IN our progress over the various fields of literature in New England during the colonial time, we encounter not one form of writing in which we are permitted to lose sight of the clergy of New England,—their tireless and versatile activity, their learning, their force of brain, their force of character. But we are now to resume our study of their writings in the field that was peculiarly their own,—that of theological and religious exposition.

     As we have already seen, the immigrant clergy of New England—the founders of this noble and brilliant order—were, in nearly all qualities of personal worth and greatness, among the greatest and the worthiest of their time, in the mother-country, mighty scholars, orators, sages, saints. And by far the most wonderful thing about these men is, that they were able to convey across the Atlantic, into a naked wilderness, all the essential elements of that ancient civilization out of which they came; and at once, to raise up and educate, in the new world, a line of mighty successors in their sacred office, without the least break in the sequence, without the slightest diminution in scholarship, in eloquence, in intellectual energy, in moral power.

     It cannot be doubted, indeed, that the great divines of the immigrant period—those heroic pastors who led forth their flocks into the American forests and founded here a new empire—had in that very fact an enormous historical advantage over their successors in the ministry,—an inapproachable prestige and renown. Nevertheless, a study of all the writings produced by the New England clergy,

from the years of the settlement to the years of the Revolution, cannot fail to convince us that the men who came after the Founders were as great as they: nay, that while in any particulars the sons and the sons’ sons equalled the Fathers, in some particulars they outdid them; they fully maintained all the strong and lofty traits of the first generation—manliness, scholarship, thoughtfulness, eloquence, purity—and even added to these traits, those of intellectual breadth, of secular culture, of social and literary urbanity.

     In the year 1686, John Dunton of London paid a visit to Salem, and there saw the senior minister of that place, the aged John Higginson. “All men look on him,” wrote Dunton,¹ “as a common father; and on old age for his sake as a reverend thing. He is eminent for learning, humility, charity, and all those shining graces that adorn a minister. His very presence and face puts vice out of countenance. He is now in his eightieth year, yet preaches every Sunday; and his conversation is a glimpse of heaven.” This benign old man was then just ten years younger than Dunton stated; but after that, he lived just twenty-two years, the last of the New England pioneers, the father of all the faithful, manifesting to the end the sweetness and strength of character that covered with unwonted majesty his patriarchal years.

     In 1629, a year before Boston was founded, he had come to Salem, a boy of thirteen, with his father, Francis Higginson; he had received his education in the new world; after many years of service as school-master and preacher in Connecticut, he had returned to Salem, in 1659; and there he remained the rest of his days, in charge of the church that his father had founded. He had great authority in all the land—the authority of goodness, of wisdom,

and of ability. His earliest publication is the election-sermon of 1663, entitled “The Cause of God and his People in New England;” a sturdy effort to check what seemed to him the torrent of worldliness and wealth-seeking there, by recalling to the people the purpose for which they and their fathers had founded New England: “If any man amongst us make religion as twelve and the world as thirteen, let such an one know he hath neither the spirit of a true New England man nor yet of a sincere Christian.”¹ It is a sermon that has the impressiveness imparted by a clear, earnest, consecrated mind; but is with out special literary superiority. His other publications, seven in number, are all upon religious topics, either expository or historical; the most notable being his “Attestation” to the “Magnalia,” dated 1697, and printed as one of the prefaces of that book. Many sentences of this production are very noble; having especially some of the antique qualities of thought and style that were then dying out of English prose,—massiveness of meaning, confidence in the invisible goodness and truth, unconsciousness of cynicism, a seer-like earnestness of tone, the quaint diction of dead sages and saints, a gravity and reverberating fulness of’phrase, the expectation of intellectual fortitude in those who read.

     During the last thirty years of the seventeenth century, William Stoughton was a conspicuous statesman of New England,—his great wealth, talent, learning, dignity, and public spirit, winning for him a large measure of the public confidence. He held, at various times, all the great offices in the commonwealth; and it was his misfortune to be chief-justice in the fatal time of the witchcraft delusion. Unfortunately, his own cool judgment was utterly overborne

in that epidemic of fury and of folly; and he became a protagonist among the persecutors. The pitiless and gratuitous savagery of his acts as a magistrate, toward those innocent and helpless creatures who fell under a public accusation half malignant and half lunatic, have smirched his noble name with uncleansable dishonor.

     He had in him the power to make for himself a great place in American letters; but he spent his principal force in outward affairs. Graduated at Harvard in 1650, at the age of nineteen, and afterward fellow of New College, Oxford, he began his public career as a minister; and having in that profession acquired much reputation, he passed out of it into politics. Two specimens of his ability as a writer have come down to us, representing the two fields of sacred and secular activity to which in suc cession he devoted his life. The later and inferior specimen is “A Narrative of the Proceedings of Andros,” published in 1691,¹—a clumsy and dull performance. The earlier and better specimen is, indeed, one of the landmarks of literature in New England for that time, the election-sermon preached by him in Boston, in 1668. It bears the striking title, “New England’s True Interest, not to Lie.” A powerful document it must have been, in its day; eloquent after the fashion of those times; conservative in thought, able in statement; courageously confronting New England with its high obligations to God and to itself, and accusing it of a drift toward shameful degeneracy in morals, piety, and manners; and it contains one sentence that has become classic among us. The doctrine of the discourse, he first expounds in the minute and technical style of the seventeenth century sermon-builders; and as usual, the chief interest is reserved for the application. Here, he charges the people of New England with an extraordinary responsibility,—a responsibility derived

from their own extraordinary character. They were picked men, he tells them; selected by God himself out of the common herd of mortals: “God sifted a whole nation that he might send choice grain over into this wilderness.”¹ Hence, “it is a solemn conviction and charge against us to have it spoken, as it must be spoken in the name of the Lord this day, O New England, thy God did expect better things from thee and thy children; not worldliness and an insatiable desire after perishing things; not whoredoms and fornications; not revilings and drunkenness; not oaths and false swearings; not exactions and oppressions; not slanderings and backbitings; not rudeness and incivility—a degeneracy from the good manners of the Christian world; not formality and profaneness, to loathe manna, to despise holy things, to grow sermon-proof and ordinance-proof; not contentions and disorders; not an itching after new things and ways; not a rigid Pharisaical spirit; not a contempt of superiors; not unthankfulness and disrespect to instruments of choice service; not a growing weary of government, and a drawing loose in the yoke of God; not these things, but better things, O New England, hath thy God expected from thee.”²

     In our study of the verse-writers of New England, we have already met with Urian Oakes, whose “Elegy upon the Death of Thomas Shepard” we found to be among the few examples of genuine poetry produced in America in the colonial time. But his principal activity was as a sermon-writer; and in that capacity he had no superior among us during the seventeenth or the eighteenth century. For once, Cotton Mather’s fancifulness struck the happy note in naming him “the Lactantius of New

England;”¹ and when, in another place, this same provincial pedant declared that Urian Oakes “was an Orpheus that would have drawn the very stones to discipline,”² he only smothered under an antic hyperbole the long-cherished tradition concerning those marvellous fascinations of living speech, which were wielded by the Cambridge pastor, and which did not perish even when uttering themselves in the cold oratory of print. I find in him an alert and forcible intelligence, civility, cosmopolitan range; an expression, affluent, nervous, flexible; a condensed energy of phrase; the epithets that are born of original and poetic insight; the gift of culminating and bright statement, crystallizing into epigram.

     It was in 1672, the first year after the return of Urian Oakes from his long residence in the mother-country, that he was selected to give the annual sermon³ before the artillery company of Boston,—an association composed of the first gentlemen in the colony, and intended to cherish here the chivalric traits of military discipline and honor. In speaking to such an audience, the orator naturally took as his theme the parallelisms existing between the true soldier and the true Christian. Here his rhetoric has a martial movement; his sentences ring like bugle-notes. There is high exhilaration-the dauntless ecstasy of heroism and triumph—in the words with which he sets forth the attributes of the warrior of Christ: “He is a man of war from his birth. Neither is he a poor naked creature; . . . but he comes into the new world in his suit of armor, armed ‘cap-a-pie,’ with a complete armor of proof, being vested with the graces of the spirit of Christ. He hath his excellent and invincible General, . . . and hath taken his I sacramentum militare,’ his oath of fidelity and obedience

to the great Lord General. He hath also . . . his company that he is listed into. . . . He hath his banner to fight under. . . . He hath his arms and weapons, offensive and defensive, to fight withal. He hath his soldierly qualifications and military accomplishments,—courage, skill, patience, hope of victory, faithfulness to . . . his General, orderliness, disposition to endure hardship, or whatever else may be mentioned, . . . a soldier well appointed . . . to dispute it out with any adversary.”¹

     Then, too, as every good man is a soldier, so, by a sad antithesis, is every bad man a soldier likewise; “but he fights against God, strengthens himself and stretches out his hand against the Almighty. . . . He puts on the whole armor of the Devil, that he may be able to stand against all the shocks of conscience, or encounters of the word and spirit of God, and fight it out to the last with the Infinite Majesty, to the everlasting ruin of his immortal soul.”² In the long, bitter battle which is waging here, they who are Christ’s men find that their enemy, “the world, can put on two faces, and change its countenance as occasion serves. If feigned, flattering smiles will not do, then killing frowns shall, if it be possible.”³ But, indeed, this will not be possible; for Christians “may be opposed, combated, and contended withal, but never routed, run down, totally defeated, or overthrown.”⁴

     It is not strange that the new pastor of Cambridge, having made so thrilling and masterly an oration at the great military anniversary of the colony, should have been summoned to be the orator at its next great political anniversary. Accordingly, in 1673, we find him giving the election-sermon, taking as his subject the moral perils that then hung over New England. He entitled his discourse, “New England Pleaded With;”¹ a brave and manly exposition of the evil tendencies then developed there,—formality, spiritual listlessness, immorality, irreverence, worldliness, greed of wealth, sensualism, love of display in dress, vanity, ostentation. As a literary effort, this discourse is not so brilliant as the artillery-sermon; has not so many majestic and resounding passages; but it is very searching, pungent, and strong, and must have produced a vast impression as its invectives first leaped, in passionate and pathetic tones, from the lips of the prophet, and glanced down among a people most sensitive to such accusations. There are in it also some sentences of broad scope, worthy to become national aphorisms. This is one: “It is the property of Englishmen, much more of religious Englishmen, and should be most of all of religious New-Englishmen, to be tenacious and tender of their liberties.”²

     Four years afterward, this matchless preacher stood forth again as the orator of the artillery-company, giving them a sermon on “The Sovereign Efficacy of Divine Providence.”³ Addressing the foremost military organization in the country, and reviewing the havoc and agony of the war just closed with the Indians under Philip, he confesses his humiliation, that with all their own military training and their various other superiorities, they could have been so terrified and so injured by such enemies; but he warns his fellow-countrymen of obligations even more sacred than those of a soldier, and of a hostility even more

terrible than that of the red men: “New England hath enemies enough on earth and in hell; woe to us if we make God in heaven our enemy also.”¹

     In the year 1726, the men of books in New England noted with considerable exultation, as a sign of national progress, the issue from an American printing-press, of a huge folio volume, the largest that had ever been printed in this country. It bore this well-deserved title, “A Complete Body of Divinity.” Within its nine hundred and fourteen pages,—each page having two columns in small and compact type, it held “two hundred and fifty expository lectures on the Assembly’s Shorter Catechism,” all written out and delivered in order by one busy man, during a period of nineteen years. That man was Samuel Willard, himself, like his book, a body of divinity; a man of inexpressible authority, in those days, throughout all the land. He was born in 1640, in the woods of Concord; in 1659 he was graduated at Harvard; he was settled in the ministry, first at Groton, and then at the South Church, Boston; he opposed the witchcraft persecutions; he succeeded Increase Mather in the presidency of Harvard College, adding that service to his work as pastor; all his lifetime, he was most fruitful in religious writings, printed and unprinted; and he died in 1707. At his funeral, Ebenezer Pemberton, his colleague, stood up and spoke of him, as one “who had been for so long a time the light, joy, and glory of the place,” and whose death was “an awful rebuke of heaven upon this whole land.”

     Nineteen years before his death, he began to give at his own church, on Tuesday afternoons, once a month, an elaborate lecture on theology. His was a mind formed for theological method. He did not desire to impose

upon himself or upon any one a slavish submission to a theological system; he only wished to get for himself and others the clearness and vigor and practical utility that come from putting one’s most careful ideas into orderly combination. He was a theological drill-sergeant. He was also a truly great divine. In the lectures upon systematic theology, which he thus began in 1688, and continued unflinchingly till he died, his object was to move step by step around “the whole circle of religion.” The fame of his lucid talks on those great themes, soon flew abroad, and drew to him a large, permanent audience of the learned and the unlearned; and after his death, theological students and others kept clamoring for the publication of those talks. In 1726, all such persons were gratified.

     “A Complete Body of Divinity” is a vast book, in all senses; by no one to be trifled with. Let us salute it with uncovered heads. The attempted perusal of all these nine hundred and fourteen double-columned pages, was, for many a theological scholar of the last century, a liberal education—and a training in every heroic and heavenly virtue. Along the pages of the venerable copy that I have used—the copy which Jeremiah Dummer, of the Middle Temple, London, sent over in 1727 as a gift to Yale College—I find fading memorials of the toil, and aspiration, and triumph, with which numerous worthy young divines of the last age grappled with the task of reading the book through; but on the blank leaf at the end, are only two inscriptions of final victory: “Lyman perlegit, 1742,” and “Timothy Pitkin perlegit, A.D., 1765.” Doubtless, both these heroes have long since had their reward, and have entered into rest, which they sorely needed; and the others perished by the way.

     The thought and expression of this literary mammoth are lucid, firm, close. The author moves over the great spaces of his subject with a calm and commanding tread, as of one well assured both of himself and of the ground he walked on. His object seemed to be, not merely to

enlighten the mind, but to elevate the character and the life; and whenever, in the discussion of a topic, he has finished the merely logical process, he advances at once to the practical bearings of it, and urges upon his hearers the deductions of a moral logic, always doing this earnestly, persuasively, and in a kingly way. The whole effect is nutritious to brain and to moral sense; and the book might still serve to make men good Christians as well as good theologians—if only there were still left upon the earth the men capable of reading it.

     SOLOMON STODDARD was born in Boston, in 1643, his father being an eminent merchant and politician of that city, and his mother a sister of Sir George Downing. He was graduated at Harvard College in 1662, and was settled in the ministry at Northampton from 1669 until his death in 1730: a man of reverend look, strong judgment, industry, learning, uncommon logical faculty; “for some years the most aged minister in the province, . . . a Peter here among the disciples and ministers of our Lord Jesus, very much our primate and a prince among us.”¹ He seems not to have published anything until he was past fifty years of age; but from that time onward, his publications were numerous, in the form of sermons, controversial pamphlets, and treatises relating to theology and to personal conduct. His mental vision was a singularly clear one; and persons enveloped in various sorts of theological and ethical fog, were much inclined to depend on his superior eyesight. Thus, in 1722, he published a little book called “An Answer to Some Cases of Conscience respecting the Country;” wherein he solves ten great questions appertaining to New England casuistry. Some of these questions

are: “What right doth belong to the Sabbath?” “At what time of the evening doth the Sabbath begin?” “Did we any wrong to the Indians, in buying their land at a small price?” “Is it lawful for men to set their dwelling-houses at such a distance from the place of public worship that they and their families cannot attend it?” Above all, “Is it lawful to wear long hair?” Upon this latter agitating theme, the excellent Mr. Stoddard has no uncertainty. The thing “seems utterly unlawful. . . . It is a great burden and cumber; it is effeminacy and a vast expense, . . . a moral evil. . . . It was a part of the calamity that came upon Nebuchadnezzar that his hairs were grown like eagles’ feathers, and his nail’s like birds’ claws.”¹ But the ingenuity of Satan is tireless; and being routed in the argument concerning long hair, he suggests to the depraved minds of men that, even if they must crop their heads close, they may still cover them up with periwigs therefore, “Is it lawful to wear periwigs?” “I judge there is abundance of sin in this country in wearing periwigs. Particularly in these two things: First, when men do wear them needlessly, in compliance with fashion. Their own hair is sufficient for all those ends that God has given hair for. One man’s hair is comelier than another’s. . . . Some cut off their own because of the color—it is red or gray; some because it is straight; and some only because it is their own. Secondly, when those that may have just occasion to wear them, do wear them in such a ruffianly way as it would be utterly unlawful to wear their own hair in. Some of them are of an unreasonable length; and generally they are extravagant as to their bushiness. . . . The practice seems to me to have these four evils in it: 1. It is an uncontentedness with that provision that God has made for men. . . . When God has given to men such hair as is suitable to answer the ends of hair; it seems to be a despising of the goodness of God to cut it off, in compliance

with a vain fashion. 2. It is wastefulness. . . . 3. It is pride. . . . 4. It is contrary to gravity. . . . This practice makes them look as if they were more disposed to court a maid than to bear upon their hearts the weighty concernments of God’s kingdom.”¹ “There be many other practices that are plainly contrary to the light of nature. Hooped petticoats have something of nakedness; mixed dances are incentives to lust; compotations in private houses is a drunken practice.”²

     For nearly the entire first half of the eighteenth century, there was in Boston a minister of one of its churches, Benjamin Colman, who, by an exquisite union of strength and tenderness, the tact of the politician, the sincerity of the saint, the magical and captivating might of the orator, held an unsurpassed ascendency over his contemporaries. He was organized to be a conqueror of his kind, through their brains and their hearts. In person above the common height, delicate in shape, of fair complexion, with the dress and bearing of an accomplished gentleman, he had a “peculiar flame and dignity in his eye;” his presence instantly unlocked all minds as by something benign, graceful, and venerable. Some of his associates, who outlived him., and who wrote the introduction to his biography that appeared two years after his death, say that no written description can convey an idea of his personal charm and power, either in private or in public. They speak of his conversation as “admirably polished and courtly;” of his incomparable eloquence in the pulpit; of his earnestness and refinement; the inimitable power and sweetness of his elocution; the ardor of his imagination; the rapture of his impassioned and devout speech. As a clergyman, there were utilities in his life that reached far

beyond those usually exerted by those in his profession; and in times of need, he was a pillar of state. Passing his days in an atmosphere charged with theological sullenness and acrimony, he was both orthodox and charitable; his personal breadth burst the hoops of his creed; he was human first, and clerical afterward.

     His education was a wise and happy one—the education of books and of life. He was born in Boston, in 1673; was graduated at Harvard, in 1692; and after three years of theological study, with some real work as a preacher, he set out for Europe, intending to gain wisdom by looking upon the wisdom of the world. It was a time of war between England and France; and on the voyage, his ship was captured by a French privateer, after a hard battle, during which the pale young preacher fought bravely on deck among the bravest. Being made a prisoner, he was clothed in rags, thrown into the hold among the sailors, taken to France, and suffered there most barbarous treatment during a captivity of several weeks. At last, he was exchanged; he made his way to England, where he remained four years. He was heartily welcomed there by the most eminent of the dissenting clergymen; went much into society; preached with great acceptance at Cambridge, Bath, and elsewhere; and had many inducements to remain permanently in the mother-country. He was a particular favorite in the family of Sir Henry Ashurst, with whose daughter he appears to have conducted, for a time, a gentle and clerical flirtation. This young lady once desired him to write for her a poem; and in response to her commands, he produced some playful verses called “A Quarrel with Fortune,” wherein, comparing her to a taper and himself to a fly, he intimates his own peril in fluttering so near a damsel of her exalted rank:

     Subsequently, in England, he became the victim of a far deeper and more serious passion. During his residence in Bath, he first met a beautiful and accomplished young woman, Elizabeth Singer of Frome, who, under the pseudonym of “Philomela,” was just then beginning to attract notice by her poems, and who afterward, rejecting the suit of Matthew Prior, married one Thomas Rowe, and had a somewhat distinguished career as a writer, both of prose and of verse. Colman’s acquaintance with this brilliant woman soon became very intimate and interesting; had he been willing to remain in England, it is said that he could have married her; and the memory of the passionate friendship thus formed with her, cast a tint of romance over the remainder of his life, passed beyond the sea. Long after his return to America, he continued his correspondence with her; and even so late as 1708, her letters to him manifest ardent emotion: she called him her “guardian angel;” said that only “the language of heaven” could express “a friendship so noble” as theirs; and assured him that, after death, her friendship for him should “commence a more exalted ardor.”²

     Postponing, however, the consummation of this friendship

to the leisure to be expected in paradise, Benjamin Colman returned, in 1699, to the more urgent vocation that awaited him in Boston, where he took charge of a new church founded on a somewhat liberal platform; serving it with preëminent success as long as he lived, nearly half a century; solacing himself, meantime, for the temporary loss of the society of his English Philomela, by three very excellent American wives.

     During this long public career, his contributions to the literature of his country were most abundant, and mainly in the form of sermons. His style in these sermons is fluent, polished, modern in tone, Addisonian, with a rich and ample movement. He had formed his literary manner by the study of English literature, and in his sermons he often refers to the masters of English pulpit-eloquence,—to Bishop Pearson, to John Howe, to “the late excellent Archbishop Tillotson,” whom he calls “that most reverend person, the greatest example of charity and moderation that the age produced.”¹ His discourses abound in terse and felicitous terms. He speaks of “the dreggy, cheap pleasures of sin;” he says that the worldling acts as if he “esteemed himself only of the upper order of brutes, to graze with and perish like them.” Describing the power of religion to adorn the body; “I once saw a poor old man in this country, who made no figure but for his piety, who seemed, already on his death-bed, to have changed his wrinkled face for Moses’s shining one; and I am sure, were the vainest persons by, in all their tawdry ornaments of body as well as real beauty, they would have looked but uncomely and deformed compared with this venerable man.” Describing the spiritual warfare of the Christian, he says: “Men must wrestle against the importunities of flesh and blood, and against the power and policy of hell; against the cravings of a vitiated nature fomented by the world and the devil.”²

     There is a manly and sweet catholicity of tone in his writings,—a unique quality then: “It is indeed best to err on the charitable side; and no temper is more hateful than a censorious, jealous, judging one; suspecting everybody of evil but ourselves and a few we are fond of; confining the Church of Christ to a narrow compass, and salvation to those only of our own persuasion. . . . There are some practices and principles that look catholic, which, though I cannot reason myself into, yet I bear a secret reverence to in others, and dare not for the world speak a word against. Their souls look enlarged to me; and mine does so the more to myself, for not daring to judge them.”¹

     A man of heroic mould both in body and in mind—one of the clerical Titans of our later colonial period—was John Barnard, who, in the year 1770, at the age of eighty-nine, died at Marblehead, after sixty-eight years of service as a preacher in New England, after fifty-six years of service as a preacher in that particular town. Tall, of graceful proportions, erect even under the burden of nearly ninety years, he had the imperial bearing of our elder New England clergy, the stateliness of a king, touched by the intellectuality of a scholar, and the tenderness of a saint.” His countenance was grand,” wrote his associate, William Whitwell, “and his mien majestic; and there was a dignity in his whole deportment. . . . His presence restrained every imprudent sally of youth; and when the aged saw him, they arose and stood up.”²

     After taking his first degree at Harvard College in 1700, he devoted himself, at his father’s house in Boston, to a wide range of studies in preparation for the Christian ministry;

he began preaching, in 1701; he did some good service for his country as a military chaplain, in 1707; he paid a visit to England, in 1709, remaining there sixteen months; and at last, in 1714, ripened by multifarious contact with life and with books, he began his pastorate at Marblehead; where he advanced year by year to a commanding reputation throughout the country. His great trait was energy, physical and mental, impelling him to the mastery of all human knowledge. He had the usual scholarly attainments in the ancient languages; he was able to deal with the most subtile and rugged problems in Biblical criticism and in divinity; all his life, he pursued the study of the higher mathematics, for which he had peculiar aptitude; he was an expert in the theory and practice of music; he gave great attention to architecture; and living in a town where the building and sailing of ships were the principal employments of the people, he astonished them by his knowledge of their own mysteries, and was able to serve them by the execution of the most artistic and improved models for ships.

     His intellectual activity, shown in so many other directions, was shown also in authorship. He published, in 1752, a metrical version of the Psalms; he wrote, in 1768, a sketch of the eminent ministers he had known in New England; and besides numerous isolated sermons, he issued, in 1727, a volume entitled “Sermons on Several Subjects,” and in 1747, another volume entitled “The Imperfection of the Creature and the Excellency of the Divine Commandment.”

     The foremost impression now made upon one by these writings, is that of the robustness, the intellectual virility, of the man. He delights in hardy tasks of thought; he has the habit of confronting real difficulties of the mind. There is a mathematical thoroughness, a lawyer-like sense, in his handling of sacred subjects; he grips them with the clutch of conscious power. His great gift lies in his logic. He excels in the argumentative presentation and defence

of Christian doctrine. Yet, having first dealt with his topic as a thing in debate, and having vindicated the reasonableness of his cause, he casts off severity of style and often becomes in expression ample, glowing, and affluent.

     It marks the literary culture of the man, that in his writings one sees traces of his familiarity not only with Calvin and the great Puritan divines, but with the more liberal writers of the Anglican church, such as Tillotson, Stillingfleet, and More;¹ and that he should even enforce his statements by the authority of Epictetus.² Though his style is by no means a rich or imaginative one, it is never beggarly or harsh; at times, it has a tone of delicate grace, the artful force of amenity in phrase; as, when he speaks of one who “hath made some progress in the mysterious art, the divine lesson, of self-denial;³ or when he asks: “Is there anything more unbecoming a rational creature than to be a slave to sense, or than for a heaven-born soul to be the Devil’s drudge?”⁴ “A man may very much stifle and suppress the remonstrances of his own mind by the hurry and noise and diversions of the world; but can he always command silence in his own breast, and stop the just clamors of conscience against himself?”⁵ He has a felicity of urbane statement, sometimes even a quiet sarcasm, which blend effectively with the vigor of stern denunciation; but always this preacher is a gentleman, even in his frankest professional arraignment of sinners.

     JONATHAN EDWARDS, the most original and acute thinker yet produced in America, was born at East Windsor, Connecticut, in 1703; was graduated at Yale College in 1720; was a preacher in New York for about eight months prior to April, 1723; was a tutor in Yale College

from the summer of 1724 until the summer of 1726; in 1727, became pastor of the church at Northampton, and so continued until 1750; from 1751 until 1758, was missionary to the Indians near Stockbridge; on the sixteenth of February, 1758, was installed as president of the College of New Jersey; and died a few weeks afterward, namely, on the twenty-second of March.

     Both by his father and by his mother, he came of the gentlest and most intellectual stock in New England. In early childhood, he began to manifest those powerful, lofty, and beautiful endowments, of mind and of character, that afterward distinguished him,—spirituality, conscientiousness, meekness, simplicity, disinterestedness, and a marvellous capacity for the acquisition of knowledge and for the prosecution of independent thought. It is, perhaps, impossible to name any department of intellectual exertion, in which, with suitable outward facilities, he might not have achieved supreme distinction. Certainly, he did enough to show that had he given himself to mathematics, or to physical science, or to languages, or to literature—especially the literature of imagination and of wit—he would have become one of the world’s masters. The traditions of his family, the circumstances of his life, the impulses derived from his education and from the models of personal greatness before his eyes, all led him to give himself to mental science and divinity; and in mental science and divinity, his achievements will be remembered to the end of time.

     As a mere child, he read not only the ordinary writings in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, but the most abstruse and subtile writings in English; and at the age of fourteen, being then a sophomore in Yale College, his eye, for the first time, fell upon Locke’s “Essay on the Human Understanding,”—a book which made an era in the history of his mind, and which he read, even at that youthful period, with a delight greater, he tells us, “than the most greedy miser finds when gathering up handfuls of silver and gold

from some newly discovered treasure.”¹ Several years before that event, however, he had trained himself always to read with pen in hand; that is, to be productive as well as receptive in reading, and not only to think for himself as he went along, but to put his thinking into exact language. The result of such training as that upon such genius as his, was a precocity, both in original thought and in the expression of it, that is perhaps not surpassed, if it is equalled, in the case of any other intellectual prodigy.

     Thus, when Jonathan Edwards was not more than twelve years old, he heard that some one in the neighborhood, probably an older boy, had advanced the opinion that the soul is material and remains with the body till the resurrection. Instead of debating the question in crude, antagonistic fashion, our young metaphysician wrote to his friend a playful letter, in which he ironically professes to be on the point of adopting the new opinion, and humbly submits for solution a few difficulties that still stood in his way, but that really constituted a most ingenious and effective exposure of the logical absurdities of the doctrine proposed: “I am informed that you have advanced a notion that the soul is material, and attends the body till the resurrection. As I am a professed lover of novelty, you must imagine I am very much entertained by this discovery; which, however old in some parts of the world, is new to us. But suffer my curiosity a little further. I would know the manner of the kingdom before I swear allegiance. First, I would know whether this material soul keeps with [the body] in the coffin; and if so, whether it might not be convenient to build a repository for it. In order to which, I would know what shape it is of, whether round, triangular, or four-square, or whether it is a number of long fine strings reaching from the head to the foot; and whether it does not live a very discontented life. I am afraid when the coffin gives way, the earth will fall in and

crush it. But if it should choose to live above ground, and hover about the grave, how big it is; whether it covers all the body, or is assigned to the head, or breast, or how. If it covers all the body, what it does when another body is laid upon it; whether the first gives way, and, if so, where is the place of retreat. But suppose that souls are not so big but that ten or a dozen of them may be about one body, whether they will not quarrel for the highest place; and as I insist much upon my honor and property, I would know whether I must quit my dear head, if a superior soul comes in the way. But, above all, I am concerned to know what they do where a burying place has been filled twenty, thirty, or an hundred times. If they are a top of one another, the uppermost will be so far off that it can take no care of the body. I strongly suspect they must march off every time there comes a new set. I hope there is some other place provided for them but dust. The undergoing so much hardship and being deprived of the body at last, will make them ill-tempered. I leave it with your physical genius to determine whether some medicinal applications might not be proper in such cases; and subscribe your proselyte—when I can have solution of these matters.”¹

     This discussion by two New England boys, of a profound and complex problem in psychology, is interesting as an illustration of the educational effects wrought on the people of New England, by their rugged theological drill. They had become a population of acute philosophers. Even their children, it seems, were ready to interrupt the delights of playing at tag or of capturing woodchucks, in order to exchange arguments over the question of the materiality of the human soul. We see, also, in the present example, some of the chief peculiarities of the mind of Jonathan Edwards,—his keenness in analysis, his faculty of seeing the logical absurdities involved in a false proposition,

his power of setting forth these absurdities in a way at once fair and irresistible, his gift of raillery, his freedom from arrogance of tone, his use of the Socratic strategy of a deferential manner in debate.

     While still an under-graduate, and therefore before his eighteenth year, he began to put into precise shape, in his note-book, the conclusions he had come to on leading topics in mental philosophy,—such as cause, existence, space, substance, matter, thought, motion, union of mind with body, consciousness, memory, personal identity, duration, and so forth. In one of these notes, on “The Place of Minds,” he comes back to that sharp study of the nature and physical relations of the spirit that had employed his mind some years before: “Our common way of conceiving of what is spiritual, is very gross, and shadowy, and corporeal, with dimensions, and figure, and so forth. If we would get a right notion of what is spiritual, we must think of thought, or inclination, or delight. Hour large is that thing in the mind which they call thought? Is love square, or round? Is the surface of hatred rough, or smooth? Is joy an inch, or a foot, in diameter? These are spiritual things; and why should we then form such a ridiculous idea of spirits, as to think them so long, so thick, or so wide, or to think there is a necessity of their being square, or round, or some other certain figure?”¹

     In another of these juvenile notes, he thus discusses “Nothing”: “That there should absolutely be Nothing at all, is utterly impossible. The mind, let it stretch its conceptions ever so far, can never so much as bring itself to conceive of a state of perfect Nothing. It puts the mind into mere convulsion and confusion, to think of such a state; and it contradicts the very nature of the soul, to think that such a state should be. It is the greatest of contradictions, and the aggregate of all contradictions, to say that Thing should not be. It is true, we cannot so

distinctly show the contradiction in words; because we cannot talk about it, without speaking stark nonsense, and contradicting ourselves at every word; and because Nothing is that whereby we distinctly show other particular contradictions. . . . If any man thinks that he can conceive well enough how there should be Nothing, I will engage that what he means by Nothing, is as much Something, as anything that he ever thought of in his life; and I believe that if he knew what Nothing was, it would be intuitively evident to him that it could not be. . . . Absolute Nothing is the aggregate of all the contradictions in the world: a state, wherein there is neither body, nor spirit, nor space, neither empty space nor full space, neither little nor great, narrow nor broad, neither infinite space nor finite space, not even a mathematical point, neither up nor down, neither north nor south. . . .. When we go about to form an idea of perfect Nothing, we must shut out all these things; . . . nor must we suffer our thoughts to take sanctuary in a mathematical point. When we go to expel being out of our thoughts, we must be careful not to leave empty space in the room of it; and when we go to expel emptiness from our thoughts, we must not think to squeeze it out by anything close, hard, and solid; but we must think of the same that the sleeping rocks do dream of; and not till then, shall we get a complete idea of Nothing.”¹

     It is in these wonderful memoranda, penned by this lad of sixteen or seventeen, that we find his first avowal of that philosophy of Idealism, with which the name of Berkeley has since been associated. At the end of an argument respecting “Being,” Jonathan Edwards says: “What, then, is to become of the universe? Certainly, it exists nowhere but in the Divine mind. . . . Those beings which have knowledge and consciousness are the only proper, and real, and substantial beings; inasmuch as the being of

other things is only by these. From hence we may see the gross mistake of those who think material things the most substantial beings, and spirits more like a shadow; whereas spirits only are properly substance.”¹ In another note, he says: “The material universe exists only in the mind. . . . All material existence is only idea.”²

     The precocity of Jonathan Edwards in physical science, appears to have been not less wonderful than was his precocity in metaphysical science. His father had a correspondent, probably in England, who was much interested in natural history; and for this gentleman, Jonathan Edwards, when twelve years of age or perhaps younger, wrote an elaborate paper, giving with great exactness of statement, and with great force of reasoning, the results of his own observations upon spiders. “May it please your Honor,” writes this modest and marvellous boy, “There

are some things that I have happily seen of the wondrous way of the working of the spider. Although everything belonging to this insect is admirable, there are some phenomena relating to them more particularly wonderful. Everybody that is used to the country, knows their marching in the air from one tree to another, sometimes at the distance of five or six rods. Nor can one go out in a dewy morning, at the latter end of August and the beginning of September, but he shall see multitudes of webs, made visible by the dew that hangs on them, reaching from one tree, branch, and shrub to another. . . . But these webs may be seen well enough in the daytime by an observing eye, by their reflection in the sunbeams. Especially, late in the afternoon may these webs that are between the eye and that part of the horizon that is under the sun, be seen very plainly, being advantageously posited to reflect the rays. And the spiders themselves may be very often seen travelling in the air, from one stage to another amongst the trees, in a very unaccountable manner. But I have often seen that which is much more astonishing. In very calm and serene days in the forementioned time of year, standing at some distance behind the end of an house or some other opaque body, so as just to hide the disk of the sun and keep off his dazzling rays, and looking along close by the side of it, I have seen a vast multitude of little shining webs, and glistening strings, brightly reflecting the sunbeams, and some of them of great length, and of such a height that one would think they were tacked to the vault of the heavens, and would be burnt like tow in the sun. . . . But that which is most astonishing is, that very often appears at the end of these webs, spiders sailing in the air with them. . . . And since I have seen these things, I have been very conversant with spiders, resolving if possible to find out the mysteries of these their astonishing works. And I have been so happy as very frequently to see their manner of working; that when a spider would

go from one tree to another, or would fly in the air, he first lets himself down a little way from the twig he stands on by a web; . . . and then laying hold of it by his forefeet, and bearing himself by that, puts out a web . . . which is drawn out of his tail with infinite ease, in the gently moving air, to what length the spider pleases; and if the farther end happens to catch by a shrub or the branch of a tree, the spider immediately feels it, and fixes the hither end of it to the web by which he lets himself down, and goes over by that web which he put out of his tail.” He then describes minutely how the spider moves from tree to tree; and how, in the fall of the year, they sustain themselves in the air and are carried upon the westerly winds to the sea, and are “buried in the ocean, and leave nothing behind them but their eggs for a new stock next year.”¹

     The interest of Jonathan Edwards in physical science did not pass away with his childhood; and while a student at Yale College, and especially while a tutor there, he prosecuted his physical researches with great diligence. He even wrote a series of notes on natural science, intended as the basis of a book. In these notes, he dealt with the principal topics in physics and astronomy, many of his remarks being very acute, ingenious, and original. He suggested that “there is in the atmosphere some other ethereal matter considerably rarer than atmospheric air;” that water is a compressible fluid—a fact not publicly announced by scientific men until thirty years afterward; that water in freezing loses its specific gravity; and that “the existence

of frigorific particles” is doubtful. In explaining the phenomena of thunder and lightning, without any knowledge of the electric fluid, and long before the invention of the Leyden jar, he rejected the notions then prevalent upon the subject, and came nearer to the theory afterward discovered by Franklin than any other human mind had then done. He made important suggestions relative to a theory of atoms; he demonstrated that the fixed stars are suns; he explained the formation of river-channels, the different refrangibility of the rays of light, the growth of trees, the process of evaporation, and the philosophy of the lever; and he made important observations on sound, on electricity, on the tendency of winds from the coast to bring rain, and on the cause of colors.¹

     The intense intellectual discipline to which, almost from infancy, this wonderful person subjected himself, was accompanied by a moral and spiritual discipline, begun as early in life, and in its rigor equally intense. In the “resolutions” that he wrote out for himself while a very young man, one now finds, amid many tokens of the gratuitous and puerile severity of his age and his sect, the traits of a personal character full of all nobility: “To live with all my might while I do live;” “When I feel pain, to think of the pains of martyrdom and of hell;” “Never to do anything out of revenge;” “In narrations, never to speak anything but the pure and simple verity;” “Never to give over nor in the least to slacker my fight with my corruptions, however unsuccessful I may be.”² On the twenty-third of September, 1723, he wrote: “I observe that 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 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.”¹ About one month afterward, he wrote: “To follow the example of Mr. B., who, though he meets with great difficulties, yet undertakes them with a smiling countenance, as though he thought them but little; and speaks of them, as if they were very small.”² On the sixth of June, 1724, while a tutor at Yale, he wrote: “I have now abundant reason to be convinced of the troublesomeness and vexation of the world, and that it never will be another kind of world,”³—an observation confirmed, doubtless, by the experience of many another Yale tutor, since that date.

     Such, in intellectual attainments and in spiritual quality, was Jonathan Edwards, when, at the age of twenty-four, he entered upon his work as minister of a parish on the frontiers of civilization. The remainder of his life was what he expected it to be,—an experience of labor and of sorrow; but always borne by him with meek and cheerful submission. He had ill health, domestic griefs, public misrepresentation, alienation of friends, persecution, even poverty. In 1751, he was so poor that his daughters had to earn money for household expenses by making fans, laces, and embroidery; and he himself, for lack of paper, had to do his writing, mostly on the margins of pamphlets, on the covers of letters, and on the remnants that his daughters could spare him from the silk-paper used by them in the manufacture of fans.

     Nevertheless, through it all, he bated not a jot of heart or hope, but still bore up and steered right onward. His chief business was in his study; and there he usually worked thirteen hours a day. Even out of the study, his mind was not at rest; when, for exercise, he rode on horseback, or walked in the woods, he kept on at his tasks of thought; in order that he might not forget anything that he had wrought out in these excursions, he was accustomed to pin a bit of paper upon his coat, for

every idea that was to be jotted down on his return; and it was noticed that, sometimes, he would come home with his coat covered over with these fluttering memorials of his intellectual activity.

     The problems upon which his mind was constantly at work, were the great problems of theology,—especially those in immediate debate, at that time, in New England. Of course, he held the theology that was then and there orthodox,—that ganglion of heroic, acute, and appalling dogmas commonly named after John Calvin. To the defence of that theology, in all its rigors, in all its horrors, Jonathan Edwards brought his unsurpassed abilities as a dialectician.

     We need not discredit the traditions that have come down to us, of the agonizing effects produced upon men and women, by such an advocate as he, giving statement to such doctrines as those. He was not an orator. In the pulpit, he generally held his little “manuscript volume in his left hand, the elbow resting on the cushion or the Bible, his right hand rarely raised but to turn the leaves, and his person almost motionless.”¹ Yet such was the power of his sincerity, of his solemnity, and of his logic, that he wrought results not surpassed in their kind even by the oratory of Whitefield. His first sermon at Princeton, in the College Hall, was two hours long; but it so enchained the audience that they were astonished and disappointed that it closed so soon. One person, who heard him preach concerning the Day of Judgment, testified that “so vivid and solemn was the impression made on his own mind, that he fully supposed that, as soon as Mr. Edwards should close his discourse, the judge would descend, and the final separation take place.”² Once, at Enfield, Connecticut, he came into an assemblage that was unusually listless and indifferent; but before his sermon was ended, the people were bowed down in agony

and terror. “There was such a breathing of distress and weeping, that the preacher was obliged to speak to the people, and desire silence that he might be heard.”¹

     The sermon through which he so moved the people of Enfield, had this terrifying title, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God;” and an analysis of his method in that discourse, will serve to show us enough of his method in all his discourses. It is upon the text, “Their feet shall slide in due time.” After a concise and solemn exposition of the original use of the words, he deduces from them this proposition: “There is nothing that keeps wicked men, at any one moment, out of hell, but the mere pleasure of God.” He then proceeds to justify the proposition by a series of ten considerations, each stated with great sharpness and force, and all accumulating upon this central thought an indescribable emphasis: 1. There is no want of power in God to cast wicked men into hell at any moment. 2. They deserve to be cast into hell. 3. They are already under a sentence of condemnation. 4. They are now the objects of that very same anger and wrath of God, that is expressed in the torments of hell. 5. The Devil stands ready to fall upon them and seize them as his own, at what moment God shall permit him. 6. There are in the souls of wicked men those hellish principles reigning, that would presently kindle and flame out into hell-fire, if it were not for God’s restraints. 7. It is no security to wicked men, for one moment, that there are no visible means of death at hand. 8. Natural men’s care to preserve their own lives, or the care of others to preserve them, does not secure them a moment. 9. All wicked men’s pains and contrivance to escape hell, while they continue to reject Christ, do not secure them from hell one moment. 10. God has laid himself under no obligation, by any promise, to keep any natural man out of hell one moment.²

     These several considerations follow, one after another, with dreadful swiftness and force, each hurled by calm, merciless logic, and by an overwhelming intensity of realism. He then reaches the application, where the urgency of reasoning, of menace, of consternation, becomes intolerable. No wonder that human nature gave way under it; that men and women sighed and sobbed, as the ghastly preacher, himself trembling at his own argument, went on and on with the horrible thing: “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 creature is made subject to the bondage of your corruption not willingly; the sun does not willingly shine upon you to give you light, to serve sin and Satan; the earth does not willingly yield her increase to satisfy your lusts; nor is it willingly a stage for your wickedness to be acted upon; the air does not willingly serve you for breath to maintain the flame of life in your vitals, while you spend your life in the service of God’s enemies. . . . And the world would spew you out, were it not for the sovereign hand of him who hath subjected it in hope.”¹

     His power over the people whom he addressed, consisted partly in his minuteness of imaginative detail,—bringing forward each element in the case one by one; so that drop after drop of the molten metal, of the scalding oil, fell steadily upon the same spot, till the victim cried out in shrieks and ululations of agony: “The bow of God’s wrath is bent, and 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.”¹ “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.”² “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.”³ If you cry to God to pity you, he will be so far from pitying you in your doleful case, or showing you the least regard or favor, that instead of that, he will only tread you under foot. And though he will know that you cannot bear the weight of omnipotence treading upon you, yet he will not regard that; but he will crush you under his feet without mercy; he will crush out your blood, and make it fly, and it shall be sprinkled on his garments, so as to stain all his raiment. He will not only hate you, but he will have you in the utmost contempt; no place shall be thought fit for you, but under his feet to be trodden down as the mire of the streets.”⁴

     In the latter part of his life, Jonathan Edwards chanced to open and to read so frivolous a book as a novel—“Sir Charles Grandison.” The delight that he found in that work, led him to analyze the sources of his pleasure, and especially to consider the power of mere style in the expression of thought; and to say to his son that he regretted his own neglect of it. As a theologian, as a metaphysician, as the author of “The Inquiry into the Freedom of the Will,” as the mighty defender of Calvinism, as the inspirer and the logical drill-master of innumerable minds in his own country, and in Great Britain, he, of course, fills a large place in ecclesiastical and philosophical history. But even from the literary point of view, and in spite of his own low estimate of his literary merits, he deserves

high rank. He had the fundamental virtues of a writer,—abundant thought, and the utmost precision, clearness, and simplicity in the utterance of it; his pages, likewise, hold many examples of bold, original, and poetic imagery; and though the nature of his subjects, and the temper of his sect, repressed the exercise of wit, he was possessed of wit in an extraordinary degree, and of the keenest edge. In early life, he was sadly afflicted by the burden of checking the movements of this terrible faculty; but later, it often served him in controversy, not as a substitute for argument, but as its servant; enabling him, especially in the climaxes of a discussion, to make palpable the absurdity of propositions that he had already shown to be untenable.¹

     In the year 1776, shortly after the evacuation of Boston by the British troops, a somewhat dramatic scene was presented one day, in one of the churches of that city, known as the Hollis Street Church. Its patriotic members, having returned from the outlying villages to which they had fled the year before, had determined to come to stern issues with their pastor, the Reverend Mather Byles, a distinguished and powerful divine, but an incorrigible Tory, then just seventy years old. All along, from the opening of the controversy between the colonies and the king, he had taken sides with the king against the colonies. Although in the pulpit he never, in those days, referred to politics, out of the pulpit he referred to little else; and he made unsparing use of his acuteness and of his sarcastic wit, to baffle and scourge the political designs of his own people. During the occupation of the city by the king’s soldiers, he had remained there, and had given them his aid and comfort; and he still affronted his congregation by praying, in their presence, for the prosperity of the monarch whose troops had desolated the town, had

slaughtered their brethren, and were preparing to enslave the whole country. For forty-three years, Mather Byles had ministered to that one church, faithfully, ably, with great renown;¹ yet they could endure his political perversity no longer. Resting their public accusations against him, however, on his faults as a pastor, and not on his faults as a patriot, they drew up their charges in writing, and notified him of their wish for a public interview upon the subject. On the day appointed, the male members of the congregation, with grim resolution, yet with no little dread of the awful eye and the no less awful tongue of the great man who had been their spiritual lord so long, assembled early at the church. The pews had been removed by the troops from the floor of the house; and perhaps with a mute sense of greater safety in the approaching interview, the men took their seats in one of the lofty galleries, and there awaited in silence the arrival of the mighty person, whose wrath they were about to invoke upon themselves. “In due time,” says the son² of one who witnessed the scene, “the door opened slowly, and Dr. Byles entered the house with an imposing solemnity of manner. He was dressed in his ample, flowing robes and bands, under a full bush-wig that had been recently powdered, surmounted by a large three-cornered hat. He walked from the door to the pulpit with a long and measured tread, ascended the stairs, hung his hat upon the peg, and seated himself. After a few moments, he turned with a portentous air toward the gallery, where his accusers sat, and said,—‘If ye have aught to communicate, say on.’” Upon this, one of the deacons, a very little man with a very little voice, stood up and began to read: “The church of Christ in Hollis Street” “Louder!” roared the frowning orator, with awful, leonine voice. The puny deacon

began again, and with still greater effort of articulate squeak: “The church of Christ in Hollis Street”—“Louder!” once more shouted the preacher, with terrible emphasis. The miserable little man, now trembling with fright as well as with great stress of vocal impotence, began once more, and was permitted to proceed through three or four of the specifications, when the insulted pastor arose, indignation darkening all his face and giving dreadful resonance to his voice, and thundered out,—“’Tis false; ’tis false; ’tis false; and the church of Christ in Hollis Street knows that ’tis false.” Upon this, he took down his hat, put it upon his head, and descending the pulpit, as an angry monarch would his throne, he stalked proudly out of the church, never to enter it again; leaving to the little deacon and his brethren, the contemptuous privilege of making the most of their specifications against him.

     Thus, in great bitterness of popular aversion, ended the public career of a man, who, until his loyalty to his king made him disloyal to his country, had held a very high place in the admiration of his contemporaries. To them he had seemed a man of extraordinary brilliance, in many different characters,—wit, poet, man of letters, theologian, pulpit-orator; but it was as pulpit-orator only that he was really great, to the service of that single character subordinating whatever gifts he possessed for all the others.

     The traditions of his wit have, since then, choked out nearly all memory of the central gravity and strength of his character; and he stands in our history merely as a Tory punster and a clerical buffoon. His jocoseness, after all, was not the principal part of him. He jested much; and yet he was much more than a jester; he was an earnest and devout Christian minister.¹

     His great strength was in the pulpit. He was perhaps

as great a master of the amenities and the potencies of pious persuasion as New England had in its colonial age, after the days of Hooker, Shepard, John Cotton, and Urian Oakes. His presence was stately and commanding; he was at once aristocrat and apostle; in dress and manner, one of the first gentlemen of his time. Very early in life, he had shown a propensity to purely literary work; he was in correspondence with some of the chiefs of literature in England; Pope sent to him a splendid copy of his translation of the Odyssey. His own literary facility was notable: he had poetic sensitiveness, an ear for the strokes and cadences of the Popean verse; no inconsiderable facility in the manufacture of that verse; all of which, without making him more than a minor poet, gave him uncommon skill in the modulation of his prose sentences for oratory. His sermons are invariably marked by neatness of phrase, and expertness in the manipulation of his materials; by fresh and striking views of things, by the avoidance of uncomfortable length, by courtesy of tone, by common sense. He had paid much attention to the æsthetics of his profession. His own idea of “a finished minister” included all the accomplishments, both of society and of books. The preacher, he said, should be a person of “graceful deportment, elegant address, and fluent utterance. He must study an easy style, expressive diction, and tuneful cadences. . . . Nothing can be more finished oratory than many of Paul’s sermons. . . . Rattling periods, uncouth jargon, affected phrases, and finical jingles—let them be condemned; let them be hissed from the desk and blotted from the page.”¹ The old Puritan traditions of the enormous studiousness of the preacher, were sanctioned by this preacher—at least in the impartation of advice to others: “The study of the minister is the field of battle. Here he plays the hero, tries the dangers of war, and repeats the toils of combat. . . . How

often must he watch when others sleep; and his solitary candle burn when the midnight darkness covers the windows of the neighborhood.”¹ He deemed it worth his while, also, to accentuate the rather obvious ethical requirements of the sacred calling: “What an inconsistent thing is a wicked minister! An unholy divine; a blind watchman; a wolfish shepherd; an ignorant angel; what nonsense is this! An ungodly man of God—what a solecism! what a monster!”²

     The distinctive gift of Mather Byles was homiletical; he originated no ideas, he constructed no new arrangement of ideas; his function lay in the strength, warmth, and vivacity with which he grasped for himself the great familiar propositions in faith and conduct, and then, for others, held them forth in a succession of splendid and powerful pictures that inevitably drew the eyes of men, and stirred their hearts into fellowship of fervor. He smote men with the sword of their own accepted ideas; into speech he put without reserve his imagination and his emotion; he loved those generic and universal topics—ancient but never old—which exercised his own uncommon faculty of sublime and tender description: the impotence of man, the insignificance of this world, the grandeur of the eternal state, the dissonance and emptiness that are in all things whatsoever save virtue and truth and God. Repeating that melancholy, tired text,—the very hyperbole and half-truth of mortal weariness and pain,”—Verily every man at his best estate is altogether vanity,” the preacher, in one sermon,³ interprets it in dramatic colloquy with an imaginary disputant, and charges each word of his text with an explicit burden of gloom. At another time, he draws this picture of the physical future of his hearers: “In a few years the most beauteous and learned and pious head will grin a hideous skull. Our

broken coffins will show nothing but black bones, or black mould, and worms, and filth.”¹ He pours scorn on the emptiness of all human pretension: “A creature drooping to dust, and falling into a filthy grave, to set up for strength and beauty, honor and applause! Was ever anything more absurd and ridiculous? So might an emmet crawl in state, and value itself upon its imaginary possessions, and conceited accomplishments. So might a shadow, lengthened by the setting sun, admire to find itself grown so tall, while in the same moment it was going to vanish, blended in the gathering twilight, and lost in night and darkness.”²

     The Bible is the storehouse for this preacher’s themes, and for much of his imagery; and his gift of description, as it exercises itself on man’s pettiness, so is it put forth for the display of God’s greatness. Taking up one of the Scriptural titles of God, “the Lord of hosts,” the orator proceeds to this amplification of it: “This is one of the magnificent and favorite titles which he wears; and it is about two hundred times applied to him in the inspired writings. The Lord of hosts, he is the King of glory: the Lord of hosts is his name. Take a view of his extended and potent armies, and see him in his glory at the head of all. The heavenly hosts are his. So are the angels in all their shining forms and unnumbered regiments. An immeasurable front, and an endless rear! No army of so exact discipline, such invincible courage and fatal execution. Our painted troops are a mere mock-show, to these resistless legions. Our chariots and horses make no figure at all before these chariots of fire and horses of fire. The chariots of God are twenty thousand thousands of angels; and he maketh his angels spirits and his ministers a flame of fire. A whole host of our mortal warriors shall wither in a night before one of them, and strew the pale camp with an hundred and four score and five thousand corpses.

Beneath these, the stars keep their military watch, the outguards of the celestial army. And what a glittering host of them range themselves over the blue plains of ether! . . . These in all their immense dominions are under his absolute command. . . . How mysterious and unknown are the laws of those unnumbered squadrons; and how irresistible their movements! Canst thou bind the sweet influences of Pleiades, or loose the bands of Orion? Canst thou bring forth Mazzaroth in his season, or Canst thou guide Arcturus with his sons? But he, the great monarch of all, commands with infinite ease; and every rolling world submits with exact obedience. . . . Below these, and sailing along our atmosphere, the clouds make their majestic appearance, a flying camp, or a moving magazine of divine artillery. . . . There the northern tempests plant their impetuous batteries; there the fierce engines of the sky play in various forms of destruction. He is alike the Lord of the terrestrial hosts, while every species of creature and every individual are under his exact command. But who can call over the list of these extended cohorts? Is there any number of his armies? The earth is full of his legions; so also is the great and wide sea, with all the tribes and colonies there. . . . And where’s the creature which he cannot commission, or that dares to mutiny against his sovereign edicts? . . . Behold what a Lord of hosts is here! Even the wind and the seas obey him! He rules

Even the devils are subject to him. . . . He is the Lord of our hosts; and not an army gathers in this earth without his counsels and providence. . . . He unfurls his ensigns, and calls for the march of nations in universal tumult, and ranges half the globe on a side, confederated to a decisive battle.”¹

     On the border-line, between the colonial age and the age of the Revolution, we confront two great men, Jonathan Mayhew and Charles Chauncey, who belong to both ages, and who represent, not only the vast political influence of the New England clergy in the agitations of those times, but the broadest intellectual training, the most rational and the most catholic sentiment, then reached by any of their class. These two men we shall meet again, and study more fully, when we come to the literature of the Revolution; but our record of the high and splendid intellectual development of the clergy of New England, during the colonial time, would lack some essential factors, if we did not at least point to their names and to the significance of their lives, even in the period now under view.

     Jonathan Mayhew, the younger of the two, who also died first, was for the last nineteen years of his short life, minister of a church in Boston. He was, in the pulpit, a sort of tribune of the people. He impressed himself upon his contemporaries as a thinker of much originality and boldness, as a preacher of extraordinary power, as a writer of great elegance, force, and wit. In the history of his time, he stands for two things: first, the impulse he gave to bold and manly political conduct among his fellow-countrymen; and second, the impulse he gave to the emancipation of their minds from the despotism of the old theological dogmas. John Adams, who knew him well, predicted that the writings of Jonathan Mayhew would preserve his reputation “as long as New England shall be free, integrity esteemed, or wit, spirit, humor, reason, and knowledge admired.”¹

     In a long life, which began almost with the beginning of the eighteenth century, and did not end until the stress

and peril of the American Revolution were all passed, Charles Chauncey,¹ pastor of the first church of Boston, lived among men as their natural leader. He was a man of leonine heart, of strong, cool brain, of uncommon moral strength. He bore a great part in the intellectual strife of the Revolution; but before that strife was opened, he had moulded deeply the thought of his time, both by his living speech and by his publications. These were mostly sermons; but as sermons they had an extraordinary sweep of topics, from early piety and the lessons of affliction, to earthquakes in Spain, murder, religious compulsion, Presbyterian ordination, legislative knavery, the encouragement of industry, and the capture of Cape Breton.

     The prevailing trait of the man was intellectual genuineness in all things, and utter scorn of its opposite in anything. He had a massive, logical, remorseless understanding, hardy in its processes, and unwilling to take either fact or opinion at second hand. On the great themes that were then in debate among men, he put himself to enormous research. One of these themes was the Episcopacy. He gave four years of hard reading to it, first in the Scriptures and in the Fathers, then in all modern books on both sides of the controversy. Other themes were the doctrines of human depravity, retribution, and the like. He settled himself down for seven years to the study of these doctrines in the New Testament, especially in the epistles of St. Paul, and finally in all other books within reach; and he thus worked his way “into an entirely new set of thoughts”² a on those matters. He was an orthodox rationalist; and he stood in the line of that intellectual development among the clergy of New England, which at a later day culminated in Unitarianism.

     In the midst of the popular spasms and rhapsodies excited by the preaching of Whitefield and his imitators,

the peculiar qualities of Charles Chauncey were strongly revealed. He had an ineffable contempt for all slipshod, giddy, gaseous minds; for ejaculatory and rhetorical folk; for that oratory which makes up for absence of ideas by vehemence of assertion. Whitefield himself, he regarded as a clerical mountebank, ignorant, shallow, presumptuous, injurious, “never so well pleased as with the hosannas of ministers and parishioners in these parts of the earth;”¹ “the grand promoter of all the confusion there has been in the land.”² To Chauncey it seemed that the people were being led by Whitefield and his kind into all manner of disorder and folly; that inevitable reaction would come, by and by, in every shape of moral disaster; and that it was the duty of every sound brain to help to check the epidemic of lunacy. With his usual thoroughness he first undertook to gather the facts; he travelled hundreds of miles to observe for himself the proceedings of the itinerants and of the people who were affected by them; and being convinced that the fruits were delusion, anarchy, self-righteousness, and all uncharitableness, he published, in 1742, a tremendous sermon entitled “Enthusiasm,” and in the following year, a still more powerful treatise, entitled, “Seasonable Thoughts on the State of Religion in New England.”

     A remarkable passage in the former of these works, is his description of the enthusiast; a full-length portrait for all ages and all lands. The original being just then very conspicuous in the streets of Boston, the fidelity of this portrait must have rendered it extremely effective at that time: “The enthusiast is one who has a conceit of himself as a person favored with the extraordinary presence of the Deity. He mistakes the workings of his own passions for divine communications; and fancies himself immediately inspired by the Spirit of God, when all the while he is under no other influence than that of an over-heated imagination.

     “The cause of this enthusiasm is a bad temperament of the blood and spirits. ’Tis properly a disease, a sort of madness. . . . None are so much in danger of it, as those in whom melancholy is the prevailing ingredient in their constitution. In these it often reigns, and sometimes to so great a degree, that they are really beside themselves, acting as truly by the blind impetus of a wild fancy, as though they had neither reason nor understanding.

     “And various are the ways in which their enthusiasm discovers itself. Sometimes, it may be seen in their countenance. A certain wildness is discernible in their general look and air. . . . Sometimes, it strangely loosens their tongues and gives them such an energy, as well as fluency and volubility in speaking, as they themselves, by their utmost efforts, cannot so much as imitate when they are not under the enthusiastic influence. Sometimes, it affects their bodies, throws them into convulsions and distortions, into quakings and tremblings. . . . Sometimes, it will unaccountably mix itself with their conduct, and give it such a tincture of that which is freakish and furious, as none can have an idea of, but those who have seen the behavior of a person in a frenzy. Sometimes, it appears in their imaginary peculiar intimacy with heaven. They are, in their own opinion, the special favorites of God; have more familiar converse with him than other good men; and receive immediate, extraordinary communications from him. . . . And what extravagances, in this temper of mind, are they not capable of, and under the specious pretext too of paying obedience to the authority of God? Many have fancied themselves acting by immediate warrant from heaven, while they have been committing the most undoubted wickedness. There is, indeed, scarce anything so wild, either in speculation or practice, but they have given in to it; they have, in many instances, been blasphemers of God and open disturbers of the peace of the world. But in nothing does the enthusiasm of these persons discover itself more, than in the disregard they express to the dictates of

reason. They are above the force of argument, beyond conviction from a calm and sober address to their understandings. As for them, they are distinguished persons; God himself speaks inwardly and immediately to their souls. . . . And in vain will you endeavor to convince such persons of any mistakes they are fallen into. They are certainly in the right, and know themselves to be so. . . . They are not, therefore, capable of being argued with; you had as good reason with the wind. And as the natural consequence of their being thus sure of everything, they are not only infinitely stiff and tenacious, but impatient of contradiction, censorious, and uncharitable. . . . Those . . . who venture to debate with them about their errors and mistakes, their weaknesses and indiscretions, run the hazard of being stigmatized by them as poor, unconverted wretches, without the Spirit, under the government of carnal reason, enemies to God and religion, and in the broad way to hell. . . . The extraordinary fervor of their minds, accompanied with uncommon bodily motions, and an excessive confidence and assurance, gains them great reputation among the populace; who speak of them as men of God, in distinction from all others, and too commonly hearken to and revere their dictates, as though they really were, as they pretend, immediately communicated to them from the Divine Spirit.”¹