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Copyright, 1903, by CHARLES SCRIBNEK'S SONS

Published, October, 1903

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HAVE NOT ACaUAINTED THEMSELVES WITH THE

CHARACTER AND WRITINGS

OF EDWARDS

PREFACE

The major part of the manuscripts of Jonathan Edwards was for a good while in the hands of the late Professor Edwards A. Park, for him to use in composing a biography of Edwards which he had projected— —a task for which that eminent theological teacher was in many respects admirably qualified. This undertaking, however, owing to his advanced age and his high ideal of what the proposed biography should be, was not carried by him beyond its early preparatory stages. On his decease, in accordance with an arrangement made a number of years before with the representative of the Edwards family, by whom the papers had been lent to Professor Park, they were transferred permar nently to Yale University.

One of the manuscripts thus received, printed from a careful transcription, forms the concluding Part of the present volume. The sketch of the principal events in the life of the Author, and the characteristics of his theology, which forms the Introduction, I have thought would not be unwelcome, especially as the Fifth of October, 1903, is the two-hundredth anniversary of his birth. Prior to the more general Introduction, some statements pertaining to the literary history of the treatise which follows it will not be out of place.

Most of the persons who are interested in theological inquiries can hardly fail to be desirous to ascertain what were the thoughts of so great a theologian as Jonathan Edwards on the subject of the Trinity. A half-century ago, rumors were afloat concerning an Essay on this subject which was represented to exist in manuscript among his unpublished papers. As early as 1851 Dr. Bushnell called for the publication of a manuscript "treatise" from the pen of Edwards, which had been described to him as an " a priori argument for the Trinity," that would occasion surprise were it suffered to appear in print. 1 In 1880, Dr. 0. W. Holmes also complained that the custodians of the Edwards manuscripts chose to withhold from the public an Essay which, he had been assured on "unquestionable authority," was in "the direction of Arianism or Sabellianism." 2 A few years later (about 1885), in an article in Herzog's Real-Encyclopadie, 3 Professor Calvin E. Stowe referred to an unpublished manuscript of Edwards on the Trinity in a manner to indicate that he had examined it, since he declares it to be a very able and carefully composed dissertation manifesting boldness and independence.

The same year new light was thrown on this topic by Professor Egbert C. Smyth's publication from a copy, which had been made long before, of a manuscript of

1 Bushnell, Christ in Theology, p. vi.

* International Review (1880), also Pages from an Old Volume of Life, p. 397.

3 Quoted by Professor A. G. Allen, Jonathan Edwards (1889), p. 341.

Edwards, which is entitled in its printed form "Observations concerning the Scripture (Economy of the Trinity and Covenant of Redemption." The Essay itself is brief, containing about 800 words, but it is concise, and is in the characteristic style of Edwards. This small volume is increased in value by the scholarly introduction and notes of the Editor. As he remarks, however, it is not a "treatise"—the term used in the citation above from Dr. Bushnell. It deals with only one branch of the subject, which is more fully treated by its Author elsewhere. The topic of the "Observations" is the mutual relation of the Persons of the Trinity with reference to the supposed Covenant of Redemption. It manifests no leaning towards Arianism or any. other of the types of opinion usually characterized as heterodox.

In 1865 an important manuscript of Edwards was edited in Scotland and printed there for private circulation, by Rev. A. B. Grosart, 1 who had obtained it in America at a time when he had intended to prepare a collective edition of the works of Edwards. This "Treatise on Grace," which is the title given it, comprises a full discussion of the Scriptural Doctrine of the Holy Spirit. It considers at length both the relation of the Holy Spirit to the Father and the Son, and the function and agency of the Spirit in the work of redemption. Under this last head, it is maintained that the presence and agency of the Holy Spirit is one and

1 Selections from the Unpublished Writings of Jonathan Edwards^ p. 19 ff.

the same with the indwelling of God in the souls of believers, and is the bond connecting them with Christ, as in the immanent relations of the Deity it unites the Father and the Son.

A notable and almost epoch-making contribution on the writings and opinions of Edwards concerning the Trinity appeared in 1881, in two Articles—forming a connected whole—in the Bibliotheca Sacra, from the pen of Professor Edwards A. Park. In the first Article are copious extracts from the "Monthly Review" (April 1751) in which were recorded passages from "The Philosophical Principles of Natural and Revealed Religion," by the Chevalier Ramsay—a work published shortly before. Ramsay was a Scotchman by birth, with a strong taste and corresponding talent for metaphysical speculation. He espoused successive phases of religious thought and belief, passing from orthodox Protestantism through Deism and, later, Scepticism, into the Roman Catholic Church. He resided for a considerable time in France, and was for a part of this period in close intercourse with Fenelon and under his influence. At the widest remove from many of Ramsay's religious tenets, Edwards approved, as concurrent with his own, the views which Ramsay set forth, in his book, of the infinitude of God, of His activity as eternal and not originating in anything external but from within ; of the analogy, up to a limit in measure, of that activity, in the human mind; of the three distinctions in the Deity, coequal in all things, self-origination only excepted. In the second Article Professor Park adverts to the refer-

ence that he had made in the first l to a manuscript of Edwards containing "remarks on the Trinity," which, he had there said, " has been mislaid and cannot yet be found"; 2 although he also observes: "Within the last few months, and particularly the last few weeks, I have found writings of Edwards and memoranda of my own which enable me to.say with assurance what I could not have said without much diffidence. They have enabled me to recognize what without them I could not exactly recall" Later, in the second Article, 3 Professor Park proceeds to give, from notes, some account of the contents of the "mislaid," and not yet recovered, Essay. After an interval, the vanished Essay turned up in a place not open to observation, into which, as Professor Park explained, it had accidentally fallen. He had it transcribed with much painstaking, and at his own expense. This was read in his presence by several of his clerical friends of high standing, or read to them. Notes were made of its contents by at least one of them. The Professor evidently had not a shadow of doubt of its identity with the mislaid and later discovered document which was still in his possession. It was manifest that he knew nothing of the existence of any other manu-f script of Edwards to be regarded in any just sense as a rival of that which is printed in this volume. He considered this Essay, likewise, to be none other than the Writing of Edwards on the Trinity the publication of which had been repeatedly called for. There is some difficulty arising from a seeming want of harmony be-1 P. 147. a P. 187, note. • P. 359 £

tween certain expressions in the notes of Professor Park in the Bibliotheca Sacra article and this Essay which had been found and recognized by him as the lost manuscript. In the description in the Article, he speaks of the Essay as divided into two parts. The phraseology, also, of some citations in the notes does not coincide with that Essay. As to the first point, however, the expression in the sketch in the notes is: "That [mislaid] Essay was divided in fact though not in form into two parts." As to particular discrepancies, Professor Park, in the Article l refers, as the basis of his description of the mislaid Essay, not only to "memoranda of my [his] own," but also, to other writings of Edwards which he had not found before, but which now helped him " to recognize what he could not exactly recall. 77 Moreover, in the course of this sketch, he refers 2 briefly to language which Edwards in other writings had applied to the several Persons of the Trinity, and he quotes from one of his [Edwards's] manuscripts a sentence on " the eternal generation of the Son." 3 On the next page, also, in a note on "The Observations" of Edwards on the Trinity, edited by Professor E.'C. Smyth, he remarks that Edwards was wont to pen his thoughts as they occurred to him; that he often expressed substantially the same thoughts in different manuscripts. He adds: "The present writer's remembrances of the Essay and some peculiar words in it," inserted in the sketch of it, correspond with the 'Observations' as published by Professor Smyth." It appears to me a reasonable supposition that, mingled

» P. 187. a p. 360. »P. 361, note 3.

with the Professor's notes which had been pencilled in the perusal of the Essay, were memoranda derived elsewhere from Edwards, and that a confusion of notes from different sources, which might readily occur, was the occasion of the variations that have been mentioned.

Which of the several writings of Edwards it was that provoked so much curiosity, and was now and then imagined to inculcate opinions at variance with orthodox tenets is really a question of minor consequence, and this for the simple reason that with respect to none of them was there any ground for such an imputation or suspicion. It appears to me probable that one reason why certain proprietors and editors of writings of Edwards hesitated about the publication of a dissertation from his pen on the Trinity was the view, which Edwards held and defended, of the subordination of Persons in the Divine Being—the eternal generation of the Son being a primary element in his faith. He was no more tinctured with Arianism and other types of opinion under the ban of the principal organized churches than the oecumenical creeds are thus tinctured, as well as the creeds of the orthodox doctors of theology generally in the ancient and later periods of Church History. But with the expiration of the century in which Edwards lived, the Nicene doctrine of the eternal generation of the Son ceased to exist any longer as a part of New England orthodoxy. It was not only discarded by its leaders, but it was often openly repudiated, and sometimes with derision. There is no occasion for surprise, if reports of what Edwards had written on the subject

should make an impression within as well as without the local schools of orthodoxy, that unpublished writings of the foremost of the New England divines on this subject were not wholly free from a taint of heterodoxy. With the renunciation of the philosophy on the subject which was received and expounded by Edwards, and with the ideas of the later New England schools on the subject, Professor Park, despite his profound respect for his genius and, in general, for his teachings, was in full accord. Hence, the philosophical parts of the expositions of the Trinity by Edwards, and such of his Biblical interpretations as corresponded to them, did not win from him concurrence or. sympathy.

From these circumstances it appears to me that the question which of the several compositions of Edwards on the doctrine of the Trinity was suspected of containing heresy, or whether it was either of them exclusively that was subject to this imputation or surmise, are questions of minor importance, and that the same may be said of the question, should it be mooted, which of them was mislaid and found in Professor Park's dwelling. The composition of it was evidently gradual and extended over a long period, from time to time. As will be seen by the reader, interpolations of a few lines were inserted in the first draft, and, besides these, additions, here and there, of considerable length. The perusal of the manuscript calls to mind his Letters to the Trustees of Princeton College, in which he explains his habitual method of pursuing his studies and of recording, as he went on, their results, with an eye to the publication

of treatises on the subjects which he considered most timely and important. The Essay on the Trinity shows the rapidity with which his pen moved, and as far as the forming of sentences and other matters of style are concerned would have been doubtless subjected to a great deal of revision had he set out to mould it for the press. The Writings published by Edwards in his lifetime sufficiently manifest the external literary features of his style. An intermediate class, e.g., the History of Redemption, were composed not without care, but are not only less elaborate in the contents, but in style lack the Author's finishing touches. It appears to me judicious to present the present Essay to the reader just as it stands. I do not propose to subject its doctrinal teaching to crit-cism, but, if I am not mistaken, even in its present form, it will be deemed lucid in its course of thought, and one of the ablest arguments of this species which the History of Doctrine affords in behalf of fundamental positions of the Nicene theology. The Paper in the present volume, as far as I am qualified to judge, is decidedly the most comprehensive and complete discussion of the doctrine on all sides that emanated from its author.

G. P. F.

EDWARDS ON THE TRINITY

CONTENTS

PAKT I

PAGE

Remarks on Edwards and His Theology ... 1

PART II

An Unpublished Essay of Edwards on the Trinity 75

APPENDIX

Note 1.— The Dismissal of Edwards from the Church in Northampton 137

Note 2 The Account Given by Edwards of

His Method of Study 139

Note 3.— Augustine on the Trinity as Imaged Eorth in the Human Mind 139

Note 4.— President T. D. Woolsey on the Personal Traits and the Influence of Edwards 140

PART I

REMAKES ON EDWARDS AND HIS THEOLOGY

PAET I

KEMARKS ON EDWAEDS AND HIS THEOLOGY

In the Yale Alumni Catalogue, in the list of the ten who compose the class of 1720, stands the name of Jonathan Edwards. He was the only son in a family of eleven children. On graduating, he was not quite seventeen years of age. The valedictory address was assigned to him. In this address the College is warmly praised. The prediction is even ventured that the day will come when students will resort to it from foreign lands. The accession in recent years of students from oriental countries is a verification of the prophecy in a sense then wholly an unconscious element in the author's vaticination. His father, by whom he was fitted for college, was the minister of East Windsor, Connecticut, was a graduate of Harvard, and had kept up his habits of study. He was respected as a preacher, and was regarded as a man of polished manners. Intellectually he was thought to be excelled by his wife, who was

4 REMARKS ON EDWARDS AND HIS THEOLOGY

educated in Boston, and was highly esteemed for her mental vigor and her acquirements, as well as for her gentle and affable ways. The son remained in New Haven nearly two years, engaged in studies preparatory for the ministry. The greater portion of the next two years he spent in preaching to a small Presbyterian church in New York. In the closing part of this interval he was again at his studies in college, where he was a tutor for a third period of two years. It was in New Haven, when at the age of twenty, that he married the beautiful and saintly young woman whom, when she was thirteen years old, he had depicted, not in verse, yet in a strain which recalls the lines of Milton in H Penseroso, —

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

" They say "—thus he wrote—" there is a young lady in New Haven who is beloved of that great Being who made and rules the world, and that there are certain seasons in which this great Being in some way or other invisible, comes to her and fills her mind with exceeding sweet delight, and that she hardly cares for anything except to meditate on Him; that she expects after a while

KEMARKS ON EDWARDS AND HIS THEOLOGY 5

to be received up where He is, to be raised up out of the world and caught up into heaven ; being assured that He loves her too well to let her remain at a distance from Him always. There she is to dwell with Him, and to be ravished with His love and delight forever. Therefore if you present all the world before her, with the richest of its treasures, she disregards and cares not for it, and is unmindful of any pain or affliction. She has a strange sweetness in her mind, and singular purity in her affections; is most just and conscientious in all her conduct, and you could not persuade her to do anything wrong or sinful if you would give her all the world, lest she should offend this great Being. She is of a wonderful calmness, and universal benevolence of mind, especially after this great Grod has manifested Himself to her mind. She will sometimes go about from place to place singing sweetly, and seems to be always full of joy and pleasure, and no one knows for what. She loves to be alone, walking in the fields and groves, and seems to have some one invisible always conversing with her." 1

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

6 REMARKS ON EDWARDS AND HIS THEOLOGY

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

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

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

EEMARKS ON EDWARDS AND HIS THEOLOGY 7

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

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

8 REMARKS ON EDWARDS AND HIS THEOLOGY

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

These early manuscripts contained outlines and specific heads of a projected work on the universe, material and mental. Through life, he was accustomed to do as Pascal did in the case of the Pens6es—to set down thoughts and outlines to serve as materials for works to be composed later. In the interesting letter which he wrote to the Trustees of Princeton College, giving the reasons why he felt reluctant to take the office of President—which he concluded to accept—he explains that he had always been accustomed to study with pen in hand, recording his best thoughts on countless subjects. One of the uses to which they were put I have just stated. The spirit in which he studied is seen in the resolutions and diaries which have been preserved. Among the resolutions which, before he was twenty, he wrote for his own benefit is this: " Eesolved, when I think of any theorem in divinity to be solved, immediately to do what I can toward solving it, if circumstances do not hinder." We meet with this entry in his diary a little later; "I observe that

REMARKS ON EDWARDS AND HIS THEOLOGY 9

old men seldom have any advantage of new discoveries, because they are beside the way of thinking to which they have been so long used. Resolved, if ever I live to [advanced] years, that I will be impartial to hear the reasons of all pretended discoveries, and receive them if rational, how long soever I have been used to another way of thinking." l

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

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

10 REMARKS ON EDWARDS AND HIS THEOLOGY

Books to be obtained include " the best" books on Geography, Church History, Chronology, Historical Dictionary, of the nature of Bayle's work, the Lives of the Philosophers. Later entries are Pope's Homer, and his Miscellaneous Works, The Spectator, Addison's Writings, Young's Night Thoughts, Richardson's Clarissa and Pamela, F6ne-lon's Telemachus, Fielding's Amelia, and, later, an Abridgment of Johnson's Dictionary.

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

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

EEMAEKS ON EDWARDS AND HIS THEOLOGY U

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

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

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

12 REMARKS ON EDWARDS AND HIS THEOLOGY

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

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

REMARKS ON EDWARDS AND HIS THEOLOGY 13

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

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

14 REMARKS ON EDWARDS AND HIS THEOLOGY

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

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

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

REMARKS ON EDWARDS AND HIS THEOLOGY 15

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

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

16 EEMARKS ON EDWARDS AND HIS THEOLOGY

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

REMARKS ON EDWARDS AND HIS THEOLOGY 17

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

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

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

18 REMARKS ON EDWARDS AND HIS THEOLOGY

In the proposition that material things have no being independent of the perception of them either by God or by other mental beings whom He empowers to perceive them, Edwards is at one with Berkeley in the mature expression which Berkeley gave to his theory-

The coincidence of the idealism of Edwards with that of Berkeley is so striking that not unnaturally it has been conjectured by critics, including Professor Fraser, his able and learned biographer, that it was from Berkeley that the youthful American philosopher imbibed his views. This, I may be allowed to say, was once my own impression. Further investigation of the question, however, has proved it to be in the highest degree probable that this inference is a mistaken one. 1 It was owing to the powerful stimulus imparted to the young Yale student by the writings of Locke that he was prompted to move on in a path of his own, quite beyond any conclusion reached in Locke's quickening essay. The " new philosophy " to which Edwards afterwards refers with approval, appears to have been the publications

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

REMARKS ON EDWARDS AND HIS THEOLOGY 19

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

It is fit and proper that the two most conspicuous memorial windows in the front wall of Battell Chapel should commemorate these two illustrious philosophers. The noble Bishop of Cloyne, a man lifted above all ecclesiastical prejudice, having been disappointed as to his project for founding in Bermuda a college for the education of Indians, not only established at Yale a Scholarship which bears his name, but also sent over to the College a gift of one thousand well-chosen volumes,—the largest single collection of books that had ever been brought to America. On the window devoted to his honor, the words are inscribed, "Hie Monumenta Posuit Animi Sui Liberalis" —"Here he placed memorials of his liberal spirit." He might smile, but his liberal mind would not be offended were he to read the words from the pen of Professor Thacher, on the Edwards window, the mate of his own: " Summi in Ecelesia OrcHnis Vates? President Dwight

20 REMARKS ON EDWARDS AND HIS THEOLOGY

wanted to have the building that took the surname of "North Middle" called Berkeley Hall. It is well that Yale now has a dormitory building named after the prelate, to whom, as Pope tells us, was "ascribed every virtue under Heaven." President Clap was evidently disposed to adopt Berkeley's doctrine concerning matter. " This College," says the President " will always retain a most grateful sense of his Generosity and Merits; and probably a favorable Opinion of his Idea of material Substance; as not consisting in an unknown and inconceivable substratum but in a stated Union and Combination of Sensible Ideas, excited from without, by some Intelligent Being." The good President would have been gratified to see the modern trend of philosophical thought toward objective idealism, a tendency probably not without sympathy at Yale, even though the reasons for it and for the consequent homage to the genius of Berkeley, are not the presents he made to the College.

I may be permitted to say that, time and again, as I have returned to the writings of Edwards, I have been increasingly struck with the variety as well as the superiority of his powers. In reading him I have called to mind by a natural association

REMARKS ON EDWARDS AND HIS THEOLOGY 21

exalted names in the history of Christian Doctrine—names of men who have illustrated this rare blending of light and heat,—such as Augustine and Aquinas, and, above all, Anselm. The treatise on the Will, a masterpiece of logic though it be, does not outrank in merit some other products of his pen of a different class. The essay on the Last End of God in Creation, and the essay on the Nature of True Virtue, stand fully as high in the scale.

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

Those to whom the name of Edwards calls up only the image of a dry reasoner or of an austere preacher, presenting detailed pictures of the sufferings of lost souls, should read the meditations on the " beauty and sweetness "—I use his owii

22 REMARKS ON EDWARDS AND HIS THEOLOGY

words—of divine things, when to his almost inspired vision the whole face of nature was transfigured. When still in his youth, there sprang up "a sense of divine things," after which, he tells us, "the appearance of everything was altered ; there seemed to be, as it were, a calm, sweet cast, or appearance of divine glory in almost everything ; in the sun, moon and stars ; in the clouds and blue sky ; in the grass, flowers, trees ; in the water and all nature, which used greatly to fix my mind. I often used to sit and view the moon for a long time; and in the day, spent much time in viewing the clouds and sky, to behold the sweet glory of God in these things; in the meantime, singing forth with a low voice my contemplations of the Creator and Redeemer." 1 He would have sympathized with Wordsworth's Lines above Tintern Abbey, only infusing into them a more theistic

tinge:

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

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

REMARKS ON EDWARDS AND HIS THEOLOGY. 23

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

When a very young preacher in New York, as he relates, he " frequently used to retire into a solitary place on the banks of the Hudson River, at some distance from the city, for contemplation on divine things and secret converse with God, and had many sweet hours there. 1 Experiences of this character did not terminate. He speaks thus of an incident that occurred at Northampton: "Once as I rode out into the woods for my health, in 1737, having alighted from my horse in a retired place, as my manner commonly has been, to walk for divine contemplation and prayer, I had a view, that for me was extraordinary, of the glory of the Son of God, as Mediator between God and man, and his wonderful great, full, pure and sweet grace and love, and meek and gentle condescension. This grace that appeared so calm and sweet, appeared also great above the heavens. The person of Christ appeared ineffably excellent, with

24 EEMAEKS ON EDWARDS AND HIS THEOLOGY

an excellency great enough to swallow up all thought and conception—which continued, as near as I can judge, about an hour; which kept me, the greater part of the time, in a flood of tears, and weeping aloud; I felt an ardency of soul to be, what I know not otherwise how to express, emptied and annihilated; to lie in the dust and be full of Christ alone. To love him with a holy and pure love ; to trust in him ; to live upon him; to serve and follow him; and to be perfectly sanctified and made pure with a divine and heavenly purity. I have, several other times, had views very much of the same nature, and which have had the same effects." 1

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

iPwight, Vol. I., p. 133

REMARKS ON EDWARDS AND HIS THEOLOGY 25

the discussions, not merely on Church polity, but also on Christian theology. They were firm adherents of the Genevan type of doctrine. This had held almost undisputed sway in England through the reign of Elizabeth. The Institutes of Calvin had been virtually the text-book of the English Protestant Clergy. Even Hooker, the noblest expounder and champion of the Anglican Ecclesiastical system, while he deprecates the unmeasured deference paid in England to Calvin's authority, pronounces a glowing eulogy upon him and his writings—declaring him to be " incomparably the greatest man whom the French Church"— the Protestant Church of France—"had produced." Calvin had achieved what no other before him had accomplished. He had organized the Protestant teaching into a compact and coherent system. It involved the complete abjuring of human merit in the process of salvation. It attributed to God and not to man's agency not only the Atonement, the ground of forgiveness, but also and equally the process of the victory over sin in the soul, from first to last. It discarded the idea that anything could occur, either in the world without or in the mind within, independently of the will and purpose of the Ruler of the universe. In this

26 REMARKS ON EDWARDS AND HIS THEOLOGY

proposition was embodied what was the creed alike of the Genevan school, and of Luther and the early Lutherans. In the view of the Calvin-ists, predestination was presupposed in the sense of man's absolute dependence, in trust in the universal control of Divine Providence, and in unmin-gled gratitude for grace as the fountain of all that is good in the soul.

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

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

REMARKS ON EDWARDS AND HIS THEOLOGY 27

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

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

28 REMARKS ON EDWARDS AND HIS THEOLOGY

half had been trained in the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge, and who, it is not an exaggeration to say, beyond any other source of influence made New England what it became.

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

In the first period after the foundation of Yale, Hebrew, like Greek and Latin, was a required study. In the College laws printed in 1748, it was ordained that systematic divinity should be taught to all the classes, and that the Westminster Confession should be one of the text-books that all the classes, " through the whole time of their

REMARKS ON EDWARDS AND HIS THEOLOGY 29

college life " should recite. This branch, the proper name of which is dogmatic theology or philosophical theology, had a very marked precedence in the circle of studies for the ministry. The natural direction of thought, especially in the conflicts of the early days, will account for the preeminence accorded to this discipline. Under this head, in American Church history, the movement which was styled, from the place of its origin and principal seat, New England Theology, at the outset often called the a New Divinity," is the most original development, and, on the whole, the most influential. With this movement, in its inception and its later stages, Yale College is identified. There all of its noted leaders, with one exception, were educated. It is the movement the rise of which stands in historic connection with the so-called Great Revival of 1740, and is linked to the name of the most illustrious of American philosophers and divines. At a very early date, if not from the beginning, the custom arose for resident graduates to prosecute studies preparatory for the ministry. From the year 1755, this class of pupils were able to receive theological instruction from the Professor of Divinity.

In the youth of Edwards the reaction against

30 REMARKS ON EDWARDS AND HIS THEOLOGY

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

REMARKS ON EDWARDS AND HIS THEOLOGY 31

come when Calvinism on this side of the water, as well as in Great Britain, if it was to hold its own, stood in need of competent defenders.

The fundamental principle in the philosophical and religious system of Edwards is the doctrine of the Absolute. The existence and necessary existence of a Being, eternal, infinite and omnipresent, a being self-conscious, yet not dependent for self-consciousness on aught exterior to Himself, was propounded with emphasis in the youthful essay, the title of which is " Being." This principle was ever after the groundwork of his teaching. In his mind God was the supreme and absorbing object of contemplation and study. His supremacy, the independence of His being and perfections, was the groundwork of his creed. The " sovereignty " of God he insisted on and emphasized. At times, in one sermon in particular, he uses language of which the natural interpretation, and one that has been not infrequent, is that election is an arbitrary selection on the part of God—purely a matter of will. This would make it a separate peculiar attribute, standing by itself —an attribute without which God would lose one of His distinguishing perfections. But this is not

32 REMARKS ON EDWARDS AND HIS THEOLOGY

the idea of sovereignty which in various places he explicitly states and defends. His affirmation is that the wisdom and holiness of God lie back of His decrees. " It is fit," he says, " that He who is absolutely perfect, and infinitely wise, and the Fountain of all wisdom, should determine everything by his own will, even things of the greatest importance. 1 He is a " being in everything determined by his own counsel, having no other rule but his own wisdom." 2 The infelicity of using language, at least occasionally, implying that " sovereignty " is nothing more than will without reason back of it, is a fault of not a few Calvinistic teachers in the past, and even of Calvin himself. Yet Calvin distinctly avers—" dare affirmo " are his words— that the decrees of God are dictated by wisdom.

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

In 1735, Rev. John Sergeant, who graduated at

> Dwight's ed., Vol. III., p. 506.

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

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

REMARKS ON EDWARDS AND HIS THEOLOGY 33

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

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

i Dwight, ut supra, p. 474.

34 REMARKS ON EDWARDS AND HIS THEOLOGY

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

KEMARKS ON EDWARDS AND HIS THEOLOGY 35

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

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

36 REMARKS ON EDWARDS AND HIS THEOLOGY

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

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

The opposite view, he contends, is equivalent to a doctrine of chance and, if carried out, would land its advocates in atheism. The points of coincidence between his reasoning in behalf of that "moral necessity,"—which, with many ancient and modern leaders in philosophy and theology, he denied to involve "constraint," in any proper sense of the term—with other writers, are nothing more than coincidence. They imply no borrowing on his part from other supporters of a like

EEMARKS ON EDWAEDS AND HIS THEOLOGY 37

thesis. There is reason to believe that he had never read Collins. While he was unquestionably influenced by suggestions of Locke on the significance of liberty and choice, his independence in thought is equally manifest.

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

38 KEJVIARKS ON EDWARDS AND HIS THEOLOGY

to his Scottish correspondent, Erskine, 1 that "men are to-day in possession of all the liberty which it has entered into the heart of man to conceive."

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

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

KEMARKS ON EDWAKDS AND HIS THEOLOGY 39

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

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

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

: 0 REMARKS ON EDWARDS AND HIS THEOLOGY

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

The Idealism of Edwards, his view of the Im-nanence of God, and his doctrine of moral neces-ity as connected with voluntary action, would eem to involve Pantheism. In fact, in earlier and ater writings, he uses language which identifies Tod with the world. In his early " Notes on the Mind " he writes: " God and real existence are the same; God is, and there is none else. ... It s impossible that God be otherwise than excellent, ! or He is the infinite, universal and all-comprehend-ng excellence." He speaks of God's " infinite imountxxr quantity of existence" In his late, pos-ihumous, treatise on the End of God in Creation, le says of God that His "being and beauty is, is it w T ere, the sum and comprehension of all ex-stence and excellence " much more than the Sun s " the comprehension of all the light and bright-less of the sky." In his treatise on Virtue, he vrites that God " is, in effect, being in general, and jomprehends universal existence." "When still in lis youth, he speaks of striving for as clear a mowledge of God's action "with respect to spirit md mind as he has of his operation concerning natter and bodies." He writes: "Man's reason

REMARKS ON EDWARDS AND HIS THEOLOGY 41

and conscience seem to be a participation of the divine essence." As we have seen that in his view of voluntary action the antecedents of what we call choice, and the consequent are subsumed under the principle of cause and effect.

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

1 !For a criticism of Edwards on this topic, see the observations of Prof. Allenj Jonathan Udwards, Period III., Ch. V-

REMARKS ON EDWARDS AND HIS THEOLOGY

was practically not confused or disturbed by j seeming inconsistency between certain aspects his theology, in the strict sense of this term, and ;heistic creed and the anthropology associated ih it.

[n another polemical treatise—that on Original l, which did not see the light until after his ith, Edwards confronts the Arminian authors reference to the strongest point in their conten-n, to wit: that the Calvinistic doctrine of the ponsibility of the posterity of Adam for his sin, dch is not their act, and that they are truly iged to be sinful from the start, is untenable. ! plunges into the thick of the conflict on the L-time subject of the spread and dominion of >ral evil in the race of mankind. He sought to iarm the opponents of orthodox doctrine, and lift the veil on the mystery of sin—the one 'stery, as Coleridge said, which makes all other ngs clear. He discards everything in the cur-it beliefs which savors of legal fiction, and seeks found the responsibility of the individual on a il spiritual continuity of the race, a view which seeks to fortify by a disquisition on the mean-l of personal identity and of sameness of sub-

REMARKS ON EDWARDS AND HIS THEOLOGY 43

stance, which he makes equivalent to constantly-repeated acts of creation. It is evident that Locke's curious chapter on " Identity and Diversity" put Edwards on the track on which he advanced to his novel opinion. But here likewise the metaphysical doctrine was worked out in an original way, and the opinions in theology were at absolute variance with the tenets of Locke. Edwards undertakes in his own way to establish Augustine's proposition of an act of the race. It is strictly true ? he asserts, that all participated in the act by which " the species first rebelled against God." x We are condemned not for another's evil choice, but for our own—for real participation in that act by which "the species first rebelled against God." The continuance of the individuals of the race and of sin in them is affirmed to be as truly a fact as the sameness of substance in the individual. The individuals sprung from the first man are the continuation of Adam. There is no question as to the sincerity of Edwards in this bold speculation.

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

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

: REMARKS ON EDWARDS AND HIS THEOLOGY

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

REMARKS ON EDWARDS AND HIS THEOLOGY 45

tions " presents the author's ideal of religious experience. This book was occasioned by his perception of the abuses which attended the " Great Revival," especially the morbid enthusiasm and various extravagances that marred its beneficent influence. One design was to sift the converts and to distinguish between sound religious feelings and such as are unhealthy and spurious. His analysis was sometimes pushed to an extreme that afterwards engendered in the churches a good deal of self-distrust, thus depriving not a few Christian believers of the Assurance which the Eeformers counted a special blessing brought in by the Protestant teaching. Nevertheless, this treatise comprises many of the author's best thoughts on the subject expressed in the title. It opens to view the mystical element in Edwards, the elements of insight and intuition in his religious thoughts. A masterly work of Edwards is that on the Nature of True Virtue, a posthumous publication. He sets forth the nature of moral goodness in the concrete. This he finds to be Benevolence, or love to intelligent being. It is love to the entire society of intelligent beings according to their rank, or, to use his phrase, the " amount of being " that belongs to them. It is

46 KEMAEKS ON EDWARDS AND HIS THEOLOGY

supreme love to God, limited as regards inferior beings. Ethics and religion are thus inseparably associated. This all-embracing Benevolence—love to " being in general "—is the fountain and essence of all specific virtues deserving of the name. He who exercises this Love delights in it when perceived in others. This delight excites a special affection for them—the love of complacency. This u relish " is an experience possible only to the actually virtuous. 1 But there is a rectitude —a fitness of Benevolence to the soul and the nature of things. The perception of it is a ground of obligation, the basis of conscience, in all, even in such as discern not the spiritual beauty of Benevolence and are incapable of it. This essay of Edwards calls out from the younger Fichte the warmest eulogy. This he concludes with the words: " So has this solitary thinker of North America risen to the deepest and loftiest ground which can underlie the principle of morals "—with more in the same vein. 2

In another posthumous essay, Edwards considers "God's Last End in Creation." The dis-

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

REMARKS ON EDWARDS AND HIS THEOLOGY 47

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

48 BEMARKS ON EDWARDS AND HIS THEOLOGY

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

REMAKES ON EDWARDS AND HIS THEOLOGY 49

ence, including suffering and death, and that in and through death and the spiritual perceptions thus developed, there was in Him, although sinless, an increase of holiness, reaching absolute perfection. He gave proof of his thorough approval of the righteousness of the divine law and of the penalty for the remission of which he prayed.

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

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

50 REMARKS ON EDWARDS AND HIS THEOLOGY

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

Of the writings of Edwards which, in modern days, are offensive to readers, not a few are those which pertain to the character and destiny of the class included under the head of the unregener-ate, and to the way in which they are said to be regarded by God. The first comment to be made on the specially obnoxious passages is that the Es-chatology of Edwards is essentially identical with that of the symbols of the Protestant churches of the period, the Socinians excepted— e. g., with the Westminster Confession—and it is not essentially diverse from the creed of the followers of Augustine in the preceding centuries. When Edwards says of infants that, while seeming innocent to us, " they are in God's sight young vipers," he casts into a figure of speech a dogma not dissonant from the creeds referred to—however distasteful both dogma and figure may be. The abhorrence with which the wicked are said to be regarded by the Divine Lawgiver and Judge is expressed in terms as intense as the English vocabulary furnishes, and through similes of equal severity. In the Enfield Sermon, it is said that God " abhors them and is dreadfully provoked," and that

REMARKS ON EDWARDS AND HIS THEOLOGY 51

even now they are in His hand, held over the fire, as one holds a loathsome insect. The wicked are "Useful in their destruction only": so runs the title of one of his sermons. Their penal sufferings hereafter were held by him, in agreement with organized churches generally, to be an allotment of retributive justice, which is considered an attribute of God, worthy of approval and fitted to excite feelings of satisfaction in the beholder. Hence the saints above, seeing the inflictions on the condemned, will " make heaven ring with the praises of God's justice towards the wicked and his grace towards the saints," who are conscious that they deserve the same "penalty," from which they have been delivered.

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

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

52 REMARKS ON EDWARDS AND HIS THEOLOGY

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

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

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

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

REMARKS ON EDWARDS AND HIS THEOLOGY 53

torments of the lost which are almost on a level with those in Edwards that are so bitterly denounced. It is not the only, but it is the principal, source of regret that passages of this class in Edwards, especially in certain revival addresses from the pulpit, should not be connected with remarks in which the love of God, co-existing with His abhorrence of evil, is spoken of, and with illustrations of this love from the Scriptures. The words of Jesus on the spirit of fatherliness in God, as expressed in the saying, He "is kind to the evil and unthankful," and in the parable of the Prodigal Son, had they been even alluded to, might have prevented, certainly in part, the seeming ascription of vindictiveness and of unqualified anger to the Creator and Judge. It would be a signal injustice, however, to impute to Edwards the absence of a profound faith in the love of God. The various heartfelt expressions on the duty of forbearance and of forgiveness, contained in the record of his early " resolutions " and written reflections, reveal the depth of this faith. The treatise on the Nature of Virtue, wherein a fundamental principle is that the character of God at the core consists in love to all intelligent beings, whether morally good or morally evil, shows that

54 REMARKS ON EDWARDS AND HIS THEOLOGY

its author—perhaps with special depth of conviction in the closing period of life—recognized the all-comprehending Benevolence of God towards mankind, whatever their guilt. 1 Moreover, despite the defective Anthropology of the prince of American theologians, he was one of the sources and promoters of the humanitarian movement in which Channing was so prominent a leader, for he was inspired with this temper in no small degree by Hopkins, the foremost pupil and disciple of Edwards, who was the pastor of Channing, and who in his youth had made disinterested Benevolence a central article in his system, being himself a pioneer in the public condemnation of the slave-trade, of which Newport, the place of his residence, was one of the marts.

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

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

EEMAEKS ON EDWARDS AND HIS THEOLOGY 55

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

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

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

56 EEMAKKS ON EDWAKDS AND HIS THEOLOGY

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

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

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

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

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

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

REMAKES ON EDWARDS AND HIS THEOLOGY 57

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

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

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

58 REMARKS ON EDWARDS AND HIS THEOLOGY

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

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

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parted directly from God, led a school of divines to accordant corollaries relative to the new life and spiritual experience.

The question of the theodicy—How is evil, especially moral evil, consistent with infinite power and love in the Deity ?—was discussed in writings of Bellamy and other adherents of the " New Divinity," as it was then called. Samuel Hopkins, whom President Stiles couples, as a "great rea-soner," with President Edwards, was graduated at Yale in 1741. He went to Northampton to study for the ministry with Edwards. From his doctrine of the extension of the reign of law over choices and volitions, Hopkins did not shrink from the distinct enunciation that the acts of the will are to be referred to divine efficiency. This thesis was adopted by Nathaniel Emmons, a graduate of Yale in 1767. Emmons, when his premises were assumed, reached his conclusions by an inevitable march of logic. Moreover, Hopkins propounded the doctrine of disinterested love which he deduced from the treatise of Edwards on the Nature of Virtue,—the doctrine, namely, of the obligations to love self, not as one's own self, but only as a fraction of strictly limited value in the sum total of rational beings,—what Edwards had

60 REMARKS ON EDWARDS AND HIS THEOLOGY

termed " being in general." The duty, as an element of thorough repentance, of unconditional resignation to the just penalty of sin, should it be the will of God to inflict it, was an inference. This was inculcated not merely as a theoretic dogma, but even as a practical demand to be addressed by the Christian pastor to the individual seeking a place in the kingdom of God. The same idea is in Mystics of earlier days, for example in the little book, the " Deutsche Theologie," so highly prized by Luther.

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

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cipate their slaves. Thus, Jonathan Edwards was an indirect agent in inspiring with zeal in the cause of humanity the leading founder of New England Unitarianism.

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

The younger Edwards, if he did not rise to the level of his father as an original thinker, was a keen logician. He was the one conspicuous representative of the New Divinity who was not graduated at Yale, his father having been recently President at Princeton. But he studied for the ministry with Bellamy, and with the school of theologians trained at Yale, followers of his father, he was, by birth and life-long association, closely affiliated. To him New England theology was indebted for its governmental view of the Atonement, which had been anticipated in the main by the great Arminian jurist, Hugo Grotius. Thereby the end and aim of the sacrifice on the cross were so extended as to exclude the objec-

62 REMARKS ON EDWARDS AND HIS THEOLOGY

tion that it was a provision meant for only an elect portion of the race. Thus, although divine sovereignty was proclaimed with an almost unexampled emphasis, no exception could be taken to the compass of divine love as related specifically to the mission and death of Christ.

The opening of the century which has lately reached its end found in the presidential seat at Yale, and in its Chapel pulpit as Professor of Divinity, the grandson of President Edwards, the first President Dwight. An instance of his power in the pulpit was the effect of his sermons two years after his accession to the presidency, on the Nature and Danger of Infidel Philosophy, which turned the tide against the imported French Deism, then prevalent in College. He was a man whose catholic temper and intellectual habit caused him to shun one-sided formulas in theology and to avoid extreme statements in homiletic discourse. The system of President Dwight, moreover, which was presented in a consecutive series of sermons in the College pulpit, steered clear of the meta. physical dryness prevalent in the preaching of the day. They were enlivened by a rhetorical quality which met an increasing popular demand. In his youth he had been a tutor in College. In this

REMARKS ON EDWARDS AND HIS THEOLOGY 63

office, along with a contemporary tutor who also became a distinguished Congregationalist divine, Joseph Buckminster, he had done much to foster a literary taste in the institution. It was the first stage in the grafting of the Renaissance culture on the Puritan type of education. Johnson, Addison and other writers of that epoch were read with delight. Through Dwight's sermons, the "new divinity," shorn of later shibboleths and clad in a comely dress, was widely diffused both in this country and in Great Britain. It was acceptable to many, as a type of modern Calvinism which, while it made no war upon the Westminster symbols, deviated from them in certain definitions of doctrine.

Numerous editions of Dwight's system were published in Scotland and in England. Down to a time not far back, not a few pilgrims from these countries, some of them preachers of high repute, who had learned theology from the writings of Dwight, were led to visit New Haven and the grave of their revered teacher. Edwards himself did not cease to be read in Great Britain. He stamped his impress, on the two principal theologians in the early part of the last century, Andrew Fuller and Thomas Chalmers, of whom

64 REMAEKS ON EDWARDS AND HIS THEOLOGY

mention has been made. Among the American theologians who sat at the feet of Dwight was James Murdock of the Class of 1797. An accurate and erudite scholar, Dr. Murdock filled for a number of years the chair of Ecclesiastical History at Andover. He deserves special honor for the work done by him in fostering this department of learning.

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

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

EEMAKKS ON EDWARDS AND HIS THEOLOGY 65

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

66 REMARKS ON EDWARDS AND HIS THEOLOGY

to them—was a scholar, and a ripe and good one, Josiah W. Gibbs, cautious and candid, and deeply learned in linguistic and biblical science.

It was the life-long purpose of Dr. Taylor to eliminate from the Edwardsean theology remaining elements which he believed to be incompatible with a fair view of human responsibility, the truth which from the first it undertook to vindicate. He did not mean to subtract from the prevailing tenets anything that is really involved in the sense of dependence at the basis of piety, and as such ever cherished by Calvinism with sedulous care. His aim was so to rectify the conception of the liberty of the will as to make room for a theodicy that should leave untouched the free and responsible nature of man and the moral attributes of God, not less than His omnipotence. Edwards had made prominent his idea of the certainty of the actual determination of the will as in each case the consequence of the antecedent motives. Dr. Taylor followed him far, but linked to this proposition the concomitant assertion of the power of contrary choice. He propounded the doctrine of " Certainty with power to the contrary," as a summary statement—a ph/rase which, as he told the

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present writer, he adopted, as descriptive of his opinion, from a passage which he met with in Father Paul Sarpi's History of the Council of Trent, where it is ascribed to one of the participators in the conciliar debate concerning the freedom of the will. Thus Dr. Taylor coincided with Edwards in attributing to motives a certain causal relation, but it was & peculiar species of causation, giving certainty but not necessity. This theory of the will was adopted in the so-called " New-School" New England theology. A younger contemporary of Dr. Taylor, a very acute instructor in theology, with a singular power of accurate and felicitous statement, was Professor Edwards A. Park, a devoted student of Edwards and an accomplished writer on the New England Theology. He, too, held to the " power of contrary choice," and conceived this to be a legitimate interpretation of Edwards. This is not the time or the place to weigh the merits of Dr. Taylor's system, only a portion of which has ever appeared in print. As to the manifest subtlety and intellectual grasp it exhibited, there could be but one opinion. 1

1 Among the numerous descendants of Edwards, one of the most distinguished and one of the most competent to discuss his character-

68 REMARKS ON EDWARDS AND HIS THEOLOGY

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

Theology, in the etymological sense of the term, began to draw to itself a renewed and increasing attention. In this movement the master-spirit in England was Coleridge. Under the stimulus emanating from him, the apologetics of the previous century began to be superseded by a more spiritual method of defending the truths of natural and revealed religion. The time had come when Dr. Johnson's satirical remark that the four evangel-

istics as a man and a writer, is the late President Theodore D. Woolsey. For a notice of an address by him, see Appendix, Note IV,

KEMARKS ON EDWARDS AND HIS THEOLOGY 69

ists were tried weekly in the pulpits of England for forgery, was ceasing to be applicable. The value of the proof which Christianity carries in itself had begun to be more justly discerned. Thought and investigation were directed more and more to the Incarnation of Christ, to His person, life and character. A few of the most gifted pupils of Dr. Taylor became deeply interested in writings of Coleridge, which were introduced into this country by President Marsh, of the University of Vermont. A new vista was opened before them. Ratiocination began to lose its charm, the authority of logic to give place to that of intuition. One of the pupils of Dr. Taylor responded with especial sympathy to the new influence.

The time has gone by when opinion was divided on the question whether Horace Bushnell was a visionary, or a man of genius with a spiritual outfit rarely to be found in students and teachers of religion. There was in him, moreover, as all who knew him well were aware, a vein of common sense, which was not seldom manifest in the homely vigor of his public and private utterances. Dr. Bushnell was graduated at Yale in 1827. It was not until 1831, while he was tutor in college, that he reached the turning point in his religious

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convictions and experience. At that time, it is right to remember, Dr. Taylor was still at the height of his power, not only in the theological class-room, but as a preacher both in college and in the churches elsewhere. He was a wise counsellor to undergraduate students in the matter of personal religion. It was an epoch when the entire institution was pervaded by a remarkable attentiveness to the Gospel.

The spirit of honesty and independence, native qualities of Bushnell, were not discouraged, but were fostered, by the example, as well as by familiar sayings, of Taylor. But from the outset of his ministry, Bushnell lifted the anchor and steered his own way. In the first of his printed works, the book on " Christian Nurture," he struck out a new path. In contrast with a dependence on occasional revivals as a means of building up the churches and keeping alive the spirit of devotion, he exalted the family as the heaven-appointed birthplace of piety in its youngest members, and family nurture as the great instrument of its growth. The same ardor which was signally manifest in his subsequent writings, perhaps tempted him now and then to overstatement, and more often to unguarded declarations which pro-

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voted attack and called for explanation. But he was able to appeal from contemporary criticism to the authority of the Puritanism of an older date, and by the freshness and reasonableness of his teaching to make an immediate and lasting impression on the churches. The work on " Nature and the Supernatural," perhaps, on the whole, the best of his writings, was the product of a seed falling into his fertile mind from a definition in Coleridge's " Aids to Reflection." The final chapter on the character of Jesus, whether or not it justified to the full extent the inference which he drew from the premises, is one of the most impressive portraitures of the character of Christ which the plentiful literature on this subject in the latter days has furnished.

Later, in a series of writings, Dr. Bushnell set forth with characteristic frankness and warmth his thoughts respecting the central topics of the Trinity and the Atonement. At the outset he broached a view respecting language which involved as an inference the necessary vagueness and inadequacy of all abstract terms; a theory equivalent in substance to the idea of Occam and the mediaeval Nominalists who followed him. The conclusion drawn was the denial of the possi-

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bility of scientific theology, and of mental philosophy as well. Theology and philosophy, being in the same boat, must sink or swim together. Unwarranted as was the exclusion of studies not having to do immediately with things material from the category of sciences, Bushnell had at heart a distinction which is valid and of practical worth. He insisted justly on the supreme importance which the conception of personality has in the contents of Christianity. In this feature of his teaching he might have cited Edwards, who sets what he terms "notional knowledge" in contrast with the living perceptions that flash on the soul by an illumination within. The awakening, suggestive power of the writings of Bushnell has been recognized everywhere by candid readers. They propounded opinions considerably at variance with cherished beliefs. Yet no one could doubt the author's religous earnestness.

Bushnell took up his pen, when from time to time he was inwardly moved to communicate new light that his restless intellectual activity kindled within him. He was not habituated to scholarly research. His continued reading had the effect gradually to modify earlier conclusions. Then he felt the impulse to recast them. No passion for

REMARKS ON EDWARDS AND HIS THEOLOGY 73

consistency was allowed to qualify the frankness of his expressions. On the subject of the Trinity, in his earlier writings there was a near approach to the Sabellian conception, suggested to him by a translation by Professor Stuart from Schleier-macher. In his mature, final exposition of the Trinity, he approximated, as he avowed, to the ancient, orthodox conception of Athanasius and the Nicene Creed. His thought thus, unconsciously, took the direction of the opinion, not then published, of Edwards. In his article in " The New Englander " on the Trinity as a Protestant truth, he reverted with esteem to Athanasius, and, in speaking of God as eternally " three-ing Himself," he placed himself on ground akin to that of Edwards, whose unpublished essay he was anxious to have given to the public. On the Atonement, as a supplement to his inculcation of what is sometimes called the " Moral View," he declared his conviction that a certain propitiatory element, which is imbedded in different forms in the creeds and liturgies of the Church from the outset, is not without a real basis, and he sought an explication of it in a peculiar form of a piece with the patripassionist drift of his theology—a form, which he deemed more satisfactory than the

t KEMAKKS ON EDWARDS AND HIS THEOLOGY

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

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

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

PAET II

AN UNPUBLISHED ESSAY OF EDWAEDS ON THE TEINITY

PART II

AN UNPUBLISHED ESSAY OF EDWARDS ON THE TRINITY 1

Tis common when speaking of the Divine happiness to say that God is Infinitely Happy in the Enjoyment of himself, in Perfectly beholding & Infinitely loving, & Rejoicing in, his own Essence & Perfections, and accordingly it must be supposed that God Perpetually and Eternally has a most Perfect Idea of himself, as it were an exact Image and Representation of himself ever before him and in actual view, & from hence arises a most pure and Perfect act or energy in the God-

1 The Essay is printed from a careful transcription of the original. It is given in the unrevised form in which it was left by the author, with no attempt to mend the orthography or the structure of the sentences. The alterations are few and trifling in their nature, being designed exclusively to remove obscurities as to the meaning which might perplex the reader. I have thought it better to err by too slight changes than in the opposite direction. The following is a list of the Author's abbreviations : Chh. = church, or churches; F. = Father; G. =God; G.H. = Ghost; Gosp. = Gospel; H.G. = Holy Ghost; Xi. = Lord; L. J. X. = Lord Jesus Christ; So. = Son; Sp. = Spirit, or Spirits; SS. = Scriptures (or Scripture); X. = Christj Xtians. = Christians.

head, which is the divine Love, Complacence and Joy.

Tho we cannot concieve of the manner of the divine understanding, yet if it be understanding or any thing that can be any way signified by that word of ours, it is by Idea. Tho the divine nature be vastly different from that of created spirits, yet our souls are made in the Image of God, we have understanding & will, Idea & Love as God hath, and the difference is only in the Perfection of degree and manner. The Perfection of the manner will Indeed Infer this that there is no distinction to be made in God between Power or habit and act, & with Respect to Gods understanding that there are no such distinctions to be admitted as in ours between Perception or Idea, and Reasoning & Judgment, (excepting what the will has to do in Judgment), but that the whole of the divine understanding or wisdom consists in the meer Perception or unvaried Presence of his Infinitely Perfect Idea., & with Respect to the other faculty as it is in God there are no distinctions to be admitted of faculty, habit, and act, between will, Inclination, & love, But that it is all one simple act. But the divine Perfection will not Infer [i. e., imply] that his understanding is not by

Idea and that there is not Indeed such a thing as Inclination & Love in God. 1

[That in John God is Love shews that

there are more persons than one in the deity, for it shews Love to be essential & necessary to the deity so that his nature consists in it, & this supposes that there is an Eternal & necessary object, because aU Love respects another that is the beloved. By Love here the Apostle certainly means something beside that which is commonly called self-love: that is very improperly called Love & is a thing of an exceeding diverse nature from the affection or virtue of Love the Apostle is speaking of.]

The sum of the divine understanding and wisdom consists in his having a Perfect Idea of him-self, he being Indeed the all: the all-comprehending being,—he that is, and there is none else. So the sum of his Inclination, Love, & Joy is his love to & delight in himself. Gods Love to himself, & complacency & delight in himself,—they are not to be distinguished, they are the very same thing in God; which will easily be allowed, Love in man being scarcely distinguishable from the Complacence he has in any Idea: if there be any difference it is meerly modal, & circumstantial.

1 The next paragraph is inserted at a later date.

The knowledge or view which God has of himself must necessarily be concieved to be some thing distinct from his meer direct existence. There must be something that answers to our Reflection. The Reflection as we Reflect on our own minds carries some thing of Imperfection in it. However, if God beholds himself so as thence to have delight & Joy in himself he must become his own Object. There must be a duplicity. There is God and the Idea of God, if it be Proper to call a conception of that that is Purely spiritual an Idea.

And I do suppose the deity to be truly & Properly Repeated by Gods thus having an Idea of himself &> that this Idea of God is truly God, 1 to all Intents and Purposes, & that by this means the Godhead is Really Generated and Repeated.

1. Gods Idea of himself is absolutely Perfect and therefore is an express and perfect Image of him, exactly like him in every Respect; there is nothing in the Pattern but what is in the Representation,—substance, life, power nor any thing else, & that in a most absolute Perfection of simil-

i Over the last three words is written, as an alternate reading, " is a substantial Idea and haa the very essence of God."

itude, otherwise it is not a Perfect Idea. But that which is the express, Perfect Image of God & in every respect like him is G. to all Intents & Purposes, because there is nothing wanting : there is nothing in the deity that Renders it the Deity but what has some thing exactly answering it in this Image, which will therefore also Eender that the Deity. *

2. But this will more clearly appear if we consider the nature of spiritual Ideas or Ideas of things Purely spiritual, these that we call Ideas of Reflection, such as our Ideas of thought, Love, fear &c. If we diligently attend to them we shall find they are Repetitions of these very things either more fully or faintly, or else they are only Ideas of some external Circumstances that attend them, with a supposition of something like what we have in our own minds, that is, attended with like Circumstances. Thus tis easy to Percieve that if we have an Idea of thought tis only a Repetition of the same thought with the attention of the mind to that Repetition. So if we think of Love either of our [illegible] Love or of the Love of others that we have not, we either so frame things in our Imagination that we have for a moment a Love to that thing or to something we

make to Represent it& stand for it, or we excite for a moment the love that we have to something else & suppose something like it there, or we only-have an Idea of the name with some of the concomitants & effects & suppose something unseen that [is] used to be signified by that name. & such kind of Ideas very Commonly serve us, tho they are not Indeed Real Ideas of the thing it self. But we have Learn'd by experience & it has become habitual to us to govern our thoughts, Judgment & actions about it as tho we concieved of the thing it self. But if a person has truly & properly an Idea of any act of Love, of fear or anger or any other act or motion of the mind, things must be so ordered and framed in his mind that he must for that moment have something of a consciousness of the same motions either to the same thing, or to something else that is made to Represent it in the mind, or towards something else that is pro re nata thither Referd and as it were transposed, and this consciousness of the same motions, with a design to Represent the other by them, is the Idea it self we have of them, & if it be perfectly clear & full it will be in all Respects the very same act of mind of which it is the Idea, with this only difference

that the being of the Latter is to Represent the former. 1

[If a man could have an absolutely Perfect Idea of all that Pass'd in his mind, all the series of Ideas and exercises in every Respect perfect as to order, degree, circumstance &c for any particular space of time past, suppose the last hour, he would Really to all Intents and purpose be over again what he was that last hour. And if it were possible for a man by Reflection perfectly to contemplate all that is in his own mind in an hour, as it is and at the same time that it is there in its first & direct existence; if a man, that is, had a perfect Reflex or Contemplative Idea of every thought at the same moment or moments that that thought was and of every Exercise at & dur-ing the same time that that Exercise was, and so through a whole hour, a man would Really be two during that time, he would be indeed double, he would be twice at once. The Idea he has of himself would be himself again.

Note, by having a Reflex or Contemplative Idea of what Passes in our own minds I dont mean Consciousness only. There is a Great difference between a mans having a view of himself, Reflex

l The next three paragraphs were inserted at a later date.

or Contemplative Idea of himself so as to delight in his own beauty or Excellency, and a meer direct Consciousness. Or if we mean by Consciousness of what is in our own minds any thing besides the meer simple Existence in our minds of what is there, it is nothing but a Power by Reflection to view or contemplate what passes.

But the foregoing position, about a mans being twofold or twice at once, is most evident by what has been said of the nature of spiritual Ideas, for every thing that a man is in that hour he is twice fully & Perfectly. For all the Ideas or thoughts that he has are twice Perfectly & every Judgmt [Judgment] made and every exercise of Inclination or affection, every act of the mind.]

Therefore as G. with Perfect Clearness, fullness & strength, understands himself, views his own essence (in which there is no Distinction of substance & act but which is wholly substance & wholly act), that Idea which G. hath of himself is absolutely himself. This Representation of the divine nature & essence is the divine nature & essence again: so that by Gods thinking of the Deity must certainly be generated. Hereby there is another Person begotten, there is another

Infinite Eternal Almighty & most holy & the same G., the very same divine nature.

And this Person is the second Person in the Trinity, the Only begotten & dearly beloved Son of G.; he is the Eternal, necessary, Perfect, substantial & Personal Idea which G. hath of him self; <fe that it is so seems to me to be abundantly confirmed by the word of G.

1. Nothing can more agree with the account the Scripture gives us of the Son of G., his being in the form of G. and his express & Perfect Image & Representation: 2 Cor. 4, 4, Lest the Light of the glorious Gosp. of X who is the Image of G. should shine unto them. Philip. 2, 6, who being in the form of G. Colos. 1. 15, who is the Image of the Invisible G. Heb. 1. 3, who being the brightness of his Glory & the express Image of his Person. 1 [In the original it is XapatcTrjp rf}<; biroo-rdo-eas dvrov which denotes one Person as like another as the Impression on the wax is to the engraving on the seal. (Hurrion, "of X Crucified," vol. 1, p. 189, 190.); & what can more agree with this that I suppose, that the Son of God is the divine Idea of Himself.] What [can]

1 What next follows, within brackets, is a later insertion. The volume referred to first appeared in 1727.

be more properly called the Image of a thing than the Idea. The end of other Images is to beget an Idea of the things they Eepresent in us, but the Idea is the most Immediate Representation, & seems therefore to be a more primary sort of Image, & we know of no other spiritual Images nor Images of spiritual things but Ideas. An Idea of a thing seems more properly to be called an Image or Representation of that thing than any distinct being can be. However exactly one being—suppose one human body—be like another, yet I think one is not in the most Proper sense the Image of the other but more properly in the Image of the other. Adam did not beget a son that was his Image Properly, but in his Image; but the Son of G.—he is not only in the Image of the F., but he is the Image itself in the most Proper sense. The design of an Idea is to Represent, & the very being of an Idea consists in similitude & Representation: if it dont actually Represent to the beholder, it ceases to be. And the being of it is Immediately dependent on its Pattern: its Reference to that ceasing, it ceases to be its Idea.

That X is this most Immediate Representation of the Godhead, viz. the idea of G., is in my ap-

prehension confirmed by Joh. 12, 45, he that seeth me seeth him that sent me, and Joh. 14, 7, 8, 9, if ye had known me ye should have known my F. also and from henceforth ye know him and have seen him. Philip saith unto him, L. shew us the F. and it sufficeth us. Jesus saith unto him have I been so long time with you, and yet hast thou not seen me Philip, he that hath seen me hath seen the F. and how saist [sayestj thou shew us the

F. See also John 15, 22, 23, 24. Seeing the Perfect Idea of a thing is to all Intents and purposes the same as seeing the thing: it is not only equivalent to the seeing of it but it is the seeing it: for there is no other seeing but having the Idea. Now by seeing a Perfect Idea, so far as we see it, we have it. But it cant be said of any thing else that in the seeing of it we see another, strictly speaking, except it be the very Idea of the other.

2. This well agrees with what the SS. teach us ever was Gods Love to and delight in his Son. For the Idea of G. is that Image of

G. that is the object of Gods eternal and Infinite Love & in which he hath perfect Joy & happiness. God undoubtedly Infinitely loves & delights in himself & is Infinitely happy in the understanding & view of his own glorious es-

sence: this is commonly said. The same the Scripture teaches us concerning that Image of G. that is his Son. The Son of G.—he is the true David or beloved. Joh. 3, 35 & 5, 20. The F. loveth the Son. So it was declared at Xs Baptism and transfiguration, this is my beloved Son in whom I am well Pleased. So the Father calls him his elect in whom his soul de-lighteth. The Infinite happiness of the F. consists in the enjoymt. [enjoyment] of his Son: Prov. 8, 30, I was daily his delight i.e. before the world was. It seems to me most Probable that G. has his Infinite happiness but one way, & that the Infinite Joy he has in his own Idea & that which he has in his Son are but one & the same.

3. X is called the face of G., Exod. 33, 14: the word in the original signifies face, looks, form or appearance. Now what can be so Properly & fitly called so with Respect to G. as Gods own Perfect Idea of himself whereby he has every moment a view of his own essence: this Idea is that face of God which G. sees as a man sees his own face in a looking glass. Tis of such form or appearance whereby G. eternally appears to himself. The Root that the original word comes from signifies to look upon or behold: now what

is that which G. looks upon or beholds in so Em-minent a manner as he doth on his own Idea or that perfect Image of himself which he has in view. This is what is eminently in Gods Presence & is therefore called the angel of Gods Presence or face. Isai. 63, 9.

4. This seems also well to agree with X being called the brightness, effulgence or shining forth of Gods Glory upon two accounts: 1 ? because tis by Gods Idea that his Glory shines forth & appears to himself. G, may be concieved of as Glorious antecedent to his Idea of himself, but then his Glory is Latent; but tis the Idea by which it shines forth and appears to Gods view so that he can delight in it. 2. God is well Represented by the Luminary & His Idea by the Light, for what is so Properly the Light of a mind or spirit as its knowledge or understanding ? The understanding or knowledge of G. is much more properly Represented by Light in a Luminary than the understanding of a created mind, for knowledge is light Rather let into a created mind than shining from it, but the understanding of the divine mind originally Proceeds from this mind it self & is derived from no other.

5. But That the Son of G. is Gods own eter-

nal and Perfect Idea is a thing we have yet much more expressly Kevealed in Gods word. First, in that X is called the wisdom of G. If we are taught in the Scripture that X is the same with Gods wisdom or knowledge, then it teaches us that he is the same with Gods perfect and eternal Idea. They are the same as we have already observed and I suppose none will deny. But X is said to be the wisdom of G.: 1 Cor. 1, 24, Luke 11, 49, compare with Math. 23, 34; and how much doth X speak in Prov. under the name of wisdom especially in the 8 chap. We there have Wisdom thus declaring, 22 v., The L. Possessed me in the beginning of his way before his works of old. I was set up from everlasting or ever the earth was, when there were no depths I was brought forth, when there were no fountains abounding with water. Before the mountains were settled, before the hills was I brought forth. While as yet he had not made the earth nor the fields nor the highest part of the dust of the world. When he Prepared the heavens I was there, when he set a compass upon the face of the depth. When he established the clouds &c. 30 v. Then was I by him as one brought up with him and I was daily his delight, Rejoicing alwaies before

him, Rejoicing in the habitable part of his Earth, and my delights were with the sons of men. It has been usual to say that he that G. Possessed & set up from Everlasting & that was brought forth before the world was, that was by G. as his Companion and as one brought up with him, that was daily his delight, was the Personal wisdom of G. and if so it was Gods Personal Idea of himself.

Secondly, in That the SS. teaches us that X is the Logos of G. It will appear that this Logos is the same with the Idea of G., whether we Interpret it of the Reason of G. or the word of G. If it signifies the Reason & understanding of G., I suppose it wont be denied that tis the same thing with God's Idea. If we translate it the word of G. ? he is either the outward word of G., or his Inward. None will say he is his outward. Now the outward word is speech whereby Ideas are outwardly expressed. The Inward word is thought or Idea it self. The SS. being its own Interpreter see how often is thinking in SS. called saying or speaking, when applied to both G. & men. The Inward word is the Pattern or original of which the outward word by which G. has Revealed himself is the copy. Now that which is the original

from whence the Revelation which G. hath made of himself is taken & the Pattern to which it is conformed, is Gods Idea of himself. When G. declares himself it is doubtless from & according to the Idea he hath of himself.

Thirdly, to the same purpose is another name by which X is called, viz. the AMEN, which is a Hebrew word that signifies truth. Now what is that which is the Prime, original &> universal truth but that which is in the divine mind, viz. his Eternal or Infinite knowledge or Idea.

& joining this with what was observed before, I think we may be bold to say that that which is the form, face & express & perfect Image of G., in beholding which is his eternal delight, & is also the wisdom & kn owledge, Logos & truth of G., is Gods Idea of himself. What other knowledge of G. is there that is the form, appearance & perfect Image and Representation of G. but Gods Idea of himself.

& how well doth this agree with his office of being the Great Prophet & teacher of mankind, the Light of the World and the Revealer of G. to creatures: John 8, 12, I am the Light of the world. Math., 11, 27, no manknoweth the Father save the Son and he to whomsoever the Son will

.Reveal him. Joh. 1, 18, no man hath seen G. at any time, the only begotten Son which is in the Bosom of the F., he hath declared him. Who can be so Properly appointed to be Revealer of G. to the world as that Person who is Gods own Perfect Idea or understanding of himself. Who can be so Properly generated to be the light by which Gods Glory shall appear to creatures, as he is[—]that effulgence of his Glory by which he appears to himself. & this is Intimated to us in the SS. to be the Reason why X is the Light of the world & the Revealer of G. to men because he is the Image of G., 2 Cor. 4, 4, Least [Lest] the Light of the Glorious Gosp. of X. who is the Image of G. should shine unto them. Joh. 12, 45, 46, and he that seeth me seeth him that sent me, I am come a light into the world that whosoever believeth on me should not abide in darkness.

The Godhead being thus begotten by Gods loving an Idea of himself &> shewing forth in a distinct subsistence or Person in that Idea, there Proceeds a most Pure act, & an Infinitely holy & sacred energy arises between the F. & Son in mutually Loving & delighting in each other, for their love & Joy is mutual, Prov. 8, 30,1 was daily his delight Rejoicing alwaies before him. This is

the eternal & most Perfect & essential act of the divine nature, wherin the Godhead acts to an Infinite degree and in the most Perfect manner Possible. The deity becomes all act, the divine essence it self flows out & is as it were breathed forth in Love & Joy. So that the Godhead therm stands forth in yet another manner of subsistence, & there Proceeds the 3d Person in the Trinity, the holy spirit, viz. the Deity in act, for there is no other act but the act of the will.

1. We may learn by the word of G. that the Godhead or the divine nature & essence does subsist in love. 1 Joh. 4, 8, he that loveth not knoweth not G. for G. is Love. In the context of which Place I think it is Plainly Intimated to us that the holy spirit is that Love, as in the 12 & 13 v. If we love one another, G. dwelleth in us and his Love is perfected in us; hereby know we that we dwell in him because he hath given us of his spirit. Tis the same argument in Both verses. In the 12 v. the apostle argues that if we have love dwelling in us we have G. dwelling in us, and in the 13 v. he clears the force of the argument by this that love is God's Spirit. Seeing we have Gods spirit dwelling in us, we have G. dwelling in [in us], supposing it as a thing granted & allowed that

Gods spirit is G. Tis evident also by this that Gods dwelling in us & his Love or the Love that he hath or exerciseth, being in us, are the same thing. The same is intimated in the same manner in the Last verse of the foregoing chap. The apostle was, in the foregoing verses, speaking of Love as a sure sign of sincerity & our acceptance with G., beginning with the 18 v., & he sums up the argument thus in the last verse, & hereby do we know that he abideth in us by the spirit that he hath given us.

Again in the 16 v. of this 4 chap., the Apostle tells us that G. is Love & he that dwelleth in Love dwelleth in G. & G. in him, which confirms not only that the divine nature subsists in love, but also that this love is the Sp., for it is the Spirit of G. by which G. dwells in his saints, as the apostle had observed in the 13 verse and as we are abundantly taught in the New Test.

2. The name of the third 6 Person in the Trinity, viz. the Holy Sp. confirms it: it naturally expresses the divine nature as subsisting in pure act & Perfect Energy, & as flowing out & breathing forth in Infinitely sweet and vigorous affection. It is confirmed both by his being called the Spirit & by his being denominated holy. 1. By his being called the Sp. of G.: the word Sp. in SS.

when used concerning minds, when it is not put for the spiritual substance or mind it self, is put for the disposition, Inclination or temper of the mind: Numb. 14, 24, Caleb was of another Sp. Ps. 51, 10, Kenew in me a Eight Sp. Luke 9, 55, Ye know not what manner of Sp. ye are of. S. 1 Thes. 5, 23,1 Pray G. your whole Sp. soul & body, 1 Pet. 3, 4, The ornament of a meek & quiet Sp. When we Read of the spirit of a spirit or mind it is to be thus understood. Eph. 4, 27, be Renewed in the spirit of your mind. So I suppose when we Read of the Sp. of G. who we are told is a Sp., it is to be understood of the disposition or temper or affection of the divine mind. If we Read or hear of the meek spirit or kind spirit or pious &, holy spirit of a man we understand it of his temper: so I suppose we Read of the Good Sp. & holy Sp. of G., it is likewise to be understood of Gods temper. Now the sum of God's temper or disposition is love, for he is Infinite love &, as I observed before, here is no distinction to be made between habit & act, between temper or disposition & exercise. This is the divine disposition or nature that we are made partakers of, 2 Pet. 1, 4, for our partaking or communion with G. consists in the Communion or partaking of the H. G.

& It is further confirmed by his being Peculiarly denominated holy. The Father & the Son are both Infinitely holy & the holy Gh. [Ghost] can be no holier. But yet the Spirit is especially called holy, which doubtless denotes some Peculiarity in the manner in which holiness is attributed to him. But upon this supposition the matter is easily & clearly explicable. For 1st, it is in the temper or disposition of a mind & its exercise that holiness is Immediately seated. A mind is said to be holy from the holiness of its temper & disposition. 2. Tis in Gods Infinite love to himself that his holiness consists. As all Creature holiness is to be Resolved into love, as the SS. teaches us, so doth the holiness of G. himself consist in Infinite love to himself. Gods holiness is the Infinite beauty & excellence of his nature, & Gods excellency consists in his Love to himself as we have observed in 1

[That the Sp. of God is the very same with Holiness (as tis in God, tis the Holiness of God, and as tis in the Creature, tis the holiness of the creature), appears by John 3, 6, That which is born of the flesh is Flesh & that which is born of the spirit is spirit. Here tis very manifest that flesh

1 The next paragraph is a much later insertion.

& spirit are opposed to one another as true contraries, and tis also acknowledged by orthodox divines in general that by the flesh is meant sin or corruption and, therefore by the spirit is meant its contrary, viz. Holiness, & that is evidently Xs meaning, that which is born of the flesh is corrupt & filthy, but that which is born of the spirit is

holy.]

3. This is very consonant to the office of the holy Ghost or his work with Respect to Creatures, which is threefold, viz. to quicken, enliven & beautify all things, to sanctify Intelligent [beings] & to comfort & delight them. 1. he quickens & beautifies all things. So we Read that the Sp. of G. moved upon the face of the waters or of the Chaos to bring it out of its Confusion into harmony & beauty. So we read, Job 26 13, That G. by his Spirit garnished the heavens. Now whose office can it be so Properly to actuate & enliven all things as his who is the Eternal & essential act & energy of G. & whose office can it be so Properly to give all things their sweetness & beauty as he who is himself the beauty & Joy of the -Creator. 2. Tis he that sanctifies created Sp. ? that is, he gives them divine Love, for the 88. teaches us that all holiness & true Grace & virtue is Resolv-

able into that as its universal spring & Principle. As it is the office of the Person that is Gods Idea & understanding to be the light of the world, to communicate understanding, so tis the office of the Person that is Gods Love to communicate divine love to the Creature. In so doing, Gods spirit or love doth but communicate of it self. Tis the same love so far as a Creature is capable of being made partaker of it. Gods Sp. or his love doth but, as it were, come and dwell in our hearts and act there as a vital Principle, and we become the living temples of the holy GL, & when men are Eegenerated & sanctified, G. Pours forth of his Sp. upon them and they have fellowship or, which is the same thing, are made partakers with the F. & Son of their love, i. e. of their Joy & beauty. Thus the matter is Kepresented in the Gospel—and this agreable to what was taken notice of before—of the Apostle John, his making love dwelling in us & Gods Spirit dwelling in us the same thing, and the explaining of them one by another, 1 Joh. 4, 12, 13.

"When X says to his F., Joh. 17, 26, and I have declared unto them thy name &> will declare it, that the Love wherewith thou hast loved me may be in them and I in them, I cant think of any

100 AN UNPUBLISHED ESSAY OF EDWARDS

way that this will appear so Easy and Intelligible as upon this hypothesis, viz. that the love with which the F. loveth the Son is the H. Sp., that X here concludeth & sums up his Prayer for his disciples with the Request that the holy Sp. might be in his disciples & so he might be in them thereby, for X dwells in his disciples by his Sp., as X teaches in Joh. 14, 16, 17, 18, I will give you another Comforter—even the Spirit of truth—he shall be in you. I will not leave you Comfortless, I will come unto you. And the apostle, Rom. 8, 9, 10, If so be the Sp. of G. dwell in you. Now if any man have not the Sp. of X he is none of his, & if X be in you the body is dead. 1

[Mr. Howes observation from the 5 Chap, of Gal. is here pertinent: Of [from] his Sermons on the Prosperous State of the Xtian Interest before the End of Time, Published by Mr. Evans p. 185. His words are, Walking in the Spirit is directed with a special Eye & Reference unto the exercise of this love, as you see in Gal. 5, 14, 15, 16, [in the] verses compared together. All the law is fulfilled in one word (he means the whole law of the second Table) even in this thou shalt love

i The next paragraph is a later insertion,—of course earlier than 1726, when this edition of Howe was issued.

thy neighb. as thy self. But if ye bite and devour one another (the opposite to this Love or that which follows upon the want of it, or from the opposite principle) take heed that ye be not consumed one of another. This I say then (observe the inference) walk in the Spirit & ye shall not fulfill the lusts of the flesh. To walk in the Spirit is to walk in the Exercise of this Love. The SS. seems in many Places to speak of Love in Xtians as if it were the same with the Sp. of G. in them, or at Least as the Prime and most natural breathing & acting of the Sp. in the soul. Philip 2, 1, if there be therefore any Consolation in X, any Comfort of Love, any fellowship of the Sp., any bowels & mercies, fulfill ye my Joy that ye be likeminded having the same love being of one accord, of one mind. 2 Cor. 6, 6, by kindness, by the H. Gh., by Love unfeigned. Rom. 15, 30: Now I beseech you brethren for the L. J. X sake and for the love of the Sp. Coloss. 1, 8, who declared unto us your love in the Sp. Rom-5, 5, having the love of G, shed abroad in our hearts by the H. Gh. which is Given to us. (See notes on this Text.) Gal. 5, 13, 14, 15, 16, Use not liberty for an occasion to the flesh. But by love serve one another, for all the law is ful-

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filled in one word even in this, thou shalt love thy neighbour as thy self. But if ye Bite & devour one another take heed that ye be not consumed one of another. This I say then, walk in the Sp. & ye shall not fulfill the Lusts of the flesh. The Apostle argues that Xtian liberty dont make way for fulfilling the lusts of the flesh in biting &> devouring one another & the like, because a principle of Love which was the fulfilling of the Law would Prevent it, & in the 16 v. he asserts the same thing in other words: This I say then walk in the Sp. & ye shall not fulfill the lusts of the flesh.

The third & last office of the H. Spirit is to comfort & delight the souls of Gds People, & thus one of his names is the Comforter, & thus we have the phrase of Joy in the H. Gh. 1 Thes. 1, 6 : having Received the word in much affliction with Joy of the H. Gh. Eom. 14, 17, the kingdom of G. is High. & Peace &> Joy in the H. Gh. Act 9, 31, walking in the fear of the Lord & comfort of the holy Ghost, but how well doth this agree with the H. Gh. being God's Joy & delight: Acts 13, 52, and the disciples were filled with Joy & with the holy Gh.—meaning as I suppose that they were filled with spiritual joy.

4. This is confirmed By the symbol of the H. Gh., viz. a dove, which is the Emblem of Love or a lover and is so used in SS. and especially often so in Solomons Song, Cant. 1, 15, Behold thou art fair, my Love, behold thou art fair, thou hast Doves Eyes: i.e. Eyes of love, & again 4,1, the same words, & 5, 12, his Eyes are as the eyes of doves, & 5, 2, my Love, my dove, & 2,14, & 6, 9; and this I believe to be the Reason that the dove alone of all birds (except the sparrow in the single case of the Leprosy) was appointed to be offered in sacrifice because of its Innocency and because it is the emblem of love, love being the most acceptable sacrifice to God. it was under this similitude that the Holy Ghost descended from the F. on X at his Baptism, signifying the Infinite love of the F. to the So, who is the true David, or beloved, as we said before. The same was signified by what was exhibited to the Eye in the appearance there was of the holy Gh. descending from the F. to the S. in the shape of a dove, as was signified by what was exhibited to the eye in the voice there was at the same time, viz., This is my well beloved Son in whom I am well pleased. 1

1 The next paragraph is a late insertion.

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[Holy Ghost, Love, represented by the Symbol of a dove. In the beginning of Genesis it is said the spirit of God moved upon the Face of the waters. The word translated moved in the original is MBtinti, which as Buxtorf & Grotius observe, properly signifies the Brooding of a dove upon her Eggs. See Buxtorf on the Radix srn & Grotius's truth of the Xtian R. B. 1, Sect. 16, notes, where Grotius observes that the Meracheth also signifies Love. See my notes on Gen. 1, 2.]

5. This is confirmed from the types of the H. Gh., and especially from that type of oil which is often used as a type of the Holy Gh. & may well Represent divine [love] from its soft, smooth, flowing & diffusive nature. Oil is from the Olive Tree which was of old used to betoken Love, Peace & friendship. That was signified by the olive branch with which the dove Returned to Noah. It was a token for and a sign of God's love and favour, after so terrible a manifestation of his displeasure as the deluge. The olive branch & the dove that brought it were both the Emblems of the same, viz., the Love of God. But especially did the holy anointing oil, the Principal type of the H. Gh., Represent the divine love & delight, by Reason of its excellent sweetness & fragrancy.

Love is expressly said to be like it in Scripture in

the 133 Ps. 20, Behold how Good x

[That God's Love or his Loving kindness is the same with the Holy Ghost seems to be plain by Ps. 36, 7, 8, 9: How excellent (or how precious, as 'tis in the Hebrew) is thy loving kindness O God, therefore the children of men put their trust under the shadow of thy wings, they shall be abundantly satisfied (in the Hebrew watered) with the fatness of thy house & thou shalt make them to drink of the river of thy pleasures, for with thee is the fountain of Life & in thy light shall we see light. Doubtless that precious Loving kindness & that fatness of God's House & Kiver of his pleasures & the water of the fountain of Life & Gods light here spoken [of] are the same thing: by which we learn that the Holy anointing oil that was kept in the House of God, which was a type of the Holy Ghost, represented Gods Love, & that the Kiver of water of Life, spoken of in the 22. of Revelation, which proceeds out of the throne of God & of the Lamb, which is the same with Ezekiel's vision of Living and life-giving water, which is here called the fountain of Life & river of Gods pleasures, is Gods Loving-kindness.

1 The next paragraph is a much later insertion.

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But X himself expressly teaches us that By spiritual fountains & rivers of water of Life is meant the Holy Ghost. Joh. 4, 14 & 7, 38, 39. 1 That by the River of Gods Pleasures here is meant the same thing with that pure River of water of Life spoken of in Rev. 22. 1 will be much confirmed if we compare those verses with Rev. 21. 23, 24 & Chap. 22. 1, 5. (see the note on Chap. 21, 23, 24.) I think if we compare these places & weigh them we cannot doubt but that it is the same Happiness that is meant in this Psalm which is spoken of there.]

6. So this well agrees with the similitudes and metaphors that are used about the holy Gh. in SS., such as water, fire, breath, wind, oil, wine, a spring, a River, a being Poured out <fc shed forth, a being breathed forth. Can there any spirituall thing be thought, or any thing belonging to any spiritual being to which such kind of metaphors so naturally agree, as to the affection of a Sp. The affection, Love or Joy, may be said to flow out as Water or to be breathed forth as breath or wind. But it would [not] sound so well to say that an Idea or Judgm*. flows out or is Breathed forth. It is no way different to say of the affec-

tion that it is warm, or to compare love to fire, but it would not seem natural to say the same of Perception or Keason. It seems natural Enough to say that the soul is Poured out in affection or that Love or delight are shed abroad: Tit. 3, 5, 6, the Love of God is shed abroad in our hearts, but it suits with nothing else belonging to a spir itual being.

This is that River of water of life spoken of in the 22 of Rev., which Proceeds from the throne of the Father & the Son, for the Rivers of Living water or water of Life are the H. Gh., by the same apostles own Interpretation, Joh. 7, 38, 39; & the Holy Gh. being the Infinite Delight & Pleasure of G., the River is called the River of Gods Pleasures, Ps. 36, 8, not Gods River of Pleasures, which I suppose signifies the same as the fatness of Gods house, which they that trust in God shall be watered with, by which fatness of Gods house I suppose is signified the same thing which oil typifies.

7. It is a Confirmation that the holy Gh. is Gods Love & Delight, Because the saints Communion with G. consists in their Partaking of the H. Gh. The Communion of saints is twofold: tis their Communion with G. & Communion with

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one another: 1 Job. 1, 3, That ye also may have fellowship with us & truly our fellowship is with the F. & with his son J. X. Communion is a Common Partaking of Good, either of excellency or happiness, so that when it is said the saints have Communion or fellowship with the F. & with the Son, the meaning of it is that they Partake with the F. & the Son of their Good, which is either their excellency & glory, (2 Pet. 1, 4, ye are made Partakers of the divine nature; Heb. 12, 4, that we might be Partakers of his holiness; Joh. 17, 22, 23, & the Glory which thou hast given me I have given them that they may be one even as we are one I in them & thou in me); or of their Joy & happiness: Joh. 17, 13, that they may have my Joy fulfilled in themselves. But the Holy Gh., Being the Love & Joy of G., is his beauty & happiness, & it is in our partaking of the same holy Sp. that our Communion with G. consists: 2 Cor. 13, 14, The Grace of the L. J. X & the love of G. & the Communion of the Holy Ghost be with you all, Amen. They are not different benefits but the same that the Apostle here wisheth, viz. the Holy Ghost: in partaking of the holy Ghost, we possess & enjoy the Love & Grace of the F. & the Son, for the Holy Gh. is

that love & Grace, & therefore I suppose it is that in that forementioned Place, 1 Joh. 1, 3, we are said to have fellowship with" the Son & not with the H. GL, because therein consists our fellowship with the Father & the Son, even in partaking with them of the H. Gh. In this also eminently consists our Communion with the Son that we drink into the same Sp. This is the common Excellency & Joy & happines in which they all are united; tis the bond of Perfectness by which they are one in the F. & the Son as the F. is in the Son . . .

8. I can think of no other good account that can be given of the apostle Pauls wishing Grace and Peace from G. the F. & the L. J. X. in the Beginning of his Epistles, without ever mentioning the H. Gh.,—as we find it thirteen times in his salutations in the beginnings of his Epistles,—But [i. e. 7 except] that the Holy Gh. is himself Love and Grace of G. the F. & the L. J. X.; & in his blessing at the End of his second Epistle to the Corinthians where all three Persons are mentioned he wishes Grace and love from the Son and the F [except that], in the Communion or the Partaking of the holy Gh., the blessing is from the F. & the Son is the H. Gh. But the blessing from the holy Gh. is

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himself, the communication of himself. John 14, 21, 23, X Promises that he and the Father will Love believers, but no mention is made of the holy Ghost, and the Love of X and the Love of the Father are often distinctly mentioned, but never any mention of the Holy Ghosts Love. 1

[This I suppose to be the reason why we have never any account of the Holy Ghosts Loving either the Father or the Son, or of the Sons or the Fathers Loving the Holy Ghost, or of the Holy Ghosts Loving the saints, tho these things are so often Predicated of Both the other Persons.]

& This I suppose to be that Blessed Trinity that we Bead of In the Holy SS. The F. is the Deity subsisting in the Prime, unoriginated & most absolute manner, or the deity in its direct existence The Son is the deity generated by Gods understanding, or having an Idea of himself & subsisting in that Idea. The Holy Gh. is the Deity subsisting in act, or the divine essence flowing out and Breathed forth in Gods Infinite love to & delight in himself. & I believe the whole divine Essence does Truly & distinctly subsist both in the divine Idea & divine Love, and that each of them are Properly distinct Persons.

& It confirms me in it that this is the True Trinity because Eeason is sufficient to tell us that there must be these distinctions In the deity, viz., of G. (absolutely considered), & the Idea of G., & Love & delight, & there are no other Real distinctions in G. that can be thought. There are but these three distinct Eeal things in G. Whatsoever else can be mentioned in G. are nothing but meer modes or Relations of Existence. There are his attributes of Infinity, Eternity and Immortality; they are meer modes of existence. There is Gods understanding, his wisdom & omniscience that we Have shewn to be the same with his Idea, There is Gods will, But this is not Really distinguished from his love, But is the same but only with a different Relation. As the sum of Gods understanding consists in his having an Idea of himself, so the sum of his will or Inclination consists in his loving himself, as we have already observed. There is Gods Power or Ability to bring things to Pass. But this is not Really distinct from his understanding & will; it is the same but only with the Relation they have to those effects that are, or are to be Produced. There is Gods holiness, but this is the same, as we have shewn in what we have said of the nature of ex-

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cellency, with his love to himself. There is Gods Justice, which is not Keally distinct from his holiness. There are the attributes of Goodness, mercy and Grace, but these are but the overflowing of Gods Infinite love. The sum of all Gods Love is his Love to himself. These three, G., and the Idea of G., & the Inclination, affection & love of G., must be conceived as Keally distinct. But as for all these other things of extent, duration, being with or without change, ability to do, they are not distinct Real things even in created spirits but only meer modes and Relations. So that our natural Reason is sufficient to tell us that there are these three in G., and we can think of no more.

It is a maxim amongst divines that everything that is in G. is G. which must be understood of Real attributes and not of meer modalities. If a man should tell me that the Immutability of G. is G. or that the omnipresence of G. & authority of G., is God, I should not be able to think of any Rational meaning of what he said. It hardly sounds to me Proper to say that Gods being without change is G., or that Gods being Every where is God, or that Gods having a Right of Government over Creatures is G. But if it be meant that the

Real attributes of G., viz. his understanding & love are G., then what we have said may in some measure explain how it is so, for deity subsists in them distinctly; so they are distinct divine persons. We find no other attributes of which it is said that they are G. in SS. or that G. is they, but -40709 & Ayami^ the Reason & the Love of G. Joh. 1, 1, &, 1 Joh. 4, 8, 16. Indeed it is said that G. is Light, 1 Joh. 1, 5, But what can we understand by divine light different from the divine Reason or understanding ? The same apostle tells us that X is the True Light, Joh. 1, 9, & the apostle Paul tells us that he is the effulgence of the Fathers Glory, Heb. 1, 3. 1

[This is that Light that the Holy Ghost in the Prophet Daniel says dwells with God, Dan. 2, 22, & the Light dwelleth with him,—the same with that word or Reason that the apostle John says, 1 Chap, of his Gospel, was with God & was God, that he there says is the true Light, and speaks much of, vide that Chapter, v. 4, 5, 7, 8, 9. This is that Wisdom that says in the 8 of Prov., 30 v, that he was by God as one brought up with him. This is the Light with respect to which especially God the Father may be called the Father of Lights.]

1 The next paragraph is inserted later.

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One of the Principal Objections that I can think of against what has been supposed is concerning the Personality of the holy Gh.—that this scheme of things dont seem well to consist with [the fact] that a person is that which hath understanding & will. If the three in the Godhead are Persons they doubtless each of them have understanding, but this makes the understanding one distinct person & Love another. How therefore can this Love be said to have understanding? (Here I would observe that divines have not been wonl to suppose that these three had three distinct understandings, but all one and the same understanding.) In order to clear up this matter Let it be considered that the whole divine office is supposed truly & Properly to subsist in Each of these three; viz., G. & his understanding & love, & that there is such a wonderfull union between them thai they are, after an Ineffable & Inconcievable manner, one in another, so that one hath another & they have communion in one another & are as it were Predicable one of another; as X said of himself & the R, I am in the F & the P. in me, so maj it be said concerning all the Persons in the Trini ty, the F. is in the Son & the S. in the F., th* H. Gh. is in the F., & the F. in the H. Gh., the

H. Gh. is in the S. & the Son in the H. GL, & the F. understands because the Son who is the divine understanding is in him, the F. loves because the H. Gh, is in him, so the Son loves because the H. Gh. is in him & proceeds from him, so the H. Gh. or the divine essence subsisting is divine, but understands because the Son the divine Idea is in him. Understanding may be Predicated of this Love because it is the love of the understanding both objectively & subjectively. G. loves the understanding & that understanding also flows out in love so that the divine understanding is in the deity subsisting in love. It is not a blind love. Even in Creatures there is Consciousness Included in the very nature of the will or act of thes soul, & tho perhaps not so that it can so Properly be said that it is a seeing or understanding will, yet it may truly & properly be said so in G., by Eeason of Gods Infinitely more perfect manner of acting so that the whole divine essence flows out & subsists in this act., & the Son is in the holy Sp. tho it dont Proceed from him by Reason [of the fact] that the understanding must be considered as Prior in the order of nature to the will or love or act, both in Creatures & in the Creator. The understanding is so in the Sp. that

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the Sp. may be said to know, as the Sp. of G, is truly & Perfectly said to know & to search all things, even the deep things of G. 1

[All the three are persons for they all have understanding & will. There is understanding & will in the F., as the Son & the holy Gh. are in him & proceed from him. There is understanding & will in the Son, as he is understanding & as the Holy Gh. is in him & proceeds from him. There is understanding & will in the Holy Gh. as he is the divine will & as the Son is in him. Nor is it to be looked upon as a strange & unreasonable figment that the Persons should be said to have an understanding or Love by another Persons being in them, for we have scripture ground to conclude so concerning the Fathers having wisd. & understanding or Reason that it is by the Sons being in him; because we are there Informed that he is the wisd. & Reason & Truth of G. & hereby G. is wise by his own wisdom being in him. Understanding & wisdom is in the F. as the Son is in him & Proceeds from him. Understanding is in the H. Gh. because the Son is in him, not as proceeding from him but as flowing out in him.]

But I dont Pretend fully to explain how these things are & I am sensible a hundred other objections may be made & puzzling doubts & questions Raised that I cant solve. I am far from Pretending to explaining the Trinity so as to Render it no Longer a mystery. I think it to be the highest & deepest of all divine mysteries still, notwithstanding anything that I have said or conceived about it. I dont Intend to explain the Trinity. But Scripture with Reason may Lead to say something further of it than has been wont to be said, tho there are still Left many things Pertaining to it Incomprehensible. It seems to me that what I have here supposed concerning the Trinity is exceeding analogous to the Gospel scheme and agreeable to the Tenour of the whole N. T. & abundantly Illustrative of Gospel doctrines, as might be Particularly shewn, would it not exceedingly Lengthen out this discourse.

I shall only now Briefly observe that many things that have been wont to be said by orthodox divines about the Trinity are hereby Illustrated. Hereby we see how the F. is the fountion of the Godhead, & why when he is spoken of in SS. he is so often, without any addition or distinction, called G. ? which has led some to think that he

only was truly & properly G. Hereby we may see why in the (Economy of the Persons of the Trinity the E should sustain the dignity of the deity, that the F. should have it as his office to uphold & maintain the Eights of the Godhead & should be God not only by essence but, as it were, by his (economical office. Hereby is illustrated the doc. [doctrine] of the H. Gh. Proceeding [from] both the F. & the Son. Hereby we see how that it is possible for the Son to be begotten by the F. & the H. Gh. to Proceed from the F. & Son, & yet that all the persons should be Coeternal. Hereby we may more clearly understand the Equality of the Persons among themselves, & that they are every way equal in the society or Family of the three. They are equal in honour: besides the honour which is common to 'em all, viz. that they are all God, each has his peculiar honour in the society or family. They are equal not only in essence, but the Fathers honour is that he is, as it were, the author of Perfect & Infinite wisdom. The son's honour is that he is that perfect & divine wisdom itself the excellency of which is that from whence arises the honour of being the author or Generator of it. The honour of the F. & the Son is that they are Infinitely Excellent, or that

from them Infinite Excellency Proceeds; but the honour of the H. Gh. is equal for he is that divine excellency & beauty itself. Tis the Honour of the F. & the Son that they are Infinitely holy and are the fountain of holiness, but the honour of the H. Gh. is that holiness itself. The honour of the F. & the Son is [that] they are Infinitely happy & are the original & fountain of happiness, & the honour of the holy Gh. is Equal for he is Infinite happiness & Joy itself. The Honour of the F. is that he is the fountain of the deity as he from whom proceed both the divine wisdom & also excellency & happiness. The honour of the Son is Equal for he is himself the divine wisd. & is he from whom proceeds the divine excellency & happiness, & the honour of the Holy Gh. is equal for he is the beauty & happiness of both the other Persons.

By this also we may fully understand the Equality of Each Person's Concern in the W[ork] of Redemption, & the equality of the Redeemeds' Concern with them & dependence upon them, & the Equality & honour & Praise due to Each of them. Glory belongs to the F. & the Son that they so greatly Loved the world: to the F. that he so Loved that he gave his only begotten Son:

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to the son that he so loved the world as to give up himself. But there is Equal Glory due to the H. Gh., for he is that Love of the F. & the Son to the world. Just so much as the two first Persons glorify themselves by showing the astonishing greatness of their Love & Grace, Just so much is that wonderful Love & Grace glorified who is the H. Gh. It shows the Infinite dignity and excellency of the Father that the Son so delighted & prized his honour & glory that he stooped infinitely Low Rather than [that] men's salvation should be to the Injury of that honour & glory. It showed the Infinite excellency & worth of the Son that the F. so delighted in him that for his sake he was Ready to quit his anger & Receive into favour those that had [deserved?] Infinitely ill at his hands. & what was done shews how great the excellency & worth of the H. Gh. who is that delight which the F. & the Son have in Each other: it shows it to be Infinite. So great as the worth of a thing delighted in is to any one, so great is the worth of that delight & Joy itself which he has in it. Our dependence is equally upon each in this office. The F. appoints & Provides the Redeemer, & himself accepts the Price and grants the thing purchased; the Son is the Redeemer by offering

himself & is the Price; & the H. Gh. Immediately communicates to us the thing Purchased by communicating himself, & he is the thing Purchased. The sum of all that X Purchased for men was the H. Gh.: GaL 3, 13, 14, he was made a Curse for us—that we might Recieve the .Promise of the Sp. through Faith. What X Purchased for us was that we have Communion with G. [which] is his Good, which consists in Partaking of the holy Ghost: as we have shown, all the blessedness of the Redeemed consists in their Partaking of X's fullness, which consists in Partaking of that Spirit which is given not by measure unto him : the oil that is Poured on the head of the Church Runs down to the members of his body and to the skirts of his Garment, Ps. 133, 2. X Purchased for us that we should have the favour of G. & might Enjoy his Love, but this Love is the H. Gh. X Purchased for us True spiritual excellency, grace & holiness, the sum of which is Love to God, which is [nothing] but the Indwelling of the Holy Gh. in the heart. X purchased for us spiritual Joy & comfort, which is in a participation of God's Joy & happiness, which Joy & happiness is the H. Gh., as we have shewn. The Holy Gh. is the sum of all good things. Good things & the Holy Sp. are

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synonymous expressions in SS.: Math. 7, 11, how much more shall your heavenly F. give the Holy Sp. to them that ask him. The sum of all spiritual good which the finite have in this world is that spring of living water within them which we Read of, Joh. 4, 10, &c, & those Rivers of living water flowing out of them which we Read of, Joh. 7, 38, 39, which we are there told means the H. Gh.; & the sum of all happiness in the other world is that River of water of Life which Proceeds out of the throne of G. & the Lamb, which we Read of, Rev. 22, 1, which is the River of Gods Pleasures & is the H. Gh. & therefore the sum of the Gospel Invitation to come & take the water of life, verse 17. The H. Gh. is the Purchased Possession & Inheritance of the saints, as appears because that little of it which the saints have in this world is said to be the Ernest of that Purchased Inheritance, Eph. 1, 14. 2 Cor. 1, 22 & 5, 5: tis an Ernest of that which we are to have a fullness of hereafter. The Holy Gh. is the great subject of all gosp. [el] Promises & Therefore is called the Sp. of Promise, Eph. 1, 13. This is called the Promise of the F., Luke 24,49, & the like in other Places. 1 [If the Holy Gh. be a Comprehension

of all Good things Promised in the Gospel, we may easily see the force of the Apostle's arguing, GaL 3. 2, This only would I know, Recieved ye the Sp. by the works of the Law or by the hearing of faith ?] So that Tis G. of whom our good is purchased & tis G. that Purchases it & tis G. also that is the thing Purchased. Thus all our Good things are of G. & through God & in G., as we read in Rom. 11, 36: "for of him & through him & to him (or in him as ek is Rendered, 1 Cor. 8, 6.) are all things." To whom be Glory forever. All our Good is of G. the F., tis all through G. the Son, & all is in the H. Gh., as he is himself all our Good. G. is himself the Portion &> purchased Inheritance of his People. Thus G. is the Alpha & the Omega in this affair of Redemption. If we suppose no more than used to be supposed about the H. Gh. the Concern of the Holy Gh. in the work of Redemption is not Equal with the Father's & the Son's, nor is there an equal part of the Glory of this work belonging to him: meerly to apply to us or Immediately to give or hand to us the blessing purchased, after it was purchased, as subservient to the other two persons, is but a little thing [compared] to the Purchasing of it by the Paying an Infinite Price, by X offering up himself in sacrifice to

procure it, & tis but a little thing to God the Fathers giving his Infinitely dear Son to be a sacrifice for us & upon his purchase to afford to us all the blessings of his purchased. But according to this there is an Equality. To be the Love of G. to the world is as much as for the F. & the Son to do so much from Love to the world, & to be the thing Purchased was as much as to be the Price. The Price & the thing bought with that Price are equal. And tis as much as to afford the thing purchased, for the glory that belongs to him that affords the thing Purchased arises from the worth of that thing that he affords & therefore tis the same Glory & an Equal Glory; the Glory of the thing itself is its worth & that is also the Glory of him that affords it.

There are two more Eminent & Remarkable Images of the Trinity among the Creatures. The one is in the spiritual Creation, the soul of man. There is the mind, & the understanding or Idea, & the spirit of the mind as it is called in SS. i.e. the disposition], the will or affection. The other is in the visible Creation viz. the Sun. The father is as the substance of the Sun. (By substance I dont mean in a philosophical sense, but the Sun as to its Internal Constitution.) The Son is as

the Brightness & Glory of the disk of the Sun or that bright & glorious form under which it appears to our Eyes. The Holy Gh. is the action of the Sun which is within the Sun in its Intestine Heat, &, being diffusive, enlightens, warms, enlivens & comforts the world. The Sp., as it is Gods Infinite love to himself & happiness in himself, is as the internal heat of the Sun, but, as it is that by which G. communicates himself, it is as the Emanation of the suns action, or the Emitted Beams of the sun.

The various sorts of Bays of the Sun & their beautiful Colours do well Bepresent the Sp. 1 They well [Bepresent the love & grace of G. and were made use of for this purpose in the Bain-bow after the flood & I suppose also in that Bain-bow that was seen Bound about the throne by Ezek[iel] : Ezek 1,28, Bev. 4,3, & Bound the head of X by John, Bev. 10, 1.] or the amiable excellency of G. and the various beautiful Graces & virtues of the Sp. These beautiful Colours of the sunbeams we find made use of in SS. for this purpose, viz. to Bepresent the Graces of the Sp., as 68. Ps. 13 v.: Tho Ye have lien among the Pots, yet shall ye be as the wings of a dove Covered with

1 The following sentence was inserted later.

silver & her feathers with yellow gold, i.e. like the Light Reflected in various beautiful Colours from the Feathers of a dove, which Colours Represent the Graces of the Heavenly Dove. The same I suppose is signified by the various beautiful colours Reflected from the Precious stones of the breastplate, & that these spiritual ornaments of the Chh are what are Represented by the various Colours of the foundation & gates of the new Jerusalem, Rev. 21 & Isaiah 54, 11 <fec.— & the stones of the Temple, 1 Chron. 29, 2; & I believe the variety there is in the Rays of the Sun & their beautiful Colours was designed by the Creator for this very purpose, & Indeed that the whole visible Creation which is but the shadow of being is so made and ordered by G. as to typify & Represent spiritual things, for which I could give many reasons. 1 [I dont propose this meerly as an hypothesis but as a part of divine truth sufficiently & fully ascertained by the Revelation God has made in the Holy Scriptures.] 2

[I am sensible what kind of objections many will be ready to make against what has been said,

1 The next sentence is a later addition.

2 The original treatise appears to end here ; what follows is independently written later, on another sheet.

what difficulties will be immediately found, How can this be % & how can that be ?

I am far from affording this as any explication of this mystery, that unfolds & renews the mys-teriousness & incomprehensibleness of it, for I am sensible that however by what has been said some difficulties are lessened, others that are new appear, and the number of those things that appear mysterious, wonderful & incomprehensible, is increased by it. I offer it only as a farther manifestation of what of divine Truth the word of G. exhibits to the view of our minds concerning this great mystery. I think the word of G. teaches us more things concerning it to be believed by us than have been generally believed, & that it exhibits many things concerning it exceeding [i. e., more] glorious & wonderful than have been taken notice of; yea, that it reveals or exhibits many more wonderful mysteries than those which have been taken notice of; which mysteries that have been overvalued are incomprehensible things & yet have been exhibited in the word of G., tho they are an addition to the number of mysteries that are in it. No wonder that the more things we are told concerning that which is so Infinitely above our

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reach, the number of visible mysteries increases. When we tell a child a little concerning God he has not an hundreth part so many mysteries in view on the nature & attributes of G. & his works of Creation & Providence as one that is told much concerning God in a divinity school; & yet he knows much more about God & has a much clearer understanding of things of Divinity & is able more clearly to explicate some things that were dark and very unintelligible to him. I humbly apprehend that the things that have been observed increase the number of visible mysteries in the Godhead in no other manner than as by them we perceive that G. has told us much more about it then was before generally observed. Under the Old Testament the Chh. of G. were not told near so much about the Trinity as they are now. But what the N. T. has revealed, tho it has more opened to our view the nature of God, yet it has increased the number of visible mysteries & they thus appear to us exceeding wonderfull & incomprehensible. & so also it has come to pass in the Chh., being told [i. e., that the Churches are told] more about the Incarnation & the Satisfaction of X & other Gospel doctrines. Tis so not only in divine

things but natural things. He that looks on a plant, or the Parts of the bodies of animals, or any other works of nature, at a great distance where he has but an obscure sight of it, may see something in it wonderfull & beyond his Comprehension, but he that is near to it & views them narrowly indeed understands more about them, has a clearer and distinct sight of them, & yet the number of things that are wonderfull & mysterious in them that appear to him are much more than before, &, if he views them with a microscope, the number of the wonders that he sees will be much increased still, but yet the microscope gives him more of a true knowledge concerning them.]

God is never said to love the Holy Gh., nor are any Epithets that betoken Love any where given to him, tho' so many are ascribed to the Son, as Gods Elect, The beloved, he in whom Gods soul delighteth, he in whom he is well pleased &c. — Yea such Epithets seem to be ascribed to the Son as tho he were the object of Love exclusive of all other Persons, as tho there were no Person whatsoever to share the Love of the Father with the Son. To this purpose evidently he is called Gods only begotten Son, at the time that it is

130 AN UNPUBLISHED ESSAY OF EDWARDS

added, In whom he is well pleased. There is nothing in SS. that speaks of any acceptance of the Holy Gh. ? or any Reward or any mutual Friendship between the H. Gh. and either of the other Persons, or any Command to Love the Holy Ghost or to delight in or have any Complacence in [the H. G.], tho such commands are so frequent with Respect to the other Persons.

The Son of God] Agreable to the Son of Gods being the Wisdom or Understanding of God is that Zech. 3, 9, read, For behold the stone that I have laid before Joshua; upon one stone shall be seven Eyes. This stone is the Messiah (See Observations on the Place in my discourse on the Prophecies of the Messiah: Miscel. B. 6.) By these Eyes is represented Gods understanding, [as shewn] by the explanation which God himself gives of it in the next Chap. v. 10. These seven are the eyes of the Lord which run to and fro through the whole Earth. The seven Eyes, being by a wonderfull work of God Graven on the stone, a thing in itself very far from sight, represents the incarnation of X in uniteing the Logos or wisdom of God to that which is in it self so weak & blind & infinitely far from divinity as the Human Nature. The same again is

represented, Rev. 5, 6, And I beheld & Lo in the midst of the Throne and of the four Beasts and in the midst of the Elders stood a Lamb as it had been slain, having seven horns & seven Eyes which are the seven spirits of (rod. The plain allusion here to that other place in Zechary shews that the stone there spoken of, with seven Eyes, is the Messiah, that elsewhere is often called a stone. And whereas [i. e. 9 with reason] these seven Eyes are said to be the seven spirits of God i. e. the Perfect & alsufficient spirit of God, for tis by the Holy Spirit that the divine nature & the divine Logos or understanding or wisdom is united to the human nature.

That in Rom. 5, 5, The Love of God is shed abroad in our Hearts by the Holy Ghost &c. in the original is The Love of God is poured out into our Hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given to us; So that the same representation is made of the manner of communicating it that is made from time to time to signify the manner of communicating the Spirit of God himself & the same expression used to signify it. The Love of God is not said to be poured out into our Hearts, in any propriety [of speech], any other way than as the Holy Spirit which is the Love of God is

132 AN UNPUBLISHED ESSAY OT? E13WAKDS

poured out into our Hearts, & it seems to be intimated that it is this way that the Love of God is poured out into our Hearts by the words annexed, by the Holy Ghost which is given to us.

Holy Ghost. These two Texts illustrate one the other: Cant. 1, 4, we will Remember thy Love more than Wine, & Eph. 5, 18, Be not drunk with wine but be ye filled with the Spirit.

That Knowledge or understanding in God which we must conceive of as first is his Knowledge of every Thing possible. That Love which must be This Knowledge is what we must conceive of as belonging to the Essence of the Godhead in its first subsistence. Then comes a Reflex act of Knowledge & his viewing Himself & knowing himself & so knowing his own Knowledge & so the Son is begotten. There is such a Thing in God as knowledge of knowledge, an Idea of an Idea. Which can be nothing else than the Idea or Knowledge repeated.

The World was made for the Son of God especially. For God made the world for Himself from Love to Himself; but God loves Himself only in a reflex act. He views Himself & so loves

Himself, so he makes the world for Himself viewed & Reflected on, & that is the same with Himself repeated or begotten in his own Idea, & that is his Son. When God considers of making any thing for Himself He presents Himself before Himself & views Himself as his End, and that viewing Himself is the same as Reflecting on himself or having an Idea of Himself, and to make the world for the Godhead thus viewd & understood is to make the world for the Godhead begotten & that is to make the world for the Son of God.

The Love of God as it flows forth ad extra is wholly determined and directed by divine wisdom, so that those only are the Objects of it that divine wisdom chuses, so that the Creation of the world is to gratify divine Love as that is exercised by divine wisdom. But X is divine wisdom, so that the world is made to gratify Divine Love as exercised by Christ or to gratify the Love that is in Xs Heart, or to provide a spouse for X. Those creatures which Wisdom chuses for the Object of divine Love]as?tXs Elect spouse and especially those elect creatures that Wisdom chiefly pitches upon & makes the End of the Rest of creatures.

APPENDIX

APPENDIX

THE DISMISSAL OF EDWARDS FROM THE CHURCH IN NORTHAMPTON

The great trial—one is tempted to call it the tragic event—in the career of Edwards was his dismissal from his pastoral charge at Northampton, after a service of twenty-four years in the ministry there—a dismissal that was judged to be expedient by a majority of one in a council of ministers and by a large majority of the members of the church. It was preceded by a discord which had lasted for a number of years. Were we to look up the causes that led to this separation, we should have to explore the history of the " Great Eevival " and of its consequences. The religious movement had deepened in the mind of its chief promoter his conviction of the vital importance of the spiritual experience of conversion. This conviction was made manifest in successive writings issued by him, including his book on the "Religious Affections " (1746). His observations during and after the commotion attending the Revival naturally inspired him with a more strenuous antagonism to everything indicative of laxness of morals in members of his flock, but it also prompted him to a rising antipathy, ending in a determined resistance, to a practice which had been formed and publicly defended by his honored grandfather and predecessor in office, the revered Stoddard, the practice of admitting to the communion of the Lord's Supper persons who were free from scandalous

conduct, and desired this privilege as a step on the road to a new spiritual life, which neither they nor the professed Christian converts about them recognized as already attained by them. The point in dispute was whether, in the intention of Jesus, the Lord's Supper was a " converting ordinance." Edwards took ground resolutely against a custom which was ardently approved by most of his parishioners, was sanctified in their eyes by the course of their previous, venerated pastor, and had spread widely in the churches of New England. The outbreaking of the disagreement that ended in the rupture of the pastoral tie and the actual exile of Edwards by his own act, as the natural result, was an instance of ecclesiastical discipline, set on foot by him from the purest motives, but which, in some of its incidents, naturally excited earnest and bitter opposition among the principal families of his parish. In all the transactions provoked at the outset by this initial contention, however in some particulars Edwards may be thought to have erred in judgment, it is undeniable that he uniformly acted with entire self-control, dignity and freedom from asperity of language and deportment. The position that he took was at variance with a fixed, widely diffused public opinion on the theological question at issue, then the subject of a heated controversy far and wide. It is an interesting fact that when the struggle at Northampton had become a thing of the past one of the foremost leaders there of the party hostile to Edwards openly and penitently confessed to him his remorse for his temper and conduct during the contest, imploring and receiving forgiveness for it. It is, also, an historic fact worthy of note that the ground taken by Edwards on the question of the qualifications requisite for full communion

with the visible church came to be sanctioned by the New England churches generally, and to be regarded by them as an essential part of their ecclesiastical system. The Half-Way Covenant, which he opposed, was condemned. Much, therefore, as Edwards suffered for his conscientious defence of his opinion in writings and in pastoral administration, the issue was the victory of his cause on what was the extended theatre of the conflict.

II

THE ACCOUNT GIVEN BY EDWARDS OF HIS METHOD OF STUDY

In the letter to the Trustees of Princeton College, Edwards refers first to the temporal inconveniences to himself and his family which an acceptance of their offer would involve. But his main objection is said to be his "own defects," viz., a constitution which begets ef a low tide of spirits," with a bashful, retiring manner, a taciturn way, " with a disagreeable dullness and stiffness much unfitting " him for conversation and for such business as the government of a college. Then comes an interesting statement of his method of study and the great accumulation, consequent upon it, of materials in the form of notes, in great part records of his own thoughts. Finally he speaks of his schemes for the composition of various works, several of which, in a preliminary form, saw the light subsequently

to his death.

Ill

AUGUSTINE ON THE TRINITY AS IMAGED FORTH IN THE HUMAN MIND

Edwards was apparently acquainted with Augustine's conception of the imagery of the Trinity in the human

APPENDIX

mind, although it does not appear that he had read the Latin Father's treatise on the Trinity. Augustine sets forth his, view in varying forms. One of them, a concise expression, is the following. 1 These three, memory, intelligence, will; since there are not three lives (vitce), hut one life (vita), nor three minds but one mind (mens), it follows that there are not three substances, but one substance (substantia). Elsewhere, as an equivalent of intelligence (intelligentia) he uses the words, "interna visio/' and as an equivalent of will (voluntas) in this connection, he uses love (caritas). He says that the mind [1] " remembers itself," " recollects by means of memory," [2] "knows itself," "by means of intelligence beholds," [3] "embraces (amplectitur) through love," and "if love, by which the Father loves the Son, and the Son loves the Father, demonstrates in an inexpressible manner the communion of both, what more suitable (convenientius) than that He who is the Spirit common to both should be styled Love." "Mind remembers itself, knows itself, loves itself ; if thus we discern, trinity we discern."

IV

PRESIDENT T. D. WOOLSEY ON THE PERSONAL TRAITS AND THE INFLUENCE OF EDWARDS

President Woolsey, in the commemorative discourse which he delivered in 1870 at the meeting of the descendants of Edwards—of whom he was one—mingles with full appreciation of his mental and moral qualities and his influence, touches of just criticism. A number of the points to which he adverts, I had anticipated before

2 LX., 18.

recurring to his address, but I mention them on account of his aptitude of expression. Dr. Woolsey speaks of the clearness and penetration of the intellect of Edwards, his high standard in all things and his sense of spiritual beauty, his union of the traits of the Apostles Paul and John, his devotion to biblical study in connection with abstract reasoning, his almost feminine tenderness united with masculine vigor and firmness, the blending of principle and feeling in his religious character, his severe, almost excessive self-criticism. But Dr. Woolsey, in his discriminating estimate of Edwards, expresses the feeling that there was " too much repression of natural qualities in the endeavor after a perfect conformity of will and soul to the will of God. ... He and others of the best Puritans of New England ... in the struggle of the human soul to rise above earthly things ... as a ship in a storm throws away some of its less essential freight .... sacrificed what is akin to the human for converse with the divine. ... To unite the two is perfection : so they reached it only on one side." Proofs are given by Dr. Woolsey of the unsurpassed impressiveness of Edwards as a . preacher in his day in New England. Dr. Woolsey recognizes his great theological influence, but of the modifications of theology among his followers which sprung up in New England from his example and influence, he remarks, "they carried practical views borrowed from him to an extreme, as in the point of disinterested benevolence. In all this I seem to see several new tendencies impressed on religious life. Eirst there is a tendency in a greater degree toward the subjective in religion. This is good, but when it impels the mind into self-analysis and continued examination of motives, may end in great evil.

Again there is a tendency to greater activity in religious life." This Dr. Woolsey ascribes "to the putting of benevolence as a leading idea into the place which faith tool*: among earlier Protestants; and hence spring with the same ease the thousand efforts to do good which have emanated in New England."

Whoever ponders the foregoing observations of Dr. Woolsey may see his way to a better understanding than is common of the Unitarian movement and the division attending it in the New England churches. Edwards, if he was a great promoter, was also a discriminating critic, of Eevivals. They spread under the t( auspices "of the New England school that succeeded him. Edwards himself was not blind to the ethical as well as the heavenward relations of "love to being in general." As concerned his own feelings and outward conduct, he was reverently attentive to the precepts of the Sermon on the Mount. At length a more vivid sense of the humane bearings of the principle of benevolence arose. A reaction appeared against what was deemed an excessive interest in religious emotions, which was thought to leave too far in the background the claims that belong to the duties and services of the life here below. The natural brotherhood of man, as well as the moral brotherhood of believers in Christ, the natural paternity of the Eather, as well as His moral Fatherhood in relation to believers, excited a new interest. It is always possible, on the one hand, to forget what injunction is the first and great command, or, on the other, to forget that the second is like unto, or of a piece with, the same.