HOSEA BALLOU AND THE LARGER

HOPE.

"How is it," Sir James Mackintosh was once asked by a student of English politics, "that I never hear a word about the blessings of liberty and the glory of the British Constitution in your debates?" "Because," was the reply, "we take all that for granted." So, if one turns to the utterances of those who broke with the orthodoxy of the eighteenth century in asserting the final victory of good over evil, he will find in them comparatively little in defence of the right to religious liberty and freedom of thought and of conscience. The pioneers of the larger hope were also pioneers of religious liberty in America. But they said little about it, because they believed so much in it. They took all that for granted. They were so absorbed in the proclamation of the truth they were called to declare that they had neither the time nor the mind to discuss their right to utter it. They wasted no words in arguing their right proclaim the larger vision and the higher truth. They broke through the theological bounds, took possession of the new ground, and went to work to clear it

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up for permanent occupancy. Their brave selfassertion was in itself the largest sort of victory for liberty. While others took to dissenting about liberty, they took the liberty of dissenting. They ignored all protests, threats, anathemas, and went straight about their task of opening up a theological territory wide enough to take their stand on the love and fatherhood of God, and its assurance of good to the whole family of mankind. They led the pioneer's life; and their lot was one of spiritual privation and intellectual loneliness, with few theological neighbors, and the nearest of these rather distant and reserved. But their little clearing grew; and new settlers began to move in and take up the region round about, and sent word back to the older communities of the spirit that here was a land flowing with religious milk and honey. And the result has been that, after a hundred and more years, immigration has become so fast and forward that the theological heirs of these early settlers are kept busy in the probate court of history, proving priority of occupancy and title. It is always a privilege for one who has entered into their labors to rehearse the story of their protest and its significance, to a jury of candid Christian minds.

There was need, when they began it, of

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test and revolt. The atmosphere of the eighteenth century in America was heavy and depressing. One need not accept the extreme and bitter denunciations of the age common to the evangelists who attacked its sins and shortcomings. But, even in the cold light of historic inquiry, the facts do not indicate any theological or spiritual stir and vitality. The religious tendencies were depressing. Professor Williston Walker has written of the times: "Taken as a whole, no century in American religious history has been so barren as the eighteenth. The fire and enthusiasm of Puritanism had died out on both sides of the Atlantic.... While New England shone as compared with the spiritual deadness of Old England in the years preceding Wesley, the old fervor and sense of a national mission were gone, conscious conversion, once so common, was unusual, and religion was becoming more formal and external.” In spite of repeated revival seasons; in spite of the labors of Wesley and Whitefield and Tennant, with their searching evangelism; in spite of Edwards and Hopkins, whose relentless theology ought to have driven their contemporaries pellmell to conversion,- the century dragged on without any real touch of heavenly fire, any real accent of the Holy Ghost. It is the opinion of Dr. Walker that, "religiously estimated, even

Boston was not what it had been in the days of its founders. The old Puritan enthusiasm had departed; and, though the Sunday congregations were large and Sunday was observed with a strictness which surprised English visitors, the Thursday lecture, once so popular, was greatly neglected." That was a sure sign of moral degeneracy and recession, and it was the cause of open comment and sorrow. Judge Sewall once noted in his diary, April

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16, 1697: "Mr. Cotton Mather gives notice that the lecture is hereafter to begin at Eleven of the Clock, an hour sooner than formerly. Reprov'd the townspeople that attended better: feared 'twould be an omen of our not enjoying the lecture long, if did not amend." The same state of things seems to have recurred a half-century later. But there must have been amendment, in part at least; for the Thursday lecture persists, in its perennial freshness.

But, whatever laxness may have marked the manners or the observances of the people, there was none whatever in their creed. The old theology held fast, with a tenacity unyielding at any point. How sure men were that it was the very word of God may be inferred from the answer of Samuel Hopkins, when asked, at the end of his life, whether he would make any alterations in

the sentiments expressed in his "System of Divinity." "No," was his stalwart reply, "I am willing to rest my soul on them forever." Its hold must have been deadly, or men would have revolted headlong at the awful preaching of Edwards. The effort to vindicate this mighty man and give him a sweeter repute in our day can never efface the horrors of his theology, nor mitigate the intellectual perversity which could so misread and malign the gospel. "We revolt," says Professor Walker, giving exact references to verify his paraphrases, "as we read Edwards's contention that the wicked are useful simply as objects of the destructive wrath of God; as he beholds the unconverted members of the congregation before him withheld for a brief period by the restraining hand of God from the hell into which they are to fall in their appointed time; as he pictures the damned glowing in endless burning agony, like a spider in the flames; and heightens the happiness of the redeemed by contrast between the felicities of heaven and the eternal torments of the lost, visible forever to the saints in glory." "No wonder," adds the chronicler, "that one of his congregation was led to suicide, and others felt themselves grievously tempted." The unnaturalness of any religious experience born of such preaching is admitted to-day.