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JONATHAN EDWARDS.

[Born 1703. Died 1758.]

THE first man of the world during the second quarter of the eighteenth century was JONATHAN EDWARDS of Connecticut. As a theologian Robert Hall and Thomas Chalmers admit that he was the greatest who has lived in the Christian ages; and as a metaphysician Dugald Stewart and Sir James Mackintosh agree that he was never surpassed. In Great Britain and on the continent of Europe men disavowed belief in some of his doctrines, but confessed that they had only protests to oppose to them: Edwards had anticipated and refuted all arguments. Adopting some of his principles, others built up for themselves great reputations by perverting them or deducing from them illegitimate conclusions. In whatever light he is regarded he commands our admiration. He was unequalled in intellect and unsurpassed in virtue. Bacon was described as the "wisest and the meanest of mankind;" but Edwards, not inferior to the immortal Chancellor in genius, suffers not even an accusation of any thing unbecoming a gentleman, a philosopher, or a Christian.

Born in a country which was still almost a wilderness; educated in a college which had scarcely a local habitation; settled, a large part of his life, over a church upon the confines of civilization, and the rest of it in the very midst of barbarism, in the humble but honourable occupation of a missionary, he owed nothing to adventitious circumstances. With a fragile body, a fine imagination, and a spirit the most gentle that ever thrilled in the presence of the beautiful, he seemed of all men the least fitted for the great conflict in which he engaged. But He who, giving to Milton the Dorian reed, sent out his seraphim to enrich him with utterance and knowledge, with fire from the same altar purified the lips of Edwards, to teach that "true religion consists in holy affections," the spring of all which is "a love of divine things for their own beauty and sweetness."

The father of Jonathan Edwards was for sixty years the humble pastor of the church

in Windsor, on the margin of the Connecticut. He was a man of learning, and of that consistent piety which, in the religious teacher, is the summing up and conclusion of his best argument. Our author was his only son, and he named him "the gift of the Lord." He was carefully instructed from infancy, and at thirteen years of age entered Yale College far advanced in classical and general learning. While a freshman he read Locke on the Human Understanding, with a higher pleasure than the "miser feels when gathering up handfuls of silver and gold from some newly discovered treasure ;" and at seventeen he graduated, with great reputation for both knowledge and wisdom. After receiving his first degree, he remained two years in the college, studying divinity, and early in the summer of 1722 was licensed to preach. When only nineteen he accepted an invitation to New York, where his ministry gave abundant satisfaction; but after eight months circumstances induced him to return to his father's house, where the summer of 1723 was devoted to theological studies. He formed warm attachments in New York. My heart seemed to sink within me,” he says, “at leaving the family and city where I had passed so many pleasant days. I went to Wethersfield by water, and as I sailed away I kept sight of the city as long as I could." But at Saybrook, where he went on shore to spend the Sabbath, he recovered his composure in a "refreshing season, walking alone in the fields."

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In the autumn of 1723 Edwards went to New Haven to receive the degree of Master of Arts, and while there was elected a tutor in the college. President Stiles assures us that his "tutorial renown was great and excellent." When he had held the office about two years, he accepted an invitation from the church in Northampton, to become the colleague of his maternal grandfather, a venerable man who for more than half a century had been its pastor. He was installed in February, 1727; and in the following July he was married to

Sarah Pierrepont, a woman of remarkable beauty, as is known both from tradition and from a portrait of her which was painted so late as 1740 for Dr. Erskine of Scotland. Edwards described her before their marriage, when he was himself but twenty years of age. "She has a singular purity in her affections," he says, "and you could not persuade her to do any thing wrong or sinful if you could give her all the world. She is of wonderful gentleness, calmness, and universal benevolence of 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." Happy man! they lived together thirty years, and he was to the end the same enthusiastic admirer. She relieved him from all cares beyond his study, whither every day she carried, in a silver bowl, his simple diet; and every night, after the other members of their family had retired to rest, they met there to spend an hour in conversation and prayer.

In 1731 Edwards visited Boston, and while there delivered before an association of ministers a sermon, which by their request was published. It was the first of his works which was printed, and it made such an impression that public thanks were offered to the Head of the Church for raising up so great a teacher. Soon afterwards commenced that famous revival of religion upon which the American historians of the last century dwell so frequently. This is not a place for the discussion or even a statement of the questions which at that time occupied more than any other the public mind not only in New England but throughout the settled portions of the country. Edwards was in every thing consistent, and, though earnest, had no sympathy with the miserable fanaticism which has almost always in such periods brought religion into contempt. His Narrative of Surprising Conversions in and about Northampton was published in London from his MS. by the celebrated Dr. Isaac Watts, in 1736.

In the eastern colonies a hundred years ago all the politicians and men of fashion managed to retain a "regular standing" in some religious society; it was essential to their respectability. The custom had been gradually

introduced of making a mere assent to certain opinions the condition of fellowship. About the year 1744 Edwards began to insist upon a return to old usages. The devil had "great speculative knowledge in divinity," more than a "hundred saints of ordinary education," and was very "orthodox in his faith," but he had given "no evidence of saving grace in his heart." More recent events than these in Northampton have shown that, however proper universal suffrage may be in the state, it is far from being expedient in the church. Those who were never there before now thronged the meeting-house to vote against their own disfranchisement; and after a while the mob succeeded in procuring the dismission of the faithfullest and wisest of pastors. Edwards bore himself heroically through the controversy; and in 1751 removed to Stockbridge, to preach to the Indians and a small church of Anglo-Americans which had been formed there by an earlier missionary. During his residence in Northampton the famous apostle, David Brainerd, had died in his house, and he had published his Memoirs; in 1746 he had given to the world his admirable Treatise on Religious Affections; and he had consented to the publication of some dozen sermons, any one of which contained more thought than the complete works of almost any fashionable preacher of later days.

Soon after his settlement in Stockbridge Edwards announced his intention, in a letter to his friend Erskine, to write a work upon Free Will and Moral Agency, in which he would bring the popular objections to the "Calvinistic divinity" to the test of the strictest reasoning; "and particularly that great objection in which the modern writers have so much gloried, so long triumphed, with so great a degree of insult toward the most excellent divines, and in effect against the gospel of Christ, that the Calvinistic notions of God's moral government are contrary to the common sense of mankind." It is hardly necessary to speak of the result. The work was written in four months and a half, amid all the cares and labours of his vocation. I never have read or heard that anybody supposed it had been or could be answered.*

Edwards on the Will is a work which never was answered, and which never will be answered.-Dugald Stewart.

The subject, since then, has hardly been one of controversy, though it has occasionally been talked about. Some ingenious persons, to attract attention to essays against fatalism, have called them replies to Edwards; but scholars have no need to be informed that Edwards never entertained any such doctrine

as that word describes.

In the autumn of 1754 he was seized with a severe fever, from which he did not recover until the following January; and his favourite pursuits were still further interrupted by the war with the French and Indians, during which soldiers were quartered in his house. In the last three years of his residence in Stockbridge, however, he wrote some of his ablest works, among which are the dissertations on God's Last End in the Creation of the World, and on The Nature of True Virtue. The last of these subjects has been a favourite one with ethical writers. Aristotle regarded virtue as un juste milieu; Hume says it is whatever is useful or agreeable to ourselves and others; and Paley, who as well as Hume had been a careful reader of Edwards, that it is "the doing good to mankind in obedience to the will of God, and for the sake of everlasting happiness." Edwards held it to be in some sense the same as beauty; in other words, to be every voluntary act of which the ultimate end is the greatest good of the greatest number. The dissertation on the Nature of Virtue is perhaps the most original of his works, and is so conclusive that all others on the subject have since been "considered as objects of curiosity rather than as guides of opinion."*

His Treatise on Original Sin is usually ranked next to that on the Freedom of the Will, for clearness, force and comprehensive ness. It was finished in 1757. Dr. Taylor, of Norwich, had foolishly boasted that his argument on this question could never be answered. The refutation of it by Edwards was so complete that even Taylor was compelled to admit that there could be no rejoinder; his mortification on his ignominious defeat is said to have shortened his days; "the grasp of his antagonist was death."

While Edwards was labouring with his

Among the writers who have been largely indebted to this work was William Godwin, who in his Political Justice, as Robert Hall well observes, "with a daring consistence has pursued the principles of Edwards to an extreme from which that most excellent man would have recoiled with horror."

wonted industry at Stockbridge, he received intelligence of the death of his son-in-law, the Rev. Aaron Burr, President of the College of New Jersey ;* and in a few days afterward he was advised, in a letter from the Trustees, of his election to the vacant office. In his reply he expressed surprise that gentlemen by whom he was so well known should have thought him worthy of so distinguished an honour. "So far as I myself am able to judge of what talents I have for benefiting my fellow creatures by word," he says, “I think I can write better than I can speak;" and he proceeded to describe several great literary enterprises which he had in view. One was a History of the Work of Redemption, a complete system of divinity on a new plan, in which the events of heaven, earth and hell should be treated in their natural order, and the various parts of dogmatical theology so interwoven as to appear in beautiful contexture and harmony with the whole. This work had already been commenced, but no part of it was prepared for the press. finished, it probably would have been his masterpiece, and would have raised him in reputation as much higher than he is now, as his completed works entitle him to be ranked above all other theological writers of his age. Another work which he contemplated was a Harmony of the Old and New Testaments.

If

Edwards determined to submit the question whether he should accept the presidency of the College to some of his most enlightened and pious friends, and upon their advice he left his family in Stockbridge and proceeded to Princeton, where he arrived in January, 1758. A few days afterward he was informed of the death of his father, whose useful life had been lengthened out to nearly ninety years. Several weeks passed before his inauguration, but he preached in the mean time in the college chapel, which his fame caused to be filled on every occasion to its utmost limit. The institution was formally committed to his charge on the sixteenth of February; on the twenty-third of the same month he was inoculated for the small-pox, which then prevailed in the town, and on the twenty-second of March he died of that disease.t

*He was the father of Aaron Burr, afterward Vice President of the United States.

+ On Wednesday, the 22d of last month, died of inoculation at Nassau Hall, an eminent servant of God, the

Seeds from Edwards have taken root in | eloquent. The mountebank declamation of strange fields. A single stalk from his philosophy has shed beauty and perfume over wastes of modern speculation. Many, of whose opinions all is dross that is not borrowed from him, have exhibited the poverty of their natural powers in assaults upon his system; and others, incapable of penetrating beyond the shell of his logic, and understanding the beauty of his life and doctrine, have done him much greater injury by professing to be of his school.

The style of Edwards is uncommonly good. It is suitable for his subjects. It has seldom been surpassed in perspicuity and precision. It is deficient in harmony, indeed, and occasionally has other faults of a mechanical sort, but he wrote hastily and printed without revision. Scarcely any of his sermons were intended for the press, and several of his more extended treatises are but rough drafts of what he designed. He appears never to have thought much of the importance of style until a few years before his death, when a copy of Richardson's Sir Charles Grandison falling in his way, he read it with pleasure and discovered the secret of its influence. From this time he attempted to write more gracefully, and the works on the Will and on Original Sin, subsequently finished, show that he improved.

He had a very powerful imagination, and some of his writings are full of the most impressive imagery. In his earlier years he gave free rein to his creative faculty, but afterwards restrained it except when expression of his thought was difficult without its aid.

His wit was of the Damascus sort, shining and keen. He delighted in the reductio ad absurdum, of which his works probably contain the finest specimens in the English language. He directed his wit against principles, and never against his antagonists.

No assertion in regard to Edwards has been more common than the one that he was not

reverend and pious Mr. Jonathan Edwards, president of the College of New Jersey; a gentleman of distinguished abilities and of a heavenly temper of mind; a most rational, generous, catholic and exemplary Christian, admired by all who knew him for his uncommon candour and disinterested benevolence; a pattern of temperance, meekness, candour and charity; always steady, solemn and serene; a very judicious and instructive preacher, and most excellent divine. And as he lived cheerfully resigned to the will of Heaven, so he died, or rather, as the Scriptures emphatically express it with regard to good men, he fell asleep in Jesus, without the least appearance of pain.- Boston Gaz., April 10, 1758.

these latter days has so perverted men's judgments that they cannot understand how a preacher who rested one arm upon a high pulpit, with its diminutive and delicately moulded hand holding a small manuscript volume all the while close to his eyes, and with the other made slowly his few and only gestures, could be an orator. But he could keep a congregation that had assembled to hear a morning sermon ignorant of the approach of noon until through the uncurtained windows of the church the setting sun's red rays were shining upon its ceiling. One time when he was discoursing of death and the judgment, people rose up from their seats, with pallor on their faces, to see Christ descend through the parting heavens. Being requested to preach at Enfield, where he was a stranger, and the assembly were so indifferent to religion as to be neglectful of the decency of silence while he prayed, he had not half finished his sermon before the startled sinners, having "already passed through the valley of silence," began to wail and weep so bitterly that he could not go on for their distress. These are triumphs of eloquence* not dreamed of by such as deem themselves masters of the art from reading the foolish recipe ascribed to Demosthenes.

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In the same page of Mr. Gilfillan's Sketches of Modern Literature, in which he declares that Edwards's style "never rises into eloquence," he gives the following anecdote: "He reminded you of Milton's line, The ground burns frore, and cold performs the effect of fire.' A signal instance of this is recorded. A large congregation, including many ministers, were assembled to hear a popular preacher, who did not fulfil his appointment. Edwards was selected to fill his place, principally be cause, being in the habit of reading his discourses, he happened to have a sermon ready in his pocket. He ascended the pulpit accordingly, amid almost audible marks of disappointment from the audience, whom, however, respect for the abilities and character of the preacher prevented from leaving the church. He chose for his text, Their foot shall slide in due time,' and began to read in his usual quiet way. At first he had barely their attention; by and by he succeeded in riveting every one of them to his lips; a few sentences more, and they be gan to rise by twos and threes; a little farther, and tears were flowing; at the close of another, particular deep groans were heard, and one or two went off in fits; and ere he reached the climax of his terrible appeals, the whole audience had risen up in one tumult of grief and consternation. And, amid all this, there stood the calm, imperturbable man, reading on as softly and gently as if he were in his own study. And, in reading the sermon, we do not wonder at the impression it produced upon an audience constituted as that audience must have been. It is a succession of swift thunder-claps, each drowning and deafening the one which preceded it. We read it once to a distinguished savant, who, while disapproving of its spirit, was compelled, literally, to shiver under the 'fury of its power.'"-Sketches of Modern Literature and Eminent Literary Men. London, 1845.

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN.

[Born 1706. Died 1790.]

FROM the first metaphysician of the age in which he lived we turn to another New Englander, but three years younger than Edwards, whose name, says Lord Brougham, uttering the common judgment of mankind," in one point of view must be considered as standing higher than any of the others which illustrated the eighteenth century." In statesmanship and philosophy he was equally illustrious, "and his efforts in each," proceeds the noble critic, "were sufficient to have made him greatly famous had he done nothing in the other."

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN was born in Boston on the seventeenth of January, 1706, and was the youngest but two of seventeen children. His parents were poor, but prudent, virtuous, and intelligent. His father had emigrated from England to enjoy religious liberty, and would have educated his youngest son for the ministry, but that his poverty made it necessary to take him from the free grammar | school to cut wicks and fill candle moulds in the workshop. This was mortifying to the aspiring boy, and he wished to become a sailor; but his father refused, and at the end of two years apprenticed him to an elder brother who had learned the printing business in London, and returned to set up an office in his native city. His new employment pleased him, and he quickly became familiar with it. He had read Defoe upon Projects, Cotton Mather's Essays to do Good, the Pilgrim's Progress, Plutarch's Lives, and some other books which were owned by his father; and he now stole hours from sleep to study the volumes he was enabled to borrow, each for a single night, from the apprentices of booksellers. Thinking he could write poetry, he composed and printed ballads, which his brother sent him to sell in the streets, and his vanity was flattered by their success; but his father's criticisms discouraged him, and he afterward confined himself to prose writing, in which he constantly and successfully endeavoured to improve. When about sixteen

years of age he abandoned the use of animal food, and agreeing with his brother to support himself with half the money that was paid for his board, managed by cooking his own vegetables to save each week a share of his allowance for the purchase of books. With the increased means and leisure thus acquired he obtained and studied Cocker's Arithmetic, Sturny's and Seller's Navigation, which made him acquainted with geometry, Locke on the Human Understanding, the Art of Thinking by the Port Royalists, and Xenophon's Memorabilia. This sort of education was probably the best for such a mind as Franklin's. It is by no means certain that he would have been so great a philosopher if he had been bred in a university. He is worth contemplating, as he whirls the printer's balls or pulls at the press, silently meditating the questions in logic and mathematics he has studied through the night in his chamber. He perceives that learning is to be his capital for distinction as well as profit, and every principle and combination suggested in his books is revolved in his mind until it is understood, while his hands are so busy with his art.

James Franklin, who had been printer of the Boston Gazette, the second American newspaper, in 1721, established the fourth one, called the New England Courant, on his own account, and his apprenticed brother carried the copies for subscribers about the city. Anonymously and in a disguised hand he wrote articles for the Courant which were applauded, and by James and his associates attributed in his presence to the cleverest men in Boston. When however the secret was discovered James was displeased, lest the apprentice should become too vain, and from that time treated him with increasing harshness, so that he probably would have broken his indentures had not an unlooked-for circumstance caused them to be surrendered. James was arrested by order of the Assembly and imprisoned on a charge of having published in his paper

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