JONATHAN EDWARDS.

CHAPTER XXX.

GREATEST OF AMERICAN THEOLOGIANS-SERMONS THAT SCARED HIS CONGREGATION-EXPELLED FROM HIS CHURCH AFTER TWENTY-THREE YEARS-GRANDFATHER OF AARON BURR-A MISSIONARY AMONG THE INDIANS FATHER OF RELIGIOUS REVIVAL.

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EAR the end of the first half of the eighteenth century there began a

new cycle in human history in which Jonathan Edwards, the father of modern Calvinism, was the leader. A large part of the religious world is still regulated by the principles which he was the first to fully declare, and American theology and philosophy, which, however, have undergone many changes since his time, have been built upon the foundation he laid.

Of the many great American divines and writers on theology Jonathan Edwards is by common consent the greatest. As a child he gave evidence of a precocious intellect. At the age of twelve he wrote a letter of some length in which he undertook to refute the idea of the materiality of the soul.

That he was a lover of nature and a student of her mysteries we learn from an elaborate account he has left of the habits of the field spider, based upon his own observations and also written when he was twelve years of age. At thirteen he was a student at Yale College, from which he graduated before he was seventeen with the highest honors of the institution.

Like his father, theology became his profession, and for twenty-three years he was pastor of the church at Northampton, which was the scene of the most famous and historic religious revival in the history of America. From this revival sprang up those religious and ecclesiastical differences which resulted in Mr. Edwards' expulsion from the church, and practically from the community in which he had labored for twenty-three years.

The religious revival is peculiarly an American institution and may be

called America's gift to foreign Calvinism. It owes its origin to a theological conviction, in the mind of Jonathan Edwards, that a necessary condition to membership in the church and to ultimate salvation was a change of heart wrought by the Holy Spirit and accompanied by some bodily manifestation of the change.

EDWARDS AND JOHN WESLEY.

The foundation of Edwards' doctrine of conversion was external evidence of God's relationship to the soul. Not only did Edwards bequeath this principle to the Calvinistic churches but to Methodism as well. In 1738 he was walking from London to Oxford with John Wesley, to whom he gave an account of the wonderful revival held under his preaching. It was just three months after this walk when the first physical manifestations of conversion were noticed under Wesley's preaching.

Before Edwards succeeded Mr. Stoddard, whom the Indians called "The Englishmen's God," as pastor at Northampton, there had been periods of great religious fervor, but nothing that could be compared to the revival or awakening which followed under Edwards' ministry.

Preceding this great historic religious event there was much laxity in religious matters, and according to Mr. Edwards a low state of morals prevailed in the community.

About this time he began preaching his powerful series of sermons on "Justification by Faith," and "Justice of God in the Damnation of Sinners." He created the impression among his congregation that God might withdraw entirely from the land and abandon them to their fate. Then followed, in the latter part of December, 1774, the period of "the Great Awakening." Temporal affairs were cast aside. The people talked only of the salvation of their souls. At one time it looked as if temporal affairs would be wholly neglected in the united effort of the people to get into the kingdom of heaven or be freed from the wrath to come.

Not in the history of the world has there been such a period of emotional Christianity as that witnessed in the little New England village presided over by this great spiritual leader of men. The church membership, or, rather, those entitled to partake of the communion, was raised to six hundred and twenty. The revival extended to one hundred and fifty other towns and did not begin to decline until the spring of 1735. With the decline of the revival there developed a strong opposition to it. The colleges at Cam

bridge and New Haven both declared against the movement. The cultured Dr. Chauncey, of the First Church in Boston, declared the revival a delusion. Whitefield and itinerant lay preachers invaded the community, dividing the people into separate congregations and bringing about a condition of general confusion. Edwards recognized the itinerant clergy, but condemned the lay exhorters. Being a high churchman, from the Puritan point of view, he believed in order and organization.

EDWARDS' EXPULSION FROM NORTHAMPTON.

Another great revival followed in 1740. These revivals had raised many questions concerning religious customs in the church, and in 1748 a strong element had grown up in the congregation antagonistic to Mr. Edwards, which eventually resulted in his expulsion. The immediate cause of his being deprived of his pulpit, in which he had presided so long, was as follows: He had learned that the young people of his parish were given to reading the popular novels of the time, which he declared produced great immorality among them. He preached a sermon in which these facts were made known to the congregation. The officers of the church united with him in calling for an examination of the offenders. When Edwards read the names of those who had been guilty of indulging in this sort of literature, together with the witnesses who were to testify, it was found that almost every family of standing and consequence in the congregation was in some way involved. The result was almost united opposition to any further action. The people were from that moment determined upon his dismissal, and from that time until they voted to dismiss him they disagreed, or affected to disagree, with him upon all questions of church government and religious conduct.

But like all great men, Jonathan Edwards triumphed in his fall, and he had the satisfaction of receiving a complete apology from his congregation, and, to-day, the most celebrated church in Northampton bears the name of the once dishonored pastor.

While at Northampton, Edwards wrote many religious works, and these, together with his sermons, give us a knowledge of the mental condition of New England not obtainable in any other way.

The historian Bancroft says: "He that would know the workings of the New England mind in the middle of the last century and the throbbings of its heart, must give his days and nights to the study of Jonathan Edwards."

GREATEST PREACHER OF HIS AGE.

Aside from his writings he is said to have been the greatest preacher of his age. Although he possessed an "angelic face," and a "meek yet lofty bearing," beneath his quiet manner were the fires of a volcano, and when he was aroused no man could put more strength into a sentence than he. It is recorded that when he preached his most famous sermon, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," in the little village of Enfield, Connecticut, the effect was as if some supernatural apparition had frightened the people out of their wits. With tears of agony streaming down their faces, they cried aloud for mercy while Edwards bade them be quiet that he might be heard. One man, who listened to him telling of the day of judgment, said that he fully believed that the dreadful day would begin as soon as the sermon came to an end.

One extract from the famous Enfield sermon will show with what power and vividness Edwards pictured a future state:

"If God should let you go you would immediately sink and sinfully descend, and plunge into the bottomless gulf. * * Were it not for the sovereign pleasure of God the earth would not bear you one moment, for you are a burden to it; the creation groans with you. The bow of God's wrath is bent, the arrow made ready on the string, and justice bends the arrow at your heart and strains the bow, and it is nothing but the mere pleasure of God, and that of an angry God, without any promise or obligation at all, that keeps the arrow one moment from being drunk with your blood. The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you and is dreadfully provoked. He looks upon you as worthy of nothing else but to be cast into the fire. * * * You are ten thousand times more abominable in his eyes than the most hateful, venomous serpent is in ours. You hang by a slender thread, with the flames of divine wrath flashing about it, and ready every moment to singe it and burn it asunder."

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Edwards defended his manner of preaching on the ground that he believed these things to be true, and that it was only a kindness to his congregation to present them, and that, too, in what he called "the liveliest manner."

MISSIONARY AMONG THE INDIANS.

After his expulsion from the church at Northampton, largely because he insisted that his congregation should live up to his ideal of the life of pro

fessing Christians, he received a call as missionary to the Indians at the frontier settlement of Stockbridge.

He had previously declined to assist in the movement to establish another church at Stockbridge, of which he should be the pastor, and also declined another call to a church in Virginia.

When Edwards went to Stockbridge the town was almost exclusively an Indian settlement, and in addition to the duties of his church he looked after the affairs of the Indians, having received an appointment from the Board of Commissioners of Indian Affairs in Boston. Money was provided for the care of these Indians without stint, but up to the time of Edwards' arrival it had been systematically stolen by the agents of the commissioners.

It did not take the new missionary very long to discover the sources of this corruption and to expose the men concerned in it, which made the missionary very popular among his Indian wards. He preached to them every Sunday, through an interpreter, and, with the assistance of his family, brought about a better condition in their spiritual and worldly affairs.

GRANDFATHER OF AARON BURR.

While at Stockbridge his daughter, Esther, married the Rev. Aaron Burr, who had recently been called to the presidency of Nassau Hall, afterward, and now known as Princeton College. The Rev. Aaron Burr was the father of Aaron Burr, the slayer of Hamilton. In 1757 Mr. Edwards was called to the presidency of Princeton, where he died during his first year in office.

Probably the greatest of Mr. Edwards' works is his treatise on the freedom of the will. Without an adequate library or any of the charts and guides of other great writers on metaphysics, living in what was practically a wilderness, he produced a book which was one of the literary sensations of the eighteenth century and which attracted the attention of the most learned men throughout the world.

For some years the people had heard from infidels and free thinkers a denial of the freedom of the will, but when this same principle was asserted by Jonathan Edwards, whose high character was acknowledged by all, and who was a man of indisputable genius, it caused a shock through the whole religious world.

As an evidence of the character of this remarkable work and the manner in which it was received, it is only necessary to quote a few of the best-known opinions:

Dr. Chalmers said: "There is no European divine to whom I make such