Jonathan Edwards, the fiery Puritan

Contents

PAGE

Prologue THE HANDOF AN ANGRY GOD. . . . 13

Book Two THE ParisH MINISTER

Pe eeSINS OF NORTHAMPTON (7 0 0, 87 VII FIRST MOVEMENT OF GOD’S SPIRIT. . . . 100 Pet ARe AMONG THE CLERGY 6.) 24) 00) 60) ee) TIO IX THE LIFE OF A NEW ENGLAND MINISTER . . 124 X SECOND MOVEMENT OF GOD’S SPIRIT . . . 138 ME REGING (TO RAGE) Ui ey ey vial el) BBG MOTOS LUNACY. 0 a el TOS MOT DREAMS OF THE MILLENNIUM; .).) . «170 fi

CONTE Nis

Book Three THE EXILE XIV FAMILY FEUD—EDWARDS DEFEATED

XV FAMILY FEUD—EDWARDS VICTORIOUS

XVI THE FRENCH AND INDIAN WAR .

XVII THE BATTLE WITH LIBERALISM .

Epilogue THE BLIGHT UPON POSTERITY BIBLIOGRAPHY, Ovo) Get ae ronan

INDEX e e e e e e e e e

PAGE

189. 210 226 236 249

257. 205}

ILLUSTRATIONS

Jonathan Edwards .

Elisha Williams

Mrs. Sarah Pierpont Edwards A Camp Meeting

George Whitefield .

Frontispiece

FACING PAGE

82 104

A Letter from Jonathan Edwards to Rev. Dr. Benjamin Colman .

Boston from the Dorchester Road .

The Husking Bee .

PROLOGUE THE HAND OF AN ANGRY GOD

PROLOGUE THE HAND OF AN ANGRY GOD

T was 1741. A corpulent German, with a corpulent German mistress, was king of England, to maintain the rights of property and keep out the popish pretender; the whig lords ruled the kingdom, and Sir Robert Walpole had just been driven from office; William Pitt was a young politician who seemed to be using patriotism as a cloak for private ambition; there was a maritime war with Spain, which was grossly mismanaged. The king of France, young and popular, was expected to rival the exploits of his predecessor; the Pompadour and the Parc aux Cerfs, the breadriots, the bankruptcy, and the revolution were all in the future; the rights of man were a myth, and democracy not even a dream. A young fop, who had become king of Prussia, had used his father’s grenadiers to steal Silesia from the heiress of the Hapsburgs, and was defending it furiously against the Austrian field-marshals; the war threatened to involve England and France.

Locke, with his theory that all ideas were acquired from sensation, was the reigning philosopher; and Newton’s vision of a law-ordered universe had permeated the intellectual consciousness of Europe; Halley was astronomeri)

royal; the movements of planets and stars were being recorded; and incredible occurrences were gravely reported and ascribed to causes still more incredible, which none the less made a show of being scientific. Meanwhile travelers rode on horseback because the roads were too bad for carriages; and washing was avoided because water was bad for the skin. Medicine was an affair of fantastic animal remedies—human excrement and the sperm of frogs— whose effects were described in pseudo-scientific jargon; half the children that were born died within a few months of birth, and a pock-marked face was the most familiar of sights; of the deaths in the city of London thirty per cent were ascribed to convulsions, and five per cent to pains in the teeth.

Nine-tenths of the world’s population was static, and employed on the soil. They believed in witchcraft, the magical power of charms, the baleful effect of comets, and a supernatural power who, if duly propitiated, would give good harvests. The idea that government existed for the good of the people was a rare and novel heresy.

The intellectual revolution had scarcely begun. Voltaire was living with his Emily in Brussels, and known as a © dramatist and an admirer of the English constitution; Montesquieu was working on “L’Esprit des Lois” in his ereat study at La Bréde; Diderot was a bookseller’s hack;

a vagabond tutor from Geneva, called Rousseau, was trying to make a name for himself in Paris as a musician. The Church of England was a moribund appanage of the aristocracy. High society was indifferent, and culture was deist; it was thought best that the common people _ should be superstitious. A group of hypocrites and enthusiastics, nicknamed the “holy club,” the “bible bigots,” and the “methodists,” were creating a scandal; they claimed to have special revelations from heaven, preached to mobs in the open air, and filled people’s minds with seditious nonsense.

Two months’ voyage across the Atlantic lay a littleregarded dependency of the British crown—the colony of New England: a land notorious for strict sabbatarians and unscrupulous drivers of bargains—devoted adherents of the Protestant succession.

Along the coastline they were thriving fishermen, and merchants of the African and West-India trade. Luxury and episcopalianism had come in with the royal governors; and the upper classes were beginning to doubt whether God had really elected the majority of mankind for eternal damnation ; they took religion easily, as a matter of respectable behavior and going to church on Sundays; some of them posed as deists, and scoffed at the superstition of the Pilgrim fathers. They followed the latest developments in the literature of England, and considered Addison the best of prose-writers, and Sir Richard Blackmore the greatest poet. In Boston there was a populace of seamen and workmen and negro slaves, who broke loose periodically in an orgy of drunkenness, window-smashing, and rioting. It was estimated that one-eighth of the houses in the town were either licensed taverns or illegal drinking and gambling dens.

Westward from Boston New England extended for two days’ journey—a land of clergymen and small farm- | ers. They were a vigorous hard-working stock, who got their women with child before they married them, and celebrated their festivals with prodigious drinkings of ale and cider and rum; they loved strange and rare delicacies —chocolate and oranges and Bohea tea; they guffawed heartily at anything which denoted sexual virility or the lack of it; they quarreled bitterly with each other, and went to law at the slightest provocation; they were the most obstinate of individualists. Their blood was not yet diluted by hard labor, puritanical repression, and loss of the more vigorous strains by emigration. The Indians continually imperiled their lives along the frontiers, and the wolves killed their sheep to within twenty miles of Boston. Washing was rare—except when the rivers were warm enough for the men to swim in them; and privies were unknown. Their god was an agricultural deity, and their religion a blend of Calvinist Christianity with primaeval superstition, based mostly on the pentateuch; they attended meeting, obeyed the law of Moses, and became converted, in order that Jehovah might ward off pestilences, Indians, droughts, floods, and earthquakes, and reward them with good harvests. Their ministers told them that if they did not accept God’s will as their will, take Christ as their Redeemer, and become born again, they would go to hell when they died; but until 1740 hell was a cliché; only the clergy felt its reality with any vividness.

In Massachusetts Governor Belcher was expecting his recall, and the clergy were hoping that such a devout supporter of their churches might not be removed from office. There was unwonted peace with the Indians; but men watched with anxiety the latest bulletins from Europe. The scarcity of precious metal and the depreciation of the paper > money had filled the lawcourts with debtors; and a scheme for remedying the shortage by founding a land-bank had been vetoed.

In 1741, however, the conversation in the taverns and at the dinner tables of ministers and colonels of militia throughout New England was not about politics. George Whitefield, the famous preacher, had swept across the country in the preceding autumn, and was still to be heard of, like a rumble of distant thunder, as he passed down the coast to his parish in Georgia. After him had come Gilbert Tennent, an Ulsterman from New Jersey, loud of voice and uncouth of gesture, clothed like John the Baptist in a greatcoat of sackcloth with a leather girdle about his loins; all winter and spring he had brandished hellfire before the Bostonians; and before he left had set the villages to the south and west ablaze with terror of the Judgment. Round Boston and New Haven there were many who scoffed; who are these creatures who spurn all decency and decorum, they inquired, telling polite citizens that they will go to hell when they die, and encouraging the mob to vulgar displays of vanity and enthusiasm; plainly they are mad; or if not mad, in the pay of the pope and the king of France. But among the common people everywhere—the dockhands of Boston and New Haven, the fishermen along Cape Cod, the farmers in the hill-country of central New England—there was only one cry—a cry of terror: for they had been told that when they died they would be tortured for ever and ever in the unquenchable flames of hell; by their drinkings and frolickings, their dances and fornications, they had provoked Almighty God, and nothing but His arbitrary good pleasure saved them from dropping any moment into the pit of torment.

The ministers marveled that God was working so powerfully on the hearts of their parishioners; they labored tirelessly to bring men to the new birth, without which they could not be saved. |

Most of the towns up the Connecticut valley had felt the revival. Springfield was ruled by an adherent of the new Arminian heresy, who kept preachers of hellfire and sudden conversion beyond his borders; but in East Windsor and Longmeadow God was mightily at work; and in Suffield there were ninety-five converts on a single day.

Enfield, lying between them, was still apathetic. So for the afternoon of July 8th a lecture was appointed, and a group of ministers took the warpath and descended upon it.

Mr. Stephen Williams, Mr. Eleazer Williams, Mr. Joseph Meachem, and Mr. Eleazer Wheelock spent the morning conducting services in dusty Longmeadow, on the bluffs

18 | above the slow-flowing Connecticut. Stephen and Eleazer Williams were sons of John Williams of Deerfield, and had been seized with him on that dreadful day twenty-six years before, when the Indians sacked his town, scalped his -wife, and marched their fainting prisoners across the mountains to Quebec; among the Frenchmen their sister, Eunice, had turned papist and married an Indian; she had recently visited her brothers in Longmeadow, but all their prayers could not induce her to seek safety from hell by making her home in New England. Joseph Meachem was the husband of another sister, and the minister of Coventry. Eleazer Wheelock was the minister of Lebanon, and a great master of pulpit elocution; in this year he preached no less than four hundred and sixty sermons; he subsequently founded a mission school for the savage Indians in New Hampshire, for which a handsome donation was given him by the Earl of Dartmouth. The four revivalists dined with Mr. Reynolds, the minister of Enfield, and in the afternoon rode up to the meeting house; there they met Mr. Edwards, from Northampton, who was to preach.

The Enfield farmers came to the meeting house in their check shirts and long red coats with three dozen buttons, and their wives in their Sunday dresses that had been handed down for generations. When the ministers filed into - the building they were shocked by the levity of the congregation ; they appeared thoughtless and vain, and hardly conducted themselves with common decency.

Mr. Edwards was over six feet tall, with a high forehead and a long narrow face; his expression was sweet and rather feminine; he was very thin, from continuous study; he wore, as was customary, a white wig, and a black gown, and was clothed beneath his gown in a coat and breeches of black broadcloth. He used no gestures, but stood motionless, with his eyes fixed on the bell-rope straight in front of him, his left elbow leaning on the cushion and his left hand holding his notes; his voice was low and a little monotonous, but well-cadenced, precise, and distinct; it went on pitilessly, like the voice of God Himself. He took as his text a passage from Deuteronomy—‘‘Their foot shall slide in due time.”

Having explained the text, he went on to say that nothing kept wicked men out of hell for a single moment but the arbitrary pleasure of God; God was more angry with many men still alive—doubtless with many that were sitting at ease in that congregation—than with many who were already in hell; the devil stood ready to seize them, and their own sin was a pent-up fire which, when God permitted, would immediately turn their souls into fiery ovens or furnaces of brimstone; nothing but the pleasure of a God who hated them saved them from a sudden death at any moment of the day.

Mr. Edwards then went on to make a direct application. © “There is hell’s wide gaping mouth open,” he said; “you have nothing to stand upon, nor any thing to take hold of; there is nothing between you and hell but the air. ... There are black clouds of God’s wrath now hanging directly over your heads, full of the dreadful storm, and big with thunder; the sovereign pleasure of God, for the present, stays his rough wind; otherwise your destruction would come like a whirlwind, and you would be like the chaff of the summer threshing floor. . . . The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, is dreadfully provoked, you are ten thousand times more abominable in his eyes, than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours; yet it is nothing but his hand that holds you from falling into the fire every moment; there is no other reason to be given why you have not gone to hell, since you have sat here in the house of God, provoking his pure eyes by your sinful manner of attending his solemn worship. You hang by a slender thread, with the flames of divine wrath flashing about it, and ready every moment to burn it asunder; and you have nothing to lay hold of to save yourself, nothing to keep off the flames of wrath, nothing of your own, nothing that you ever have done, nothing that you can do... . If, when once the day of mercy is past, you cry to God to pity you, he will be so far from pitying you, that he will only tread you under foot; he will crush out your blood, and make it fly, and it shall be sprinkled on his garments. . .. To your exquisite horrible misery there will be no end; when you look forward, you shall see a long for ever, a boundless duration before you, which will swallow up your thoughts, and amaze your soul; and you will absolutely despair of ever having any deliverance, any end, any mitigation, any 21 rest at all. You will know certainly that you must wear out long ages, millions of millions of ages; and then when you have so done, you will know that all is but a point to what remains. . . . This is the dismal case of every soul in this congregation now hearing this discourse, that has not been born again. . . . There is reason to think, that there are many in this congregation now hearing this discourse, that will actually be the subjects of this very misery to all eternity. It would be a wonder, if some that are now present should not be in hell in a very short time. And it would be no wonder if some persons, that now sit here, in some seats of this meeting-house, in health, quiet and secure, should be there before to-morrow morning.”

This sermon was interrupted by outcries from the congregation; the details have not been recorded; but it must surely have been at these words that pandemonium broke loose. All over the meeting house men and women stood up and rolled on the floor, shrieking and screaming; it was like a forest smitten by a hurricane. “Oh, I am going to hell,” they cried; ‘‘alas for our frolicks and our dances; how shall we remember them in hell.” For many minutes the building was filled with the fearful wail of condemned souls; then they secured quiet, and Mr. Wheelock prayed, and the ministers climbed down from the pulpit. But long past sunset and through the night Enfield was like a beleaguered city; in almost every house men and women could be heard crying out for God to save them; they fancied that at any moment Christ might descend in judgment from the sky with

22 | the archangels and the apostles at his side, and the graves would give up their dead; and the little children were afraid to play, and pleaded with the Almighty to save them.

This Enfield sermon has become notorious. Many people think of Edwards only as the preacher of the most terrific hellfire sermons of which we have record.

He is, however, a figure of unique importance in the history of America. He was the father of American Puritanism: before him religion meant the propitiation of a jealous God in order to secure worldly prosperity; after him it meant disinterested obedience to the law, because the law was lovely; Edwards rescued Calvinism when it was on the verge of destruction by the scientific outlook, and made it impregnable against intellectual assaults for almost a century; he fastened upon the necks of his countrymen a Puritanism such as we know to-day.

Puritanism may seem to many of us an unlovely thing; but every great human movement has something noble at its roots; and Edwards was a great man. He was probably the first, and may also have been the last, in American history who accepted Puritanism solely because it satisfied his own psychological needs; before Edwards men became converted to secure prosperity or to escape hellfire; after him mostly because they were convinced by his faith. Edwards accepted also much that seems to us repulsive or absurd, because he failed to disentangle it from those parts of Puritanism which he needed; but from his own narrative it is plain that his conversion was not the result of fear or of conviction that was merely intellectual. He came from the same mould as the great princes of the mediaeval church; and nothing suggests that he would have found uncongenial the role of an Anselm or a Bernard; but some caprice of Providence condemned him to live in a New England village. And whereas the Catholic Church teaches its saints how to be indulgent to the weaknesses of the laity, Calvinism required the same self-surrender from each individual; Edwards tried to make everyone like himself; and the results of that effort are still with us.

For his victims he is a vice to be shaken off, a demon to be spat at. But for the unbiased observer he is a figure almost without spot or blemish, whose vision of the universe is of a breathtaking sublimity, and who realized certain of the possibilities of human nature so perfectly that they need never be realized again.

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CHAPTER iI WINDSOR FARMES

HE Reverend Timothy Edwards, father of Jonathan, was ordained in 1694 to be the minister of Windsor Farmes, on the east side of the Connecticut River. He was the son of Richard Edwards, a rich lawyer and merchant of Hartford, whose grandfather, according to an unproved legend, had come from Wales and held a London parish in the reign of Elizabeth. Timothy’s wife had been Esther Stoddard, daughter of the pastor of Northampton; her mother was the daughter of the first minister of Windsor, and her grandmother, the first of the five wives of Anthony Stoddard, had been niece of John Winthrop and sister of Sir George Downing, graduate of Harvard and sycophant of Charles [I. Wealth, religion, and respectability adorned the ancestry of Jonathan Edwards for several generations. His father and mother, both his grandfathers, and two of his great-grandfathers were all people of unusual ability. There was, however, a skeleton in the family cupboard. Richard Edwards, at the age of twenty, had been inveigled into marriage by a rich and attractive New Haven girl, Elizabeth Tuttle, who within a few months gave birth to a child whose paternity her husband disowned; after twenty years of marriage she seems to have become insane, for her husband secured a divorce; one of her sisters committed infanticide; and one of her brothers was hanged for murdering another sister; Timothy Edwards was her second child. One of Jonathan’s sisters was distinctly queer, and two of his nieces became confirmed opium-eaters; his own youngest son, born too late to be educated by him, was a clever and erratic Don Juan; and one of his grandsons was Aaron Burr. The cross between Puritan solidity and the morbid brilliance of the Tuttles seems to have caused all the ability of the Edwardses, a family dear to enthusiastic eugenists.

Timothy was considered to be unusually learned; but was otherwise a normal New England parson. He was afraid of God, but he was not, according to modern notions, especially puritanical. He had a healthy appetite for brandy and rum; and when he was ordained, a dance was held at his house. The earliest Puritans had disliked dancing, partly because it was pagan in origin and therefore in all probability an invention of Satan, partly because it caused fornication ; they would allow “‘pyrrhical or polemical saltation,” and “dancing of men with men and women with women,” for these had biblical precedents ; but not “gynaecandrical” dancing. The prohibition, however, was little regarded, and by 1700 everybody danced except a few of the clergy and the graver laymen.

Timothy believed, like most of his contemporaries, that everything which happened in the world was arranged by a

_ personal God; God intervened continually in the progress of events, and made known His wishes to His servants through those events which unbelieving persons called accidents. For this reason card-playing and games of chance were blasphemous ; for to obey the verdict of accident was to obey the verdict of God, and people should do it, as John Cotton said, “rather prayerfully than sportfully.” Lotteries, therefore, were forbidden; and playing cards, when found by police officers, were burnt. When embarking on any enterprise, the Puritans always watched carefully for the verdict of God, as expressed through such omens as climatic conditions, texts impressed on their minds, the movements of animals, and trivial accidents; and success was usually a proof of divine approval.

Timothy kept a notebook in which he recorded those occasions when God had made personal interventions to save him from death or calamity. As an infant, he had fallen into a tub of water and been miraculously saved from drowning. When he was at the grammar school in Hartford, he pulled the trigger of a loaded gun while it was aimed at a playfellow; but providentially it missed fire—a deliverance which, his father said, was worthy of a place in Mr. Mather’s “Remarkable Providences.’’ He went with his schoolmates to slide and play whiptop on a frozen river, and was narrowly saved from going through the ice. Another time a peachstone stuck in his throat; when he could not pull it out, he realized that death was close at hand, and that because he was a sinner God would not save him; but God did save him, for, while he was running down to the river to get a drink, the peach-stone miraculously came out. Once he was hanging from the top bough of a cherry tree, and, when a schoolmate told him he would break his neck, he went on hanging out of sheer bravado; nevertheless, against all probability, God did not allow the bough to break. Four times on sea-voyages to Boston he was saved from shipwreck; three times he was thrown from horses without being killed; and once, when he was on a canoe trip up “the ereat river” to visit his sweetheart at Northampton, he was nearly bitten by a rattlesnake. These indications that God approved of his way of living were very precious to the Reverend Timothy Edwards.

On Sundays and Thursdays he explained to his congregation the methods of the deity in governing the world, and showed how the New England churches were God’s especial care. “Calamitys,” he declared, “are awful signs and appearances of divine anger ;” if calamities came and people did not repent, but went on disobeying the ten commandments—for by a process of construction worthy of the United States Supreme Court the Puritan ministers had interpreted the Decalogue as covering every possible variety of sin—then God became “very angry indeed”; it was “a very provoking thing,” and the punishments that God was — liable to inflict included “blasting and mildew, year after year, . . . unfruitfull seasons and unseasonable winds, . . sweeping floods, and scorching parching droughts, . . . the wasting sword and graves of war, ... mortal and contagious diseases, ... Small pox, malignant fevers, Pleurisis and the like, . . . strifes and disagreements in our publique affayres both civill and military;” finally, and worst of all, God would ‘“‘cut you short in the ordinance of his Gospell,”’ and there would be ‘“‘a kind of famine of the heart and of the word of the Lord amongst you.” ‘“Aren’t these things awfull?” he concluded. Wherefore the ungodly must consider that their impenitence and disobedience brought down judgments on the land, and that to save the neighbors from calamity they must repent; moreover, “if the rest of the land should repent and turn to God in a generall way and yet you continue impenitent, you cant expect to share in the blessings of God upon them.” The godly, also, must reflect that they had probably committed sins which “have offended God and doubtless made him angry ;” “you, for aught you know,” he told them, “may have a hand in bringing down judgements on the place where you live”. God, for Timothy Edwards, was a person up in the | sky, who was very jealous of His honor; blasphemy and sabbath-breaking were more offensive to God, and hence | more likely to ruin the harvest, than fornication and drunk-— enness; for the former were direct insults, whereas the latter were merely breaches of the law which God, for reasons known only to Himself—or rather for no reason at all hut His own arbitrary will—had commanded men to obey. These doctrines were expounded by Timothy from the pulpit, and doubtless impressed upon his son; they were a form of superstition which eighteenth-century science was making impossible; one of the most notable achievements of Jonathan Edwards was that he rejected them completely.

The other five days of the week Timothy worked on his farm, with intervals of visiting the sick, reproving wrongdoers, riding to ministers’ meetings and college commencements, and teaching Latin and Greek to his children and to a few paying pupils. He was not, like most New England ministers, the physician of his parish, as well as its advocate with the deity. But his time was fully occupied, for he had eleven children. The Puritans noticed in their Bibles the commandment to the Old Testament patriarchs to “replenish the earth,” and they had the authority of Cotton Mather for believing that God punished women who blasphemed against the holy duty of childbearing with “multiplied and repeated miscarriages; so the rule with every Puritan family was a baby every two years. The result was that many men married and wore out two or three wives; bachelors were regarded with great suspicion, and not allowed to live alone; and the ordinary male commenced prospecting for his next wife as soon as the funeral feast was over. Timothy’s children came according to the rule—the early ones at intervals of a little less than two years, and the last of all three years and a month after the last but one; but his wife must have been unusually robust, for she survived. her husband and several of her children and died at the age of ninety-nine.

Timothy was an indifferent farmer; and in later years, like almost all his fellow-clergymen at that period, was in serious financial difficulties, owing to the depreciation of the _ currency and the unwillingness of his parishioners to pay his salary with any regularity. He also quarreled with his church because they did not pay him sufficient deference— as for instance by lifting their hats when they met him in the street,—and because he maintained that one of them, by marrying a girl against her father’s will, had violated the _ fifth and eighth commandments; he did not, however, like many clergymen at that period, start a lawsuit against the parish for his unpaid salary. Such conditions were common at that time in the New England villages; the New England laymen had resistance to authority in their blood, and in the course of generations the piety, which had made their ancestors kiss the feet of good ministers, had worn very thin. Timothy was considered a successful minister and God blessed his church with several notable spasms of revivalism.

Jonathan was born in 1703—the fifth child and only son. Of his boyhood very little is known. Puritan boys were very like other boys, and their wickedness was a continual trouble to theologians, who used them as examples of the total depravity of unconverted men; one sometimes finds erave New England clergymen solemnly making restitution for the apples and candy which they had stolen in their boyhood and pleading with God for forgiveness. Their wickedness during meeting was particularly distressing; they sat all together at the back, instead of with their parents; and though there was a tithing-man with a stick to keep them in order, church meetings were continually discussing means of stopping them from ogling the girls and carving the woodwork, instead of listening to the sermon or, like most of their parents, going to sleep; sometimes they were even haled into the lawcourts for kicking each other or clambering over the benches or bullying some priggish companion who persisted in taking notes of what the minister said. That Edwards ever misbehaved is, however, unlikely ; he was far too precocious.