion or idea of such an animal as he gave ac- 
 count of, and never had, nor ever would have." 
 
 The affinity in some respects between the mind of Ed- 
 wards and that of Emerson has been frequently noticed. It 
 certainly seems as if the same mind that coined the idea of 
 this self-contradictory animal might have written Brahma ; 
 or, if we could imagine Emerson reading the Freedom of the 
 Will, that he might have plagiarized Brahma from this illus- 
 tration ! 
 
 This pithy element in Edwards finds most frequent illus- 
 tration in his milder writings, and in his more closely reasoned 
 argumentation when he is in hot chase of an opponent, — "driv- 
 ing an enemy up Salt River," as Professor Park used to say ; 
 but also sometimes in his most passionate and terrible passages 
 where it shines like crystals among the scorije left by volcanic 
 fires. But Edwards himself is so unconscious of this quality 
 that the reader himself is likely to miss it. To discover it by 
 search is much like placer mining, requiring a good deal of 
 sifting out of coarser material before the golden grains and 
 nuggets appear. But the discoveries are worth the pains. I 
 believe that a volume of sentences and paragraphs of this 
 nature might be culled from his writings that would outrank 
 the Thoughts of Pascal, that as a stimulus to thought and a 
 help to devotion would be of untold value to the Christian 
 Church, and that would serve to set Edwards himself in quite 
 a new light before the world. 
 
JONATHAN EDWARDS: A STUDY. 
 By Rev. John DeWitt, D.D., L.L. D. 
 
 I am deeply indebted to your Committee for the honor 
 they have done me in inviting me to take part in this celebra- 
 tion. My hesitation in accepting their invitation was due sole- 
 ly to the feeling I had that a son of New England could more 
 appropriately than a stranger ask your attention to an appre- 
 ciation of this great New Englander. This hesitation was 
 overcome, partly by the cordiality with which the invitation 
 was extended, and partly by the consideration that Princeton, 
 ■where Edwards did his last work and where his body lies to- 
 day, might well be represented on the occasion by which we 
 liave been assembled. Moreover, Princeton College, when 
 Edwards was called to its presidency, was largely a New Eng- 
 land institution of learning. Both of his predecessors in that 
 office, Jonathan Dickinson and Aaron Burr, were natives of 
 New England, graduates of the College at New Haven and 
 Congregational ministers. Associated with Dickinson and 
 Burr in the planting of the College were not only other Yale 
 
35 
 
 men, but Harvard men also: Ebenezer Pemberton and David 
 Cowell and Jacob Green and, above all, Jonathan Belcher, 
 sometime Royal Governor of the Colony of Massachusetts and 
 cx-oiticio Overseer of Harvard, his alma mater; who, when 
 afterward he was commissioned Royal Governor of the 
 Province of New Jersey, to repeat his own words, "adopted 
 as his own this infant College," gave to it a new and more 
 liberal charter, and so largely aided it by private gifts and 
 official influence that its Trustees called him its "founder, 
 patron and benefactor." I am glad as a Princeton man to find 
 in the anniversary of the birth of one of its Presidents an op- 
 portunity to acknowledge the University's great debt to New 
 England. And, if you will permit a personal remark, I can- 
 not forget that in coming to these services I am returning to 
 the Commonwealth of which I am proud to have been a citi- 
 zen, and to the Massachusetts Association of Congregational 
 Ministers whose list of pastors for six successive year con- 
 tained my name.* I should have to efface the memory of a 
 pastorate exceptionally happy, and of unnumbered acts of 
 kindness from the living and the dead, in order not to feel 
 grateful and at home today. 
 
 But, after all, the highest justification of this commemo- 
 ration of a man born two centuries ago is not that his genius 
 and character and career reflect glory on the people and the 
 class from whom he sprang, but that they contain notable ele- 
 ments of universal interest and value. The great man is great 
 because in some great way he adequately addresses, not what 
 is exceptional, not what is distinctive of any class or people, 
 but what is human and common to the race ; to whose message, 
 therefore, men respond as men ; whose eulogists and interpre- 
 ters are not necessarily dwellers in his district or people of 
 his blood ; who is the common property of all to study, to 
 enjoy, to revere and to celebrate. It is, above all, because 
 Jonathan Edwards belongs to this small and elect class that 
 we are gathered to honor his memory by recalling his story 
 and reflecting on the elements of his greatness. 
 
 It would be inappropriate, certainly in this place and be- 
 fore this audience, for a stranger to repeat the well-known 
 story of his life. I shall better meet your expectations if I 
 
 *Paotor of the Central Church, Boston. 
 
36 
 
 shall reproduce the impressions of the man made on me by a 
 renewed study of his collected writings and his life. 
 
 We shall agree that the inward career of Edwards was 
 singularly self-consistent; that from its beginning to its (ilose 
 it is exceptionally free from incongruities and contradictions; 
 that in him Wordsworth's line, "The child is father to the 
 man," finds a signal illustration. When we are brought into 
 contact with a life so unified, whose development along its 
 own lines has not been hindered or distorted by external dis- 
 turbances as violent even as that suffered by Edwards at 
 Northampton, we naturally look for its principle of unity, the 
 dominating quality which subordinated to itself all the others, 
 or, if you like, which so interpenetrated all his other traits as 
 to become his distinctive note. We are confident that such a 
 quality there must have been, and that if we are happy enough 
 at once to find it, we shall have in our possession the master 
 key which, so far as may be to human view, will open to us 
 the departments of his thought and feeling and activity. 
 
 A century later than Edwards there was born another 
 great New Englander — Ralph Waldo Emerson — between 
 whom and Edwards there is a strong likeness as well as a 
 sharp contrast. Because this is his centennial year, Emerson 
 like Edwards is just now especially present to our minds, and 
 one is temptjed to compare and contrast the two. To this 
 temptation I shall not yield. But in order that we may proper- 
 ly approach and seize for ourselves a fine formula of Edwards' 
 dominant quality, permit me to recall to you a study of Emer- 
 son by a litterateur of great charm and wide acceptance. Mr. 
 Matthew Arnold, in his well-known lecture, says that Emer- 
 son is "not a great poet," he "is not a great man of letters," 
 he "is not a great philosopher." Mr. Arnold, I think, does 
 great injustice to Emerson in two of these negations. If I 
 did not think so I should not associate him with so great a 
 man as Edwards. I am not, indeed, concerned to defend the 
 claims of Emerson to "a place among the great philosophers." 
 His treatment of particular subjects was marked by discon- 
 tinuity; and his tendency to gnomic, sententious forms of 
 speech betrayed him not seldom into overstatement or exag- 
 geration. Now, than discontinuity and overstatement there 
 can scarcely be conceived more deadly foes 'to system- 
 
37 
 
 building, to the construction of a world-theory ; and 
 the construction of a world-theory is the end of all philos- 
 ophizing. It may be questioned whether Emerson ever per- 
 mitted himself to rest in any fixed theory of the universe. I 
 have the impression that for a fixed view of the universe he 
 never felt the need, and that from all actual views of the uni- 
 verse which have been fixed in formulas he revolted. And, 
 therefore, when Mr. Arnold says, "Emerson cannot be called 
 with justice a great philosophical writer — he cannot build, he 
 does not construct a philosophy," I do not know on what 
 grounds we can dissent from his statement. 
 
 But when he goes further and, with the same positiveness, 
 says, "We have not in Emerson a great writer or a great poet," 
 Mr. Arnold passes from the region of opinion based on con- 
 siderations whose force all estimate alike, into the region of 
 opinion which has its source and ground in mere individual 
 temperament and taste. Moreover, greatness is a word so 
 vague as scarcely to raise a definite issue ; and this fact might 
 well have prevented so careful and acute a critic from em- 
 ploying it to deny to Emerson a quality which Mr. Arnold 
 would have found difficult to define. Certainly this much can 
 be said. If Emerson is not "a great writer, a great man of 
 letters," yet. in his unfolding of ideas and in his portrayal and 
 criticism of nature ar.d of life, he has nobly fulfilled and is still 
 fulfilling the function of a great man of letters to thousands of 
 disciplined minds; interpreting for them and teaching them 
 to interpret nature and man, educating their judgments, cul- 
 tivating their taste, introducing them to "the best that has 
 been thought and written," and stimulating and ennobling 
 their whole intellectual life. And if he is not, as Mr. Arnold 
 says he is not. "sensuous and impassioned" in his poetry, we 
 must not forget that reflective poetry is Emerson's best and 
 most characteristic poetic achievement; that reflective poetry 
 cannot possibly be "censuous and impassioned" ; and that Mr. 
 Arnold is prejudiced against all reflective poetry, and. indeed 
 does not think it poetry, whether it be Emerson's or Words- 
 worth's. 
 
 But though Mr. Arnold does Emerson injustice in these 
 two negative propositions. I think that, in his positive state- 
 ment, he has firmly seized and happily formulated Emerson's 
 
38 
 
 dominating quality. He has given us the real clue to the sig- 
 nificance of Emerson's literary product, regarded as a whole, 
 when he says of him: "Emerson is the friend and aider of 
 those who would live in the spirit." The friendship of Emer- 
 son for "those who would live in the spirit" is, indeed, his 
 characteristic trait. He is also their "aider," as Mr. Arnold 
 says. But the aid he offers them is conditioned precisely by 
 the fact that he is a man of letters and a poetic interpreter of 
 nature and of life, and that he does not bring to them a phil- 
 osophy. I say, the aid he offers is conditioned by this lack of 
 a philosophy ; and by conditioned I mean limited. For because 
 of it the realm of nature and spirit, as he presents it, is vast 
 indeed, but vague and undefined and, so far forth, unrevealed. 
 And therefore, as Mr. Arnold himself points out, his aid is 
 confined to the sphere of the moral sentiments and action. Mr. 
 Arnold does, indeed, express the opinion that "as Words- 
 worth's poetry is the most important work done in verse in 
 our language in the nineteenth century, so Emerson's essays 
 are the most important work done in prose." But this is the 
 language of purely personal judgment. Far more important 
 for us in estimating Emerson,- with Mr. Arnold's help, as "an 
 aider of those who would live in the spirit," is the sentence 
 in which, he formulates the precise content of the aid which 
 Emerson extends. And this is the sentence: "Happiness in 
 labor, righteousness and veracity ; in all the life of the spirit ; 
 happiness and eternal hope — that was Emerson's gospel." A 
 fair and felicitous description it is. And how clearly it reveals 
 the limit of the aid which Emerson's gospel offers ! How 
 clearly it reveals that the aid extended is not the aid of a great 
 thinker in the sphere of ultimate knowing and absolute being, 
 but is aid confined to the sphere of the moral sentiments and 
 action ! 
 
 Thus, by a route somewhat circuitous indeed, but I trust 
 not wholly without interest or propriety, we reach, in Mr. 
 Arnold's characterization of Emerson, the formula of which 
 1 spoke as finely expressing Edwards' dominating and unify- 
 ing quality. Edwards like Emerson is, above all else and by 
 eminence, "the friend and aider of those who would live in 
 the spirit." Who that knows him at all will denv him a right 
 equal to that of Emerson to this high title? Of course, they 
 
differ widely both in the aid they offer and in their methods of 
 offering it. Emerson's aid is conditioned and Hmited, as I 
 have already said, by his want of a firm and self-consistent 
 doctrine of the imiverse, by his want of a philosophy. And 
 we must be just as ready to acknowledge that Edwards' aid 
 IS as clearlv conditioned and limited by his unfortunate poverty 
 m the humanities, by his notal)le lack of feeling for poetry and 
 letters. On the other hand and positively I think we may say, 
 that it would be hard to name a man of letters who, having 
 separated himself from all formulated philosophical and re- 
 ligious beliefs, has more nearly than Emerson exhausted the 
 resources of letters and poetry in the service of "those who 
 would live in the spirit." And among the great doctors of the 
 Christian Church, it would be as hard to name one more dis- 
 tinctively spiritual in character and aim than Edwards, or one 
 who, in cultivating the spiritual life in himself and promoting 
 it in others, has more consistently or more ably drawn on the 
 resources of his philosophy, his world-view, his Christian doc- 
 trine of the universe. 
 
 I am quite sure that this obvious likeness and difference 
 between Edwards and .Emerson is the right point of departure 
 for any large study of their affinity and opposition. Such a 
 study the day invites us to mention, but does not permit us to 
 undertake. The day belongs, not to the great Puritan who 
 gave up the Puritan conception of the universe for its inter- 
 pretation by poetry and letters, but to the great Puritan who 
 denied himself the high satisfactions of literature, that 
 through his distinctively Christian doctrine of God and man 
 he might be "the friend and aider of those who would live in 
 the spirit." It is to his spirituality, and to his intellectual gifts 
 and work, that I ask your attention. 
 
 Plow many writers have portrayed wdiat one of them 
 calls the "spirituality of mind" of the Northern and Teutonic 
 peoples ! One of the most striking passages in Taine's Eng- 
 lish Literature contrasts in this particular the Latin and Teu- 
 tonic races. And a New England theologian and man of let- 
 ters, in unfolding the truth that the Northern nations of Eu- 
 rope, unlike the Southern, were "spiritual in their modes of 
 
40 
 
 thouoht ■" calls our attention to the fact that -the Northern 
 heathen' had fewer gods than the Southern, and could believe 
 in their reality without the aid of visible form. He hewed no 
 idol and he erected no temple ; he worshiped his divinity m 
 spirit, beneath the open sky, in the free air." How far this 
 spiritual temper can be attributed to climate, to "the influences 
 which rained down from the cold Northern sky," we cannot 
 say. Racial character would best be accepted as an ultimate 
 fact. The fact itself is certain, that among the European peo- 
 ples, the race to which Edwards belonged was most strongly 
 marked by this spiritual quality. Moreover, it was precisely 
 by the greater strength and intensity of this racial quality that 
 the Puritan class was separated as a class from their own peo- 
 ple. Spiritualitv is what the logicians call the specific differ- 
 ence of Puritanism. The unshaken belief in the reality of the 
 spiritual universe, the ability to realize its elements without the 
 aid of material symbols, the strong impulse to find motives to 
 action in the unseen and eternal, to feed the intellect and the 
 heart on spiritual objects, and in distinctively spiritual exper- 
 iences or exercises to discern the highest joys and the deepest 
 sorrows and the great crisis of life— these were the traits 
 of the Puritans. And these traits were exhibited, not by a few 
 cloistered souls who obeyed the "counsels of perfection" and 
 were secluded from their fellows by special vows of poverty, 
 celibacy and obedience, but by the mass of the population in 
 Puritan New England; by countrymen and villagers and citi- 
 zens and statesmen. This spirituality organized the govern- 
 ments and determined the politics of vigorous commonwealths. 
 Theocratic republics, as spiritual as that which, under Savon- 
 arola, had so short a life in Florence, flourished for genera- 
 tions on American soil. It was in this Puritan society that 
 Jonathan Edwards' American ancestors lived. They were 
 typical Puritans, justly esteemed and influential in the com- 
 munities in which they dwelt. The convictions, traditions and 
 spirit of the class were theirs. This was especially true of 
 both his father and his mother. The simplicity, the sincerity, 
 the spirituality of Puritanism at its best were incarnate in 
 them; and it was the Puritan ideal of life which, before his 
 birth, they prayed might be actualized in their unborn child. 
 
 Belonging to this spiritual race, sprung from this spir- 
 itual class, descended from such an ancestry and born of such 
 
41 
 
 a parentage, we have the right to anticipate that his dominant 
 quahty wih be this spirituahty of which I have spoken. We 
 have the right to look for what Dr. Egbert Smyth calls, "Ed- 
 wards' transcendent spiritual personality," and concerning 
 which he says, that "the spiritual element" in Edwards "is 
 not a mere factor in a great career, a strain in a noble char- 
 acter. It is his calmest mood as well as his most impassioned 
 warning or pleading, his profoundest reasoning, his clearest 
 insight, his widest outlook. It is the solid earth on which he 
 treads" Dr. Smyth has thus stated in suggestive phrase the 
 supreme truth concerning Edwards ; the truth that his dom- 
 inating quality, his differentiating trait, his prevailing habit of 
 mind, is spirituality. The time at my disposal does not per- 
 mit tne illustration of this great quality in any adequate way. 
 I can only touch on a few particulars which may help us better 
 to appreciate it. 
 
 The careful student of Edwards is deeply impressed, first 
 of all, by his immediate vision of the spiritual universe as the 
 reality of realities. When I speak of the spiritual universe, I 
 am giving a name to no indefinite object of thought. I mean 
 God in His supernatural attributes of righteousness and love, 
 the moral beings created in His miage, the relations between 
 them, and the thoughts and feelings and activities whicii 
 emerge out of these relations. This was the universe in which 
 Edwards lived and moved and had his being. As he appre- 
 hended it, it was no mere subjective experience, no mere 
 plexus of sensations and thoughts and volitions. It was the one 
 fundamental substance and the one real existence. It was the 
 one objective certainty which stands over against the shadowy 
 and illusory phenomena that we group under the title matter. 
 And his vision of it was vivid and in a sense complete. He 
 knew it not only in its several parts, but as a whole, as an 
 ordered universe ; as the macrocosm which he, the microcosm, 
 reflected and to which he responded. 
 
 All this is true in a measure, to be sure, of all the other 
 saints and, indeed, of the sinners also. It is in what I have 
 .called the immediacy of his spiritual apprehension that his dis- 
 tniction lies. There is, of course, a sense in which the spiritual 
 -world is immediately discerned bv all of us. It is of spirit 
 rather than of matter that our knowledge is direct. That 
 
42 
 
 consciousness of a self which cannot be construed in terms of 
 matter, or that idea of self which is a necessary postulate of 
 all our thinking brings us at once into the universe of spirit. 
 But in order to the vivid realization of this spiritual universe, 
 there is necessary for the most of us a special activity or ex- 
 perience. And by this activity or experience our realization 
 of the spiritual world is mediated. Edwards, in this respect, 
 is a remarkable exception in his own class. Consider some 
 great and notable men of the spiritual type. Consider St. 
 yVugustine. How true it is that the great elements of the 
 spiritual world became vivid to Augustine through the media- 
 tion of his experience of sin ! And that these spiritual ele- 
 ments were always interpreted by the aid of that experience, 
 his Confessions abundantly testify. Or think of Dante. As 
 Augustine reveals in his Coufcssioiis the instrumental relation 
 to his deepening spirituality of the long period of sinful storm 
 and stress, Dante makes perfectly clear to us in The Nezu Life 
 that it was the love of Beatrice which so mediated for him the 
 spiritual world and so brought him under its sway, that in 
 order to repeat and interpret the vision of it he laid under 
 contribution his total gifts and learning. Or take John Cal- 
 vin. That fruitful conception — more fruitful in Church and 
 State than any other conception which has held the English- 
 speaking- world — of the absolute and universal sovereignty of 
 the Holy God as a revolt from the conception then prevailing 
 of the sovereignty of the human head of an earthly Church, 
 was historically the mediator and instaurator of his spiritual 
 career. 
 
 Now Edwards is distinguished from Augustine, Dante 
 and Calvin by the fact that his intuition of the spiritual uni- 
 verse was, in the sense in which I have used the world, imme- 
 diate. To a degree I should be unwilling to affirm of any oth- 
 er man I have studied, except one, his spirituality was natural. 
 That he was a sinner, needing regeneration and atonement, he 
 knew. That these were his blessed experience he was grate- 
 fully assured. But except the apostle called by eminence "the 
 Theologian," St. John the Divine, I know no other great char- 
 acter in Church History of whom it can so emphatically be 
 said, and when he 'breathed the pure serene" of tha spiritual 
 world and gazed upon its outstanding features, or explored 
 
43 
 
 its recesses, or studied the inter-relations of its essential ele- 
 ments, he did so as "native and to the manner born." To 
 quote again the words of Dr. Smyth: "It is the solid earth on 
 which he treads, its sleeping rocks and firm-set hills." 
 
 'i he spiritual universe, thus vividly and, immediately ap- 
 prehended as the reality of realities, of course, became, in turn, 
 the interpreter to himself of all he did and felt. It became 
 even the regnant principle of his association of ideas, so that 
 the unpurposed movements of his mind in reveries were de- 
 termined by it. How influential in his earliest thinking it was, 
 you will see if you study his Notes on mind and ultimate be- 
 ing; and how persistent it was, you will see in his latest ob- 
 servations on The End of God in Creation. It governed his 
 aesthetics also. The line between aesthetic emotion and spir- 
 itual feeling is sharp, and wide, and deep. Often as the two 
 are confounded by those whose sensibilities are strongly stirred 
 by beauty in nature or in fine art, it is still true that they are 
 as distinct as spirit and matter. The aesthetic emotion is ulti- 
 mate and never can be made over into spiritual affection. No 
 one knew this better than Edwards. But through both reflec- 
 tion and experience he reached and formulated the conclusion, 
 that the hig-hest and most enduring aesthetic emotion is that 
 which is called out not by material beauty but by holiness. 
 And he may be said to have unfolded the great mediaeval 
 phrase. "The beatific vision of God," into the doctrine of the 
 highest beauty, in his epoch-making treatise — epoch-making 
 in America certainly the treatise was — on The Nature of 
 Virtue. This seems to me a striking instance of the way 
 in which his spirituality permeated and irradiated his thinking. 
 , I think that even the traits of Edwards' style are best 
 explained by this same quality. It has often been said of him 
 that style is precisely what Edwards lacked. We are told 
 that, after reading Clarissa Harlozve, he expressed regret that 
 m his earlier years he did not pay more attention to style. We 
 may be thankful certainly that he did not form his style on 
 that of the affluent Richardson. I am unable to share the 
 regret he expressed ; unless, indeed, it was a regret that he 
 did not always take pains to make his literary product eminent 
 in the qualities of style which always marked it. Edwards 
 was above all things sincere; and his style is the man. Its 
 
44 
 
 qualities are clearness, severe simplicity, movement and force. 
 In these he is eminent, almost as eminent as John Locke; and 
 he is more eminent in his later than in his earlier composi- 
 tions. They finely fit his theme and his spirit. His theme in 
 substance is one. It is the spiritual universe, in some aspect 
 of it. And his spirit is that of a man dominated by those spir- 
 itual afl:ections which he teaches us are a lively action of the 
 will. It was appropriate that his style should be calm and 
 severe, and that even in his sermons it should lack the dilation 
 and rhythm of a rapt prophet's emotional utterance. Edwards 
 was no Montanist. He was a seer, indeed, but a seer with a 
 clear vision; and the spirit of the prophet was subject to the 
 prophet. No man of his day was, so far as I know, the sub- 
 ject of stronger or deeper spiritual afi^ections. But no one 
 knew better just what spiritual affections are. He knew es- 
 pecially how different they are from mere sensibility ; and he 
 was always calm under their sway. No other style than his 
 could have so well reflected and expressed this spiritual, un- 
 hysterical man. And I must believe that his is the direct fruit 
 of his spiritual cjuality. Certainly, it was spiritually effective. 
 Never did any one's discourse make a more powerful and at 
 the same time a more distinctively and exclusively spiritual 
 impression on audience or readers. One of the most charm- 
 ing of modern poems is that in which Tennyson portrays the 
 Lady Godiva, that she might take the tax from off her people, 
 riding at high noon through Coventry "naked, but clothed on 
 with chastity." So seem to me the bare and unadorned ser- 
 mons and discussions of Edwards. Straight through his sub- 
 ject to his goal this master moves ; unadorned yet not un- 
 clothed, but clothed upon with spirituality. 
 
 Or consider Edwards' emotional life. Dr. xA^llen, of Cam- 
 bridge, in his paper on The Place of Edzvards in History, has 
 dwelt fondly- on what he calls the spiritual affinity between 
 Dante and Edwards. He makes the remark, that "the deepest 
 of Edwards was not that with Calvin or with Augustine, but 
 with the Florentine poet." Now, I am sure, that of his affinity 
 with Augustine and with Calvin, Edwards was distinctly con- 
 scious. Cut nowhere, so far as I know, is there the slightest in- 
 timation that he had any interest in Dante's Nezv Life or The 
 Divine Comedy. He was no idealizing poet, no literary artist, 
 
45 
 
 no allegorizer ; and he seems to have taken little or no pleasure 
 in this kind of literature. Had there been a fundamental sym- 
 pathy between Dante and Edwards, it would have expressed 
 itself in Edwards' works with Edwards' characteristic dis- 
 tinctness. But not only is Dante not mentioned, but, what is 
 more striking, there is not an illusion, I think, in Edwards' 
 works to the poems of the Puritan John Milton or the alle- 
 gories of the Puritan John Bunyan. This seems inexplicable 
 on Dr. Allen's theory of a strong affinity between the New 
 England theologian and the Florentine poet. Most unhappy, 
 however, is the palmary instance of this alleged affinity selected 
 by Dr. Allen for remark. It is what he calls the striking 
 spiritual likeness between Dante's words touching his first 
 sight of Beatrice and Edwards' description of Sarah Pierpont. 
 I refer to them, not to criticise Dr. Allen, but because the strik- 
 ing contrast between them helps us the better to appreciate the 
 regnancy of Edwards' spiritual quality, even when he was" 
 under the spell of earthly love. 
 
 And the contrast is striking. Dante in noble and beau- 
 tiful words describes the dress that Beatrice wore. "Her 
 dress on that day was a most noble color, a subdued and good- 
 ly crimson, girded and adorned in such sort as best suited 
 with her tender age." He exalts her in a way which Edwards 
 would have severely reproved, in the words, "Behold the de- 
 ity which is stronger than I, who coming to me will rule with- 
 m me." And he confesses in powerful and poetic phrases the 
 violent effect upon his body which his strong emotion pro- 
 duced. The whole picture is charming, poetic, ideal, and was 
 written in a book for the public, years after the boy had seen 
 the girl. The greatest poet of his time, if not of all time, in 
 maturer life looks back upon the meeting and, with consum- 
 mate art, I do not say with insincerity, transfigures it. 
 
 How different is Edwards' well-known description of 
 Sarah Pierpont ! It was written in Edwards' youth, four years 
 before his marriage; not in a book for the public, but on a 
 blank leaf for his own eye. In its own way it is as engaging 
 as Dante's. But its way is not artistic or imaginative at all 
 It IS distinctively and exclusively spiritual. There is no ideal- 
 ization, no translation of the object of his love into a symbol 
 no physical transport, no agitation, no "shaking of the pulses 
 
46 
 
 of the body." We learn nothing of Sarah Pierpont's dress of 
 appearance or temperament. All he tells us about her is about 
 her spiritual qualities and her relations to the spiritual uni- 
 verse. , And at the last, on his deathbed, he sends to his absent 
 wife, this Sarah Pierpont, his love ; and again speaks of the 
 uncommon union between them as, he trusts, spiritual and 
 therefore immortal. Read in connection with the brief refer- 
 ences to his household life to be found in his biography, these 
 passages bring before us a man whose closest and tenderest 
 earthly love was transfigured, not by artistic genius, but by 
 what I have called his dominating spirituality. And both 
 passages issue naturally out of that spiritual conception of 
 beauty which he has so finely unfolded in the great essay on 
 Virtue. 
 
 This same quality manifests itself in the impartiality and 
 impersonality of his feeling under conditions well calculated 
 to awaken strong partial and personal feelings. Go through 
 the whole history of the unfortunate Northampton contro- 
 versy. Read the correspondence of Edwards, his speeches be- 
 fore the several Councils and the Fanvell Sermon. Or mark 
 his behavior vmder the trying conditions of a recrudescence in 
 Stockbridge of the enmity shown at Northampton. And you 
 will see what I mean, when I say that his spirituality is ex- 
 hibited in the impartiality of his feelings and the impersonality 
 of their objects. You will agree with me that in all of it he 
 was true to his thesis ; that private feelings must be subordi- 
 nated to that benevolence, that spiritual love of being in gen- 
 eral, which is the essence of virtue. Indeed, I recall no other 
 instance of a severe and protracted trial, in which the chief 
 figure appears so unconcerned about everything except its 
 spiritual significance. 
 
 But it is in the work to which he gave himself, in the 
 subjects on which he labored, in his method of treatment, in 
 the conclusions he reached, that Edwards' spirituality is most 
 impressively revealed. He was interested apparently in noth- 
 ing but the spiritual universe and the spiritual life. Of course, 
 the whole of Edwards is not known to us. We rarely, if 
 ever, catch sight of him in his avocations, so strong was his 
 sense of vocation. I discover in him no interest in politics, in 
 literature, in the plastic or even the intellectual arts. In dis- 
 
47 
 
 tinctively intellectual pursuits other than religious he did at 
 times engage. But he engaged in them, certainly in his ma- 
 turer years, only in order to the thorough concentration of 
 his powers on his spiritual work. Thus, when his mind was 
 strained by excessive study and would not hold itself to a 
 severely spiritual train of thought, or when his imagination 
 rose in rebellion and tempted him, he whipped each in to sub- 
 jection by setting his powers to the solution of a difficult 
 mathematical problem ; and so he regained possession of him- 
 self solely for high spiritual purposes. And how spiritual his 
 purposes were let the titles of his works testify, from the first 
 published sermon to the great treatises on Sin, Virtue and the 
 Will, and finally the great Body of Divinity in historical form, 
 which in his letter to the Trustees of Princeton he describes as 
 his coming work, and in describing which his soul expands 
 and his style, almost for the first time, becomes rhythmical. 
 
 We are therefore entitled to say with emphasis that the 
 dominant quality of Edwards is spirituality — spirituality of 
 mind, of feeling, of aim and action. The spiritual universe 
 was for him not only the most certain and substantial of real- 
 ities, but the exclusive object of contemplation. Purely spir- 
 itual feeling seems to have filled in his life the great spaces 
 which in the lives of most men are occupied by passionate 
 sensibilities and aesthetic pleasures. Or we may better say, 
 that his exceptional personality was the alembic in which these 
 sensibilities and pleasures were transmuted into the pure 
 distillate of spiritual feeling; until all his outgoing and active 
 affections rested on spiritual qualities and objects, and all his 
 reactions of emotion were the blessednesses of the spirit. 
 When his will energized and called the great powers of his 
 intellect into action it was on the most spiritual themes that 
 his mind wrought with the greatest ease and geniality. Dis- 
 tant in manner and reserved on most subjects, whenever he 
 conversed about heavenly and divine things of which his heart 
 was so full, "his tongue," says Dr. Samuel Hopkins, "was as 
 the pen of a ready writer." The spiritual world so completely 
 possessed him that its contemplation and exposition seems 
 never to have tired him. After receivinlf the invitation to 
 Princeton, he told his eldest son that for many years he had 
 spent fourteen hours a day in his study. Spiritual thinking 
 and feeling were thus both his labor and his recreation. 
 
48 
 
 This exclusive spirituality of Edwards explains his lack 
 of charm and interest. For obviously he is lacking here. Com- 
 pare with the lack of interest in Edwards the interest the 
 world has always taken in Luther, in the stormy career of 
 Knox, in the incessant and varied activity of Calvin, and earlier 
 than these in the dramatic life of Augustine. Shall we say 
 that he charms us less because he was a more spiritual man, or 
 only because he was more exclusively spiritual ; because he was 
 less wealthily endowed with humane sympathies? Is it because 
 of his delicate organization and feeble vitality? Or is it be- 
 cause, under the domination of the spiritual universe, and 
 knowing- well his own powers and limitations, he determined 
 to know this one thing only? Or is it, after all, only the de- 
 fect of his biographers? I do not know. Certainly he pre- 
 sents a striking contrast to the other great spiritual men whom 
 1 have named. And I think we are bound to acknowledge that 
 his remarkable separation in spirit from the feelings and tastes 
 and occupations of the people seriously limited his usefulness, 
 and seriously limits it to-day. But when all is said, his spir- 
 ituality is his strength. And in a world where social charm 
 and sympathy is abundant, and where high and exclusive 
 spirituality is in the greatest men as rare as radium ; we ought 
 to rejoice that of one of the greatest it is true that he was 
 bond-slave to the spiritual world. 
 
 The clue to Edwards then, his dominating and irradiating 
 quality, the trait which gave unity to his career, is his spirit- 
 uality. His was indeed, to repeat the fine word of Dr. Egbert 
 Smyth, "a transcendent spiritual personality." 
 
 II. 
 
 I have detained you so long on this subject that I must 
 treat briefly and inadequately Edwards' intellect and work. 
 
 It was as a bond-slave then to the spiritual universe that 
 all his work was done. Now his work was not that of a 
 philanthropist or a missionary. It was the work of a thinker. 
 The instrument with which he wrought was- his intellect; and 
 the word which describes the quality as distinguished from 
 the subject of his writings is the word, intellectual. This is 
 as true of his sermons as it is of his elaborate treatises. And, 
 
49 
 
 as a whole, his works constitute an intellectual svstem of the 
 spiritual universe. 
 
 Eminently intellectual in his activity, Edwards, so far as 
 I can see, had no intellectual pride. His intellect he regarded 
 simply as an instrument to be employed in the service of the 
 spiritual world. And as such an instrument, if we would do 
 him justice, we must regard it. We must seize and estimate 
 its outstanding traits as they reveal themselves in this char- 
 acteristic activity which he solemnly accepted as his vocation. 
 What, then, were the distinctive traits of Edwards' intellect, 
 and what position must we assign to him among intellectual 
 men, especially among theologians? 
 
 The genius of Luther and that of Calvin have often been 
 contrasted. There is a general agreement that while Luther 
 saw single truths with the greater clearness and the sooner 
 recognized their capital value, to Calvin must be attributed in 
 greater measure the gift of construction; the great gift by 
 which he organized in a system the principles of the Protestant 
 Reformation. Now though Edwards nowhere shows the bold- 
 ness and originality of either of these men ; though he never 
 inaugurated a new mode of Christianity like Luther or organ- 
 ized its theology like Calvin, and, therefore, holds no place 
 beside them in history ; he had both a gift of penetration like 
 Luther's and a gift of construction like Calvin's. It is also 
 true, I think, that in the subtlety of his intellect he was greater 
 than either. The man of all men whom he seems to me most 
 like intellectually and, indeed, every way— in the character of 
 his religious experience, in his genial acceptance of the theo- 
 logical system he inherited, in his philosophical insight, in his 
 power in the exposition of abstract truth, in his fruitfulness, 
 in his constructive ability and in his failure nevertheless to 
 leave behind him a completed system, in his fundamental philo- 
 sophical and theological views, in his idealism and Platonism 
 —IS Anselm of Canterbury. And, having regard to the works 
 they have left behind them— the one, the Monologium and 
 Pros! gill in , the Tract on Predestination, the Prayers and 
 Meditations, the Essay on Free Will and the Ctir Deus Homo, 
 and the other, the great sermons, the treatises on The Nature 
 of Virtue, The End of God in Creation, Original Sin, Justi- 
 fication by Faith, The Religious Affections and The Nature 
 
50 
 
 of the Freedom of the Will — I think that Edwards stands 
 fully abreast of the mediaeval philosopher and theologian. Had 
 Dante known Edwards as we know him, he would have given 
 him a place beside Anselm in the Heaven of the Sun. 
 
 In saving that Edwards is like Anselm, 1 have also in 
 mind the fact that there are two great classes of Theologians. 
 All Christian theology rests on Holy Scripture. But theo- 
 logians strikingly differ among themselves in the importance 
 they respectively assign to the history of doctrine and the 
 Church's symbols on the one hand, and to the concord between 
 the Word of God and the reason on the other. In the 
 medieval Church there were school divines who rested solely 
 on history and authority ; who had no confidence in the argu- 
 ment from the reason ; who did not believe that there is a 
 theologia naturalis. This tendency was strongest, perhaps, in 
 the Franciscan, Duns Scotus. In modern Protestant churches, 
 the tendency is, perhaps, strongest in the high Anglican 
 writers. Now while Edwards was in harmony with the Re- 
 formed Confessions, the absence of the Confessional or his- 
 toric_al spirit is noticeable in all his theological treatises. The 
 lack of it is explained partly by his training. In the curricu- 
 lum of the American Colonial College, historical studies were 
 slight and elementary, while studies which discipline the pow- 
 ers were pursued with a vigor and sincerity which the modern 
 University would do well to promote. We must regret, I 
 think, the lack in this great American theologian of large his- 
 torical culture and, by consequence, of the historical spirit. Be- 
 cause of it there is, in the positiveness of his assertions, in his 
 strong confidence in logical analysis and dialectic in them- 
 selves, and in his historical generalizations in The History of 
 Redemption, a quality which it is right to call provincial. 
 
 But if he is defective at this point, it is not too much to 
 say, that he is one of the greatest Doctors of the Universal 
 Church by reason of his singular eminence in three capital 
 qualities. In the first place, he is far more powerful than most 
 theologians in his appeal to the reason in man. I mean the 
 reason in its largest sense and as distinguished from the under- 
 standing. The reason itself, he held, as if he were a Cam- 
 bridge Platonist, has a large spiritual content. If I imder- 
 stand him, he went bevond the Westminster Divines in the 
 
51 
 
 value he put upon the Light of Nature. Of his actual appeal 
 to the reason, including under that term the conscience and the 
 religious nature, I have time only to say that it permeates and 
 gives distinction to his entire theological product. He ad- 
 dresses it with large confidence in his sermons, in his essay on 
 The End of God in Creation, in his chapter on the Satisfaction 
 of Christ written in the very spirit of the Cur Deus Homo, in 
 all his endeavors to ciuicken in reader and hearer the sense of 
 guilt and the fear of its punishment, in his great discourse on 
 Spiritual Light, and in his great volume on the Religious Af- 
 fections. In all of them a consummate theologian of the 
 reason distinctly appears. To this we must add his supremacy 
 in the related gifts of clear exposition, subtle distinction, and 
 acute polemic. To this supremacy the world has borne abun- 
 dant testimony. If he is like Anselm in his high estimate of 
 the reason, he is like Thomas Aquinas in his dialectical acute- 
 ness. Nor is this acuteness mere quickness of vision and alert- 
 ness in logical fence. His two greatest polemic works are 
 probably the essays on Original Sin and The Freedom of the 
 IVill. Both of them are profound as well as acute; both are 
 large in their conception of the subject ; and in both he is fair 
 to his antagonist, and, though not so largely, yet as really con- 
 structive as he is polemic. To these we must add, finally, a 
 consummate genius for theological construction. No one can 
 go through his collected works even rapidly, as I was com- 
 pelled to do this summer^, without seeing that a self-consistent 
 World-view or theory of the Universe was distinct and com- 
 plete in the consciousness of Edwards, and that it is the living 
 root out of which springs every one of his sermons and dis- 
 cussions. No theological writer is less atomistic. None is 
 less the prey of his temporary impulses or aberrations. No 
 theological essays less merit the name of disjecta nieuibra. 
 The joy of the completed literary presentation of this univer- 
 sal system, this spiritual and intellectual Cosmos, was denied 
 him. But it is in his works, just as completely as Coleridge's 
 system is in the Biographia Literaria and the Table Talk, just 
 as clearly as Pascal's Pyrrhonism lies open to us in his frag- 
 mentary Thoughts. Had he lived to complete at Princeton 
 his History of Redemption, his "body of divinity in an entire 
 new method," it is my belief that the world would have seen 
 in it the fruit of a constructive genius not less great than that 
 
52 
 
 which appears in the SuiiDiui of St. Thomas or in the Insti- 
 tutcs of Calvin. 
 
 Though no theologian more habitually conceived the 
 spiritual world as objective, yet his great powers and special 
 talents wrought best, and he produced his best work, when he 
 was writing on the religious life. That life he knew well, be- 
 cause of his own profound and vivid religious experience. But 
 he never wrote out of his experience alone. The Spiritual uni- 
 verse as a whole is before him as he -writes. It is always there- 
 fore the ideal religious life of the redeemed sinner he is de- 
 scribing. Hence its severity, its purity, its deep humility as it 
 measures itself with the absolute ethical and spiritual perfec- 
 tion. If we do not wish tO' sink into despair, we must not for- 
 get this as we read the greatest of his tracts, the essay on The 
 Religions Affections. 
 
 A theologian, so profound and so individual as Edwards 
 was, could not but have made many contributions of the high- 
 est importance to theological science. Now whatever Ed- 
 wards' distinctive contributions to theolog'y were, it is import- 
 ant to notice that they were contributions to the historical 
 theology of the Christian Church. He was in full concord 
 with the great Ecumenical Councils on the Trinity and the 
 Person of Christ. He thoroughly accepted the formal and 
 material principles of the Reformation. And he was con- 
 vinced of the truth of the great system known as Calvinism, 
 or the Reformed Theology. His greatness as a theologian 
 and his fruitfulness as a writer are rooted in the consent of 
 his heart, as well as the assent of his mind, to these historical 
 doctrines. And though, as I have said, individually he was 
 not distinctively informed by the historical spirit, yet he is in 
 the line of the historical succession of Christian theologians. 
 
 Turning to these distinctive contributions I have time to 
 name only one; but that one has been of immense historical 
 importance in America. Jonathan Edwards changed what I 
 may call the centre of thought in American theological think- 
 ing. There were great theologians in New England before 
 Edwards. I mention only John Norton of Ipswich, and Sam- 
 uel Willard of Harvard. They followed the Reformed School 
 Divines not only in making- the decree of God the constitutive 
 doctrine of the system, but in emphasizing it. Edwards did 
 
53 
 
 not displace the eternal Decree as the constitutive doctrine; 
 but by a change in emphasis he lifted into the place of first 
 importance in theological thinking in America the inward state 
 of man in nature and in grace. He appears to have been led 
 strongl}- to emphasize these related themes, partly by the Great 
 Awakening, and partly by the controversy on the Half-way 
 Covenant which followed it. No one, however, but a man of 
 genius could have made this change in emphasis so potent a 
 fact in American Church history. It is impossible to exag- 
 gerate the influence thus exerted by Edwards on American 
 theological and religious discussions and on American relig- 
 ious life. If I may so say, here is the open secret of the New 
 England theology from Samuel Hopkins to Horace Bushnell. 
 And more than to any other man, to .Edwards is due the im- 
 portance which, in American Christianity, is attributed to the 
 conscious experience of the penitent sinner, as. he passes into 
 the membership of the Invisible Church. 
 
 Quite as important as this distinctive contribution is the 
 tremendous stimulus and impetus he gave to theological spec- 
 ulation and construction. When I think of the Edwardean 
 School of New England theologians from Samuel Hopkins 
 to Edwards Park, between whom are included so many bril- 
 liant men, too many even to be named at this time, when I 
 think of the Edwardean theologians in my own Church, like 
 Henry Boynton Smith and William Greenough Thayer Shedd ; 
 when I think of the fruitful history of his works in Scotland 
 and England, and recall his real mastery over the minds he 
 influenced ; it seems to me that it is not too much to say that, 
 up to this time, his influence in the English-speaking world — 
 not on all thinking, but on distinctively dogmatic thinking — 
 has been as great as that of either Joseph Butler or Samuel 
 Taylor Coleridge. 
 
 I have thus endeavored to set before you my impressions 
 of Edwards' dominating quality, his intellectual gifts, and the 
 kind of work he did ; and to state the place which in my view 
 he holds among the theologians of the Universal Church. I 
 have refrained from eulogy. He is too consummate and sin> 
 cere a master for us to approach with the language of compli- 
 ment. But I should incompletely perform the duty you have 
 devolved upon me. did I fail to speak of two of his works 
 
which have been violently and repeatedly attacked. C )ne is the 
 essay on The Freedom of the IVill. The other is the Sermons 
 oil the Punishment of the Wicked. 
 
 ' The essay on the Freedom of the Will is essentially a 
 polemic, and only incidentally a constructive treatise. As a 
 polemic, therefore, it must be judged. He had before his 
 mind, not the whole voluntary nature of man as a subject to be 
 investigated, but the special Arminian doctrine of the lil)erty 
 of indifference as an error to be antagonized. What, there- 
 fore, the essay shows is, not his constructive ability, but his 
 ability as an antagonist. I have read carefully only one other 
 treatise in which the propositions as obviously move forward in 
 procession, with steps as firmly locked together. This other 
 treatise is theEthics of Spinoza. If you dare consentingly to 
 follow Spinoza through three kinds of knowledge up to his 
 definition of substance — which, since it is thought not in a 
 higher category but in itself, is self-existent ; which is and 
 can be one only ; and those known attributes "perceived to be 
 of the essence of this substance" are infinite thought and in- 
 finite extension — if you follow Spinoza thus far ; you will soon 
 find yourself imprisoned in a universe of necessity, and bound 
 in it by a chain of theorems, corollaries and lemmas impossi- 
 ble to be broken at any point. Your only safety is in obeying 
 the precept, Obsta priiieipiis. Quite equal to Spinoza's is Ed- 
 wards' essay in its close procession of ordered argument. Like 
 Spinoza he begins his treatise with definitions. And I cannot 
 see how anyone, who permits himself to be led without pro- 
 test through the first of the "Parts" of the essay, can refuse to 
 go on with him at any point in the remaining three. In read- 
 ing the treatise one should, above all, keep in view the fact 
 that, though it is polemic against a particular theory, it was 
 written in the interest of a positive theological doctrine. I 
 think we shall do justice to this doctrine if we state it in terms 
 like the following: "Man's permanent inclination in sinful; 
 and his sinful inclination will certainly qualify his moral 
 choices." This Augustinian doctrine Edwards defended by a 
 closely reasoned psychology of the will. Now I am not sure 
 that this great doctrine, which I heartily accept, was at all 
 aided by Edwards when he involved it with and defended it by 
 a particular psychology. And my doubt is deepened by what 
 
55 
 
 seems to me his unnecessary employment, in the spiritual 
 sphere, of terms taken from the sphere of nature, like "cause," 
 "determination" and "necessity." I can only call your atten- 
 tion to the fact that the defense of the religious doctrine, and 
 not his psychology, was Edwards' deepest anxiety. And who 
 of us is not prepared to say, that the bad man's badness is a 
 permanent disposition certain to emerge in his ethical volitions, 
 and that to revolutionize it there is needed the forth-putting 
 of the power of the Holy Ghost ? 
 
 But it is Edwards' sermons on llic Punishment of flie 
 Wicked which have awakened the strongest enmity ; an en- 
 mitv expressed often in the most violent terms. The rational 
 and Scriptural basis of the doctrine and the objections to it 
 need not be set forth here. Edwards accepted, defended and 
 proclaimed it. substantially in the form in which it has been 
 taught in the Greek, the Latin and the protestant Churches. 
 It is the doctrine of the Fathers, the mediaeval Schoolmen and 
 the Protestant theologians. Edwards' doctrine of Hell is ex- 
 actly one with the doctrine of Dante. Now it is of interest to 
 note that there is a widespread revulsion from Edwards, con- 
 sidered as the author of these Sermons, which does not and 
 so far as I am aware never did appear in the case of Dante, 
 considered as the author of the Inferno. What is the explan- 
 ation of the difference? Dante is praised and glorified by not 
 a few of those to whom the name of Edwards is for the same 
 reason a name of "execration and horror." Indeed, Dante has 
 been defended by a great American man of letters for rejoic- 
 ing in the pain of the damned ; while no one of Edwards" ser- 
 mons, unless it is Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, has 
 been more severely criticised as inhuman than the discourse 
 entitled, The Torments of the Wicked in Hell no occasion of 
 Grief to the Saints in Heaven. We shall do well, therefore, to 
 note the contrast between Dante's and Edwards' presentation 
 of the same subject. 
 
 When Dante was sailing through the Lake of Mud in the 
 Fifth Circle of Hell, there appeared before him suddenly 
 Philippo Argenti, who in this world was full of arrogance and 
 of disdain of his fellowmen, now clothed only with the lake's 
 muck. Pathetically he answers Dante's inc^uiry, "Who art 
 thou that art become so foul?" with the words, "Thou seest I 
 
56 
 
 am one who weeps." And Dante replies, "With weeping and 
 with waiHng, accursed spirit, do thou remain, for I know thee 
 ahhough thou art all filthy." Then Virgil clasps Dante's neck 
 and kisses his face and says, "Blessed is she who bore thee !" 
 And Dante replies, "Master, I should much like to see him 
 ducked in this broth before we depart from the lake." And 
 Virgil promises that he shall be satisfied. "And after this", 
 continues Dante, "I saw such rending of him by the muddy 
 folk that I still praise God therefor and thank Him for it. All 
 cried 'At Philippo Argenti !' and the raging Florentine spirit 
 turned upon himself with his teeth. Here we left him ; so that 
 1 tell no more of him." This is one of the passages in Dante's 
 poem of that Hell over whose entrance he read .these words : 
 "Through me is the way into eternal woe ; through me is the 
 way among the lost people. Justice moved my high creator ; 
 the divine Power, the supreme Wisdom, and the primal Love 
 made me. Before me were no things created unless eternal, 
 and I eternal last. Leave every hope, ye who enter here." 
 
 There is nothing in Edwards which, so far as I can judge, 
 equals this in its horrid imagery and suggestion. And yet 
 men enjoy Dante and the Inferno. They do not "execrate" 
 him for a "monster," as Dr. Allen says they do Edwards. And 
 in his great essay on Dante, Mr. James Russell Lowell makes 
 this very scene the text of an eloquent laudation of Dante's 
 moral quality, in which he says of him ; "He believed in the 
 righteous use of anger, and that baseness was its legitimate 
 quarry." Why is it that the attitude of the general public, 
 thus represented by Mr. Lowell, toward the Hell of Dante is 
 so different from the attitude of the same public toward the 
 Hell of Edwards? I think we shall find an answer to this 
 question in what I may call Edwards' spiritual realism. Of 
 course Dante is a realist also. How often this quality of his 
 poem has been pointed out to us ! But Dante's is the realism 
 of the artist, the poet who appeals to our imagination. Our 
 imagination being gratified, we enjoy the picture and even the 
 sensations of horror which the picture starts. Of all this there 
 is nothing in Edwards. There is no picture at all. There is 
 no picture at all. There is scarcely a symbol. Here and there 
 there is an illustration. But the illustrations of Edwards are 
 never employed to make his subject vivid to the imagination. 
 
57 
 
 They are intended simply to explicate it to the understanding. 
 The free, responsible, guilty and immortal spirit is immediately 
 addressed ; and the purely spiritual elements of the Hell of the 
 wicked, separated from all else, are made to appear in their 
 terrible nakedness before the reason and the conscience. The 
 reason and the conscience respond. We are angry because 
 startled out of our security. And we call him cruel, because 
 of the conviction forced on us that we are in the presence of 
 a terrible, even if mysterious, spiritual reality. Edwards al- 
 wavs spoke, not to the imagination, but to the responsible 
 spirit. Men realized when he addressed them that because they 
 are sinners, their moral constitution judicially inflicts upon 
 their personality remorse; and that remorse is an absolute, 
 immitigable and purely spiritual pain, independent of the con- 
 ditions of time and space and, therefore, eternal. 
 
 The Nineteenth Century, in one of its greatest poets,* 
 looking out on nature, sees no relief from this eternity of re- 
 morse ; that is to say, it sees no evidence, in nature's "tooth 
 and claw" that God will ever interfere to end this spiritual pain 
 and punishment. It only "hopes" that, "at last, far off," 
 "Winter will turn to Spring"-" I shall not attack any man for 
 a hope, maintained against the evidence of remorse within and 
 nature without, that the mystery of pain and moral evil will 
 be thus dissipated in their destruction. It is not my business 
 to denounce a thoughtful and reverent spirit like Tennyson, 
 because of any relief he may individually find, when facing 
 the most terrible revelation of nature and of his moral consti- 
 tution, in the "hope" which issues from our sensibility to pain 
 and from the sentiment of mercy which God has implanted 
 in us all. But I do say, that a man's private "hope" should 
 never be elevated to the dignity of a dogma, or be made a norm 
 of teaching, or he proposed as a rule of action. And I do pro- 
 test that it is the height of literary injustice, while praising 
 Dante, to condemn Edwards the preacher because, in his anx- 
 iety to induce men to "press into the kingdom," he preached, 
 not the private hope of Lord Tennyson, but the spiritual verity 
 to which the conscience of the sinner responds. Thus, in his 
 treatment of this darkest of subjects, that spirituality which 
 I have said was his dominant quality is regnant; and here, too, 
 
 *Tu Memoriam, liii-lvi. 
 
58 
 
 he should be called, "the friend and aider of those who would 
 live in the spirit." 
 
 With this protest I conclude. Let me say again, that I 
 am deeply grateful to you for the opportunity you have given 
 me to unite with you in this commemoration of the man we so 
 often call our greatest American Divine. He was indeed in- 
 expressibly great in his intellectual endowment, in his theo- 
 logical achievement, in his continuing influence. He was great- 
 est in his attribute of regnant, permeating, irradiating spirit- 
 uality. It is at once a present beatitude and an omen of fu- 
 ture good that, in these days of pride in wealth and all that 
 wealth means, of pride in the fashion of this world which 
 passeth away, we still in our heart of hearts reserve the high- 
 est honor for the great American who lived and moved and 
 had his being in the Universe which is unseen and eternal. 
 
 Stockbridge Street. 
 Elm planted by Timothy Edwards on the right. 
 
EDWARDS AT STOCKBRIDGE. 
 
 By Riov. William Edwards Park, D.D. 
 
 Like many great men wliD came after him Mv. Edwards 
 went West. To the hamlet then called Stockbridge, a little 
 clearing in the vast forest, along a wood path forty miles to 
 the westward Edwards wended his way. The land for this 
 small village which had been named Stockbridge from the 
 English home of its first settlers, had been purchased from 
 the Housatonic Indians in 1722, and in the year 175 1 it con- 
 tained twelve English speaking families and one hundred and 
 fifty families of Indians. If President Edwards on his' arrival 
 thither looked for communications with other men and larger 
 places, he would have seen toward the east Northampton, 
 which had lately repudiated him, .with Springfield, Worcester 
 and Boston lying beyond. Albany was then practically the 
 western frontier of the Jinglish settlements, and if the great 
 sage had turned his eye to the north, he would have seen a few 
 families in Pittsfield, beyond which stretched an unbroken 
 wilderness. When he remembered the goodly population 
 and refined culture of Northampton, he must have felt that 
 
60 
 
 his situation was contracting, but he had really reached a 
 great expansion and did not know it. He was called like 
 Abraham out of the Chaidees to a great place. From an 
 unpublished manuscript of the late Prof. E. A. Park, D. D., I 
 quote the following account of the memorable journey: "The 
 poet John Keets wrote for his own epitaph, 'Here lies one 
 whose name was writ in water.' " Jonathan Edwards does not 
 appear to have been sadaened by the injury done his own 
 name, as he rode over the rough and obscure road from his 
 home settlement on the edge of the wildernss to his new set- 
 tlement nearer the depth of the wilderness. Seldom indeed 
 has a man lived who thought so little of his name, while he 
 v/as entitled to have it written on a monument of marble. If 
 a picture could have been taken of him as he was travelling 
 from Northampton to Stockbridge, it would have been the 
 picture of a man touched with melancholy in view of incidents 
 attending his pastorate. Had the thrilling scenes of the "Great 
 Awakening" been obliterated from the memory of his parish- 
 ioners? Had his fervid discourses been written on water in- 
 stead of being engraved on the rock? We are often told that 
 the human heart is a kind of photographic plate, retaining, so 
 to speak, the impression made upon it by the light. Did the 
 light of Edwards' discourses make no impression upon the 
 hearts of his parishioners? Were those hearts covered with 
 blurred or distorted images? We may suppose him to have 
 been grieved by the untoward events which were the iiidiz'id- 
 iial sequences rather than the permanent results of his ministry. 
 We have reason to suppose, however, that although he may 
 have been cast down, his faith was not destroyed, that he re- 
 tained a strong confidence in the reality of religious revivals, 
 in the permanent efficacy of Divine truth, when preached ac- 
 cording to the Divine plan and in the Divine purpose, to over- 
 ride all the ends of the world for the good of the Church. 
 On his pathway through the woods he must have felt the mean- 
 ing of the adage that "The wolf is at the door." He must 
 have foreseen not only the continuance of the povertv, but the 
 addition of new discomforts when his invalid wife with her 
 young children should take up her abode with the Indians, and 
 her sons and daughters should enter the circle of uncongenial 
 companions. This passage to his Indian settlement afforded 
 him a rich opportunity for testing the influence of his favorite 
 
61 
 
 thoug-hts upon his own mind. He may have repeated to him- 
 self the following- reflections so often reiterated in different 
 forms throughout his published and unpublished writings: 
 "By virtue of the believers union with Christ he doth really 
 possess all things. I mean that he possesseth God, three in 
 one, and all that he has. and all that he does, and all that he 
 has made or done, the whole universe, bodies and spirits, light. 
 Heaven, angels, men or devils, sun, moon, stars, land and sea, 
 fish and fowls, all the silver and gold, all beings and perfec- 
 tions, are as much the Christian's as the money in his pocket, 
 the clothes he wears or the house he dwells in, or the victuals 
 he eats, 'yea, more advantageously his, than if he commanded 
 all these things mentioned to be just in all respects as he 
 pleased, by virtue of the union with Christ," because Christ, 
 who certainly doth possess all things, is entirely his, so that he 
 possesses it all, more than a wife the property of the best and 
 dearest of husbands. All the universe is his, only he has not 
 the trouble of managing it ; but Christ to whom it is no trouble 
 to manage, manages it for him, a thousand times as much to 
 his advantage as he could himself, if he had the managing of 
 all the atoms in the universe. Did Edwards believe in the 
 hour of his great trial that Jesus Christ was managing for him, 
 so that he possessed all things? 
 
 The regrets which others may have put into the thought 
 of this remarkable man may have never entered his mind. 
 Ihere is no doubt as to the promptness and resolution with 
 which he acted. He certainly met the emergency with tact, 
 courage and quick adaptation to new conditions. After the 
 dissolution of his pastorate at Northampton he had been invit- 
 ed by the "Commissioners at Boston of the Society for Propa- 
 gating the Gospel in New England and the parts Adjacent" to 
 become the missionary for the remnant of the once powerful 
 tribe of Housatonic Indians, then located in Stockbridge. This 
 rather humble position had been vacated two years before by 
 the death of the Reverend John Sergeant. Dr. Samuel Hop- 
 kins then settled in the neighboring town of Great Barrington, 
 was offered the position, but declined it in favor of Mr. Ed- 
 wards, Avhom he ardently wished to bring into the neighbor- 
 hood. The twelve white families also formed the nucleus of 
 a little church which called Mr. Edwards to its pastorate. 
 
62 
 
 From the church and the mission fund the great thinker re- 
 ceived a pittance of income which was supplemented by the 
 labors of his wife and daughters, who made fans and other 
 articles, which were sold in the market at Boston. The new 
 missionary was obliged to erect for himself and family a house 
 such as few of us would wish to live in, but which in that 
 age was called commodious. He was compelled to defray 
 the cost of the edifice from his slender purse before he had dis- 
 posed of his Northampton property. We fear that "the wolf 
 was very near the door." In August, 175 1, Mr. Edwards was 
 installed as pastor of the little church, and assumed the care 
 of the Indian mission. Mr. Timothy Woodbridge instructed 
 the Indian children faithfully in the day school during the 
 week, while Edwards preached twice a week to the whites and 
 twice to the Indians. Considering the elementary character of 
 the services to the Indians and the great amount of sermon ma- 
 terial used in a former pastorate and available in a new church, 
 the duties of the 'new minister were not for him arduous. But 
 the persecution which had almost crushed him at Northampton 
 followed him to his new home, led on by a member of the 
 same family which had harassed him in his old church. The 
 greedy and knavish individual referred to attempted by repre- 
 sentation, specious and ingenious, but entirely false, to oust 
 the missionary from his position that he might secure the dis- 
 tribution of the Indian mission fund for himself. In reading 
 the correspondence between Mr. Edwards and the ring of 
 would-be Indian thieves, we might suppose that the mission- 
 ary was dealing with a modern contractor who furnished sup- 
 plies to the Sioux or Modocs. They expected to outwit 
 with ease the metaphysical speculator. But the metaphysician, 
 a far shrewder and more practical man of the world than has 
 ever been supposed, handled the thieves as he did the Armin- 
 ians in controversy, brought to light their long series of lies, 
 cut off all outlet of escape, and forced the chief conspirator to 
 cry for mercy and leave the town for the general good, after 
 he had failed to secure it. Freed from the annoyances of these 
 men, although the contest had cost him much time and troub- 
 le, Edwards addressed himself to the work before him. 
 
 In our opinion this great thinker and scholar at his time 
 of life, and with his habits of thought and work almost unal- 
 
63 
 
 terably formed, was not adapted to be a mere missionary to the 
 Indian. He did his task faithfully, but the work did not draw 
 out his strongest faculties. His predecessor. Sergeant, by 
 means of industry, tact and good judgment, did a work for 
 the savages which was better than that of the far greater man 
 who followed him. Neither did Edwards seem to pursue the 
 work with all the enthusiasm of his nature, fie gave to it only 
 a part of his great personality. He never learned the language 
 of the Indians, as he certainly could have done, and as Ser- 
 geant and Eliot had done before him, but addressed them reg- 
 ularly through an interpreter after the manner of Brainerd. 
 Only a few of his sermons to the Indians have been preserved. 
 They are ingenious, forcible and able, but abound in defini- 
 tions too precise and distinctions rather too subtle for the mind 
 of the savage, although the preacher may occasionally have 
 had the Mohawk chief, *Hendricks, in his congregation. 
 
 Half unconsciously to himself, without forming any spec- 
 ial design, Edwards was led on to the work in order to do 
 which he had been taken from the large place and set down in 
 the small one. He was to put in shape for the use of posterity, 
 all the accumulated treasures of his mind. Had he not been 
 sent to his little forest church, he would have left us fragment- 
 ary ideas, and the beginnings of many treatises not one of 
 which he could have finished. As Thucidides was banished 
 from Athens, and left his petty occupations there that he might 
 write his history of the Peloponesian war, which is the great 
 master-piece of the historians' art, as Dante was taken out of 
 the intrigues and petty squabbles of the Florentine Republic, 
 that he might give to the world the Divine Comcdia, so Ed- 
 wards was taken from his work at Northampton, which he had 
 practically finished, that in rural seclusion he might lay foun- 
 dations and build towers for the construction of a new theo- 
 logical literature. 
 
 At a time when he was recovering from a protracted 
 sickness, and was busy in destroying the vermin who wanted 
 to nibble at the Indian School Fund, he planned and completed 
 his immortal work on The Freedom of the Will. Tradition 
 
 *Note: — Hendricks lived at this time in the Mohawk valley, 
 but had a grandson in the Stockbridge School where he occasion- 
 ally visited. 
 
64 
 
 affirms that in the httle closet, seven feet by three and a half, 
 which he supposed to be a study, he wrote the work in the 
 forenoons of four and a half months, much less time 
 than an ordinary man would need in order to understand 
 it ! This rapidity of composition is, in one sense marvelous, 
 in another sense easy and natural for the author. In produc- 
 ing so profound a book in such a brief time Edwards embodied 
 the results of forty years' study. The work may be compared 
 to Daniel Webster's speech on Foote's Resolution, with the 
 materials collected during twenty-five years experience, but 
 put together in a day and night. The book contains some er- 
 rors in Biblical interpretation, neither does the author always 
 adhere closely to his definitions, but he succeeds in proving 
 that the human choice pla3''s within the circumference of a vast 
 decree, just as passengers on an ocean steamer are free to 
 move around all parts of the ship while the ship carries them 
 with its own motion over which they have no control. 
 
 The work on The Freedom of the Will had a natural con- 
 nection with that upon Original Sin, and the second book may 
 be considered to be explanatory of the first. On the whole we 
 consider this to be the most able, but least fortunate of Ed- 
 wards' great treatises. Who is there who can examine the 
 Origin of Sin, look down into that bottomless pit, and keep a 
 steady head? Yet considering that the subject lies almost 
 outside the range of the human faculties, the work of Ed- 
 wards is a master-piece. It seemed at one time as though the 
 great reasoner's course of argument would compel him to ad- 
 mit that God was the author of sin, a conclusion which was 
 abhorrent to his reverential nature. Driven toward a shore 
 upon which he is determined not to land, the argument of Ed- 
 wards becomes somewhat obscure and evasive. The celebrat- 
 ed Dr. Emmons declared that: "President Edwards' work on 
 Original Sin is a great floundering in the mire, but it takes a 
 great horse to make such a great floundering." 
 
 There is extant an interesting letter from Dr. Samuel 
 Hopkins, who afterwards bec&me the noted pastor of Newport, 
 •R. I., but who was at this time the minister of a little church 
 in Great Barrington, adjacent to Stockbridge, and was 
 therefore Edwards' nearest clerical neighbor. The letter is 
 dated September 4, 1754, addressed to the Reverend Joseph 
 
65 
 
 Bellamy, and contains the following sentences, among others : 
 "1 visited Mr. Edwards at his home in Stockbridge. He has 
 fever and ague, and suffers a fit every day. He mourned be- 
 cause he was laid aside from doing God's work, and feared 
 that his church and mission would be depleted during the time 
 of his illness. On the following Lord's day afternoon, I was 
 beginning the service in my own church and while 1 was read- 
 ing the Psalm, news came that Stockbridge was beset by an 
 army of Indians and the town set on fire. The congregation 
 was scattered in a twinkling. In the course of two hours a 
 troop, of people rushed from Stockbridge into Barrington. It 
 turned out that two men and one woman had been killed, but 
 only two Indians were seen near Stockbridge. It was rather 
 a false alarm. The troops afterwards came to our assistance. 
 They have seen Stockbridge, eaten up all our provisions and 
 gone. The sight of two Indians cost the colony about tweaity 
 thousand pounds." In a letter of President Edwards to a 
 friend, referring probably to the same transaction he says : 
 "During the recent outbreak eighteen soldiers were quartered 
 at my house. They filled our spare rooms, and some of them 
 had to sleep in the barn and outhouses." Soon afterwards he 
 sends to the General yVssembly of Massachusetts the following 
 statement of account: "My family furnished to the soldiers 
 eight hundred meals of victuals. I have kept horses amounting 
 to pasturing one hundred and fifty horses for twenty-four 
 hours, and have expended seven gallons and a quart of West 
 India rum. Two Indians put the colony to fifty thousand 
 pounds charge, and never exposed themselves. A fort was 
 built near my house. We gave the laborers one hundred and 
 eighty meals of victuals. They used up fifteen rods of new log 
 fence, which had cost me two shillings a rod. I make no 
 charge for entertaining poor people, who have been driven 
 from their settlements by fear of the enemy, but I think I 
 might be paid for maintaining troops and laborers in the em- 
 ploy of the province." The General Court of Massachusetts 
 allowed him eighteen pounds. 
 
 While worn out with his unintermitted thirteen hours 
 daily of study, harassed by mean and intriguing men, who la- 
 bored to oust him from his position that they might secure 
 control of the Indian mission fund, afterwards sick with fever 
 
66 
 
 and ague, with his church services interrupted by Indian raids, 
 with his house overrun with provisional troops, while his wife 
 and daughters were obliged to make fans and other articles 
 to eke out the scanty income of the family, himself obliged to 
 write his sermons in a fine hand in order to economize in paper 
 and make the note books for the material of his immortal dis- 
 courses on the blank sides of old church notices, and the dis- 
 carded patterns of fans and ladies caps, especially the note 
 book consisting of one hundred and fifty pattern sheets cut 
 in the shape of a half moon, and carefully sewed together, Ed- 
 wards sat down in his closet of three and a half feet by seven, 
 to write his treatise on The Last End of God in the Creation 
 of the World. How he could have collected his thoughts for 
 such a theme while distracted with sickness, "wars and rumors 
 of wars," struggles to maintain his position, and struggles to 
 support his large family upon the scanty income which the po- 
 sition afforded, we cannot imagine. But the work appeared 
 and seemed to perpetuate the ideas of the mystic thinkers of 
 the Middle Ages, while it closed the author's long continued 
 controversy with the Arminians. He projected a work on the 
 Mystery of the Trinity from which we quote a few exquisite 
 sentences showing the beautiful objects in nature which he had 
 seen during his rides and walks about Stockbridge. In speak- 
 ing of the subtle emanations of the Deity he says : "The Son 
 of God created the world for the very end to communicate 
 himself in an image of his own" excellency. The beauties of 
 nature are really emanations or shadows of the excellency of 
 God. So that when we are delighted with flowers, meaddws 
 and gentle breezes of wind, we may consider that we see only 
 the emanations of the sweet benevolence of Christ. The green 
 trees and fields and the singing of birds are emanations of his 
 purity. The easiness and naturalness of trees and vines are 
 shadows of this beauty and loveliness. The crystal rivers and 
 murmuring streams are the footsteps of his favor, grace and 
 beauty. When we behold the light and brightness of the sun, the 
 golden edge of the evening cloud, we behold the adumbrations 
 of his glory and goodness ; and in the blue sky of his mildness 
 and gentleness. The beauteous light is a lively shadow of his 
 spotless holiness and a happiness and delight in communicating 
 himself. This is the reason why Christ is compared to these 
 things and called by their names. The Sun of Righteousness. 
 
67 
 
 the morning star, the rose of Sharon, the lily of the valley, 
 the apple tree among the trees of the wood, a bundle of myrrh, 
 a roe or a young hart. We see the most proper image of the 
 beauty of Christ when we see beauty in the human soul." Af- 
 ter tliis beautiful composition was finished, the indefatigable 
 thinker drew up a scheme for: "The History of Redemption 
 being a Bodv of Divinity in the form of a History." His 
 plan was to illustrate every doctrine of theology by the records 
 of God's dealings with mankind in history. But he lacked 
 the' historical education needed for such a treatise, and for 
 many reasons the project was impracticable.- The historic 
 theologians of the future must complete the work, the plan 
 only remains to attest the vastness of Edwards' mind. With 
 the' writing of the "Notes on the History of Redemption," the 
 career of Edwards at Stockbridge practically ends. The call 
 to the presidency of Princeton College, the brilliant opening 
 of his administration and his sad and sudden death on the 
 threshold of his work, must be described by others. The tra- 
 dition is, that when the Council decided to advise the renowned 
 thinker to leave his little church and assume his great and 
 new office, Edwards burst into tears. The educational inter- 
 ests of the nation called him to go forward, but his heart re- 
 mained with his Indians and his schemes of authorship. 
 
 We like to connect the evolution of the world's history 
 with certain spots. There have been during the centuries 
 centres of political activity and centres of the world's thought. 
 In ancient days the religious opinion of the world was mould- 
 ed at Jerusalem and her aesthetic taste was formed at Athens. 
 In modern times the ideas of the world have been generated 
 at the Sorbonne of Paris ; the Church of St. Frydeswide at Ox- 
 iord ; the universities of Harvard and Yale. Neither is it fitting 
 to conclude without a reference to the little closet study at 
 Stockbridge in which lived and toiled the man who made the 
 doctrines of John Locke old fashioned, proved liimself to be 
 the peer of Leibnitz and Descartes, and made his little forest 
 church the focal centre of the religious thought of the seven- 
 teenth centurv. 
 
EDWAiiDS' Library Table. -Conch Shei.t, Used in Calling the Peopi.b 
 • TO Meeting.— Communion Tankard. 
 
 MuKAL Tablet in the Stockbbidge Church. 
 
PAMPHLET BINDEi 
 
 ^ZZ Syracuse, N 
 
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 DATE DUE 
 
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 1 1012 01039 1896 
 
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