when you have so done, when so many ages have actually been spent by you in this manner, you will know that all is but a point to what remains."

In view of such doctrine as this, his last sermon to the church of Northampton, delivered on June 22, 1750, becomes very grim. His final trouble with his parishioners arose from a decay in church discipline which by that time. had grown conspicuous. In the New England churches there had early arisen something called the Half Way Covenant, by which those who had received baptism in infancy might in turn present their own children for baptism. At first, however, no one was admitted either to the Lord's Supper or to the voting privileges of a church without performing some personal act of public consecration. As time went on, and discipline relaxed, many ministers, among them Edwards's grandfather Stoddard, began to administer the communion to those who were consecrated to the Lord by the Half Way Covenant only. The chief ground of Edwards's dispute with his congregation was his refusal of the sacrament to persons who had not formally joined the church. And here are some of the words in which he bade his flock farewell:

"My work is finished which I had to do as a minister: You have publicly rejected me, and my opportunities cease.

How highly therefore does it now become us, to consider of that time when we must meet one another before the chief Shepherd? When I must give an account of my stewardship, of the service I have done for, and the reception and treatment I have had among the people he sent me to: And you must give an account of your conduct toward me, and the improvement you have made of these three and twenty years of my ministry. There is nothing covered that shall not be revealed, nor hid which shall not be known; all will be examined in the searching, penetrating light of God's omniscience and glory, and by him whose eyes are as a flame of fire; and truth and right shall be made plainly to appear, being stripped of every veil; and all error, falsehood, unrighteousness and injury shall be laid open, stripped of every disguise; every specious pretense, every cavil, and all false reasoning shall vanish in a moment, as not being able to bear the light of that day. . . . Then every step of the conduct of each of us in

this affair, from first to last, and the spirit we have exercised in all shall be examined and manifested, and our own consciences shall speak plain and loud, and each of us shall be convinced, and the world shall know; and never shall there be any more mistake, misrepresentation, or misapprehension of the affair to eternity."

This unflinching insistence on sin and its penalty has impressed people so deeply that they have been apt to hold it comprehensive of Edwards's theological system. Really this is far from the case. He stoutly defended the divine justice of his pitiless doctrine, to be sure, with characteristically impregnable logic:

"God is a being infinitely lovely, because he hath infinite excellency and beauty. To have infinite excellency and beauty, is the same thing as to have infinite loveliness. He is a being of infinite greatness, majesty, and glory; and therefore he is infinitely honourable. He is infi nitely exalted above the greatest potentates of the earth, and highest angels in heaven; and therefore is infinitely more honourable than they. His authority over us is infinite; and the ground of his right to our obedience is infinitely strong; for he is infinitely worthy to be obeyed in himself, and we have an absolute, universal, and infinite dependence upon him.

"So that sin against God, being a violation of infinite obligations, must be a crime infinitely heinous, and so deserving of infinite punishment."

Yet in spite of all this, he held, God now and again shows unmerited mercy, which may by chance be granted to any one of us. We have seen already how surely he believed this vouchsafed to the lady who became his wife. Here is another of his infrequent statements of fact, recording how divine grace came to one Phebe Bartlet, a child of Northampton, born in March, 1731

"On Thursday, the last day of July (1735), the child being in the closet, where it used to retire, its mother heard it speaking aloud, which was unusual, and never had been observed before; and her voice seemed to be as of one exceeding importunate and engaged, but her mother could distinctly hear only these words, (spoken in her childish manner, but seemed to be spoken with extraordinary earnestness, and out of distress of soul) Pray Bessed Lord give me salvation! I pray, beg pardon all my sins! When the child had done prayer, she

came out of the closet, and came and sat down by her mother, and cried out aloud. Her mother very earnestly asked her several times, what the matter was, before she would make any answer, but she continued exceeding crying, and wreathing her body to and fro, like one in anguish of spirit. Her mother then asked her whether she was afraid that God would not give her salvation. She then answered yes, I am afraid I shall go to hell! Her mother then endeavoured to quiet her, and told her that she would not have her cry . . . she must be a very good girl, and pray every day, and she hoped God would give her salvation. But this did not quiet her at all ... but she continued thus earnestly crying and taking on for some time, till at length she suddenly ceased crying and began to smile, and presently said with a smiling countenance. . . . Mother the kingdom of heaven is come to me! Her mother was surprised at the sudden alteration, and at the speech, and knew not what to make of it, but at first said nothing to her. The child presently spake again, and said, there is another come to me, and there is another . . . there is three; and being asked what she meant, she answered . . . One is, thy will be done, and there is another . . . enjoy him for ever; by which it seems that when the child said, there is three come to me, she meant three passages of its catechism that came to her mind."

Hideous as this picture of Puritan infancy must seem in certain moods, there are others, and moods which to Edwards would have seemed much more rational, in which it takes on an aspect of ecstatic beauty. According to the system from which he never wavered, the misery and the subsequent joy of this little child meant that, for no merit of her own, God had been mercifully pleased to receive her into the fellowship of the saints, wherein she was destined to enjoy for ever such peace as his own words shall describe :—

"The peace of the Christian infinitely differs from that of the worldling, in that it is unfailing and eternal peace. That peace which carnal men have in the things of this world is, according to the foundation it is built upon, of short continuance; like the comfort of a dream, 1 John ii. 17, I Cor. vii. 31. These things, the best and most durable of them, are like bubbles on the face of the water; they vanish in a moment, Hos. x. 7.

"But the foundation of the Christian's peace is everlasting; it is what no time, no change, can destroy. It will remain when the body dies; it will remain when the mountains depart and the hills shall be removed, and when the heavens shall be rolled together as a scroll.

The fountain of his comfort shall never be diminished, and the stream shall never be dried. His comfort and joy is a living spring in the soul, a well of water springing up to everlasting life."

In plain truth, what people commonly remember of Edwards is merely one extreme to which he reasoned out his consistent system. Like the older theology of Calvin and of Augustine, it all rests on the essential wickedness of the human will, concerning which Edwards's great treatise is still held a strong bit of philosophising. He asserts something like an utter fatalism, a universality of cause affecting even our volition, quite beyond human control. This fatal perversion of human will he believes to spring from that ancestral curse which forbids any child of Adam to exert the will in true harmony with the will of God. Reconciliation he holds possible only when superhuman power comes, with unmerited grace, to God's elect.

Once accept Edwards's premises, and you will be at pains to avoid his conclusions. Yet it is hardly too much to say that long ago American posterity has generally rejected both, more absolutely indeed than it may come to reject them in the future. One can see why. In his American world, so relieved from the pressure of external fact that people generally behaved much better than is usual in earthly history, Edwards, whose personal life was exceptionally removed from anything practical, reasoned out with unflinching logic, to extreme conclusions, a kind of philosophy which is justified in experience only by such things as occur in densely populated, corrupt societies. Augustine wrote amid the corruption of decadent Rome, whose ruined amphitheatres still testify to the brutal excess of pleasure which could subsist amid what seemed civilisation, and whose fashionable vices had run in men and women alike to more than Neronic excess. Calvin reiterated this theology in a Europe where the most potent family was the Medici, the Florentine race whose blood combined with that of degenerate Stuarts to complete the degra

dation of royalty in Charles II., and James, and the Pretenders. And, a century and more later, this Jonathan Edwards tried logically to extend Calvinism in a world where there were few more dreadful exhibitions of human depravity than occasional cheating, the reading of eighteenth-century novels, — which Edwards is said to have held dangerously obscene, and such artless merry-making and moonlight flirtation as have always gladdened youth in the Yankee country. Whoever knew American life in the middle of the eighteenth century and honestly asked himself whether its manifestations were such as the theology of Edwards would explain, could hardly avoid a deeper and deeper conviction that even though he was traditionally accustomed to accept the premises, which so clearly involved Edwards's conclusions, somehow these conclusions were not so.

By the middle of the eighteenth century, in short, religious thought in America had divorced itself from life almost as completely as from politics. The slow result was certain. In 1857, nearly a hundred years after the death of Edwards, the most familiar and unanswerable comment on his system appeared. Often misunderstood, generally thought no more than a piece of comic extravagance, Dr. Holmes's "OneHoss Shay" is really among the most pitiless satires in our language. Born and bred a Calvinist, Holmes, who lived in the full tide of Unitarian hopefulness, recoiled from the appalling doctrines which had darkened his youth. He could find no flaw in their reasoning, but he would not accept their conclusions. In a spirit as earnest, then, as his words seem rollicking, he wrote of Edwards thus :

"Little of all we value here

Wakes on the morn of its hundredth year
Without both feeling and looking queer.
In fact, there's nothing that keeps its youth,
So far as I know, but a tree and truth.

(This is a moral that runs at large;

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