The pulpit and American life

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The Introduction vii

The Puritan Preacher ......... i

II

Mr. George Bancroft, our historian, has written: ** He that would know the workings of the New England mind in the middle of the eighteenth century and the throbbings of its heart, must give his days and nights to the study of Jonathan Edwards." And Professor Allen of Cambridge, the last biographer of Edwards, adds the comment : *' He that would understand the significance of later New England thought, must make Edwards the first object of his study."

And to these common American estimates, I would add the words of Dr. Fairbaim of Oxford, in the " Prophets of the Christian Faith " : '* We are fain to confess that in this lone New Englander, preaching now in Northampton, whether amid the excitement of the Great Revival or in the face of the coldness of an estranged people, and now laboring in the backwoods at Stockbridge, amid Indians and amid countrymen ruder than the Indians, we yet have one who holds his place amid the most honorable of the doctors of the Church, of the philosophers of his century, and of. the Saints of God." '* He is perhaps the only American intellect," says Dr. George A. Gordon, " that deserves a place in the ranks of the world's great thinkers. We can be sure that he is among the Kings ; we cannot be sure that another name in our history is there."

It is not the purpose to speak of Edwards as a thinker; though without question, it is as a thinker by his books on philosophy and theology, that he has influenced men far more than by person and speech. Yet it is the easier and narrower task that I set myself, to speak of Edwards as a preacher.

Three questions we must ask, if we would understand the work of any preacher ; they concern the message, the manner, the personality. What truth did the man speak? Was the word simply an echo of other voices — or was it a personal and peculiar message — a prophet's word in adaptation to the need of the generation and in its directness and reality from the spirit of God? How was it spoken? In the conventional form and accent of the time, or in new channels of power? And more subtly still — what was the person behind message and speech, the peculiar and rich elements of personality that transmuted truth into life?

I would try to get some idea of the man first. He was a product of the intense, isolated, religious life of New England. " In the attempt to understand him," says Dr. Fairbairn, *' we have first to realize the comparative isolation in which he lived, and therefore the independence with which he worked. If we put him back into his time without recollection of his place, no man could seem less the son of his century. He was born in 1703, a year before Locke died. In England, Deism had commenced its belligerent and barren career. Berkeley had entered Trinity College, and was jotting down in his commonplace book the speculations that were later to become a new * Theory of Vision ' and furnish the * Principles of Human Knowledge.' Toland was busy proving Christianity not mysterious, and arguing for a new Theism which should make God all in all. Of those who may be regarded as more strictly his contemporaries, Joseph Butler entered Oriel College, Oxford, just about the time Edwards entered Yale. David Hume, eight years his senior, became, like Edwards, a student of Locke, but, unlike him, so interpreted Locke as to deduce from him a system of universal doubt, which did not, like that of Descartes, spare thought and find through the ego a way into reasoned belief. In France, in the very year of Edwards' birth, Voltaire entered, a boy of nine, the great Jesuit school, the College Louis le Grand, and began to prepare himself to conduct his crusade — in its essence more Christian than those of the middle ages — against the tyranny of the unreal and make-believe in religion. While Edwards was pastor in Northampton, Rousseau was indulging himself in all the luxury of sentiment, and feeling his way toward the limitation of the individual and the construction of society through the ' Social Contract.' As Edwards, diffident in secular things while greatly daring in intellectual, was describing to the Corporation of Princeton his * peculiarly unhappy constitution ... his contemptibleness of speech, presence, and demeanor, much unfitting me for conversation, but more especially for the government of a college,' and hesitating to accept the position offered to him — a younger contemporary in Germany, Lessing, w^as turning his thoughts to the reform of the theater, and to a more scientific interpretation of religion and its history. But Edwards in his New England home lived apart from all these European movements and influences. They could, indeed, hardly be said to have touched him."

He inherited the earnest, analytic, introspective, speculative mind of New England. Its most thoughtful life came to flower in his mind. When a mere boy in years the reading of Locke's essay on the understanding revealed the bent of his mind and started the train of philosophic study — carried on to the day of his death, and shaping all his work as preacher and controversialist. It is not certain that he ever studied the works of Bishop Berkeley, but one of his college tutors, Samuel Johnson, was an ardent disciple of Berkeley, and Edwards was vitally affected by Idealism. A recent writer thinks his idealism an independent vision of truth. The keen, patient, penetrative, analytic mind would have made notable additions to science or law had it been devoted to such pursuits. The outer world, as in most young and ardent souls, did make its appeal to the boy. And his study of American spiders, when but twelve years, sent to the Royal Society of Great Britain, is the first record of nature-study in the Colonies, and the promise of what he might have done had he given himself to pure science. But to neither science nor philosophy was this life born. His call was not to philosophy but to religious teaching. ** To the life of the Spirit he was anointed from his birth." His studies on the mind and the nature of excellence, written when at college, at sixteen, are perhaps without parallel for his years — and were essentially reproduced at fifty in the discussions on the '' Nature of True Virtue." But questions of mind were subordinate to those of the soul. Problems of Being were God, and man's relation to God. Speculation was started and governed for the ends of salvation. God was the good — and the all — Religion was the end of thought — the substance of life. Edwards was a dedicated spirit. Religious impressions were strong from the earliest years.

But the years immediately following his graduation at Yale were those of special religious interest and growing consecration. He studied two years with a minister, as was the custom, then had a short service in a Presbyterian church in New York, and was called back to Yale to serve for three years as a tutor. The latter years were full of unfolding conceptions of truth and deepening of feelings.

The resolutions written before he was nineteen show the strength and sincerity of his religious nature:

Resolved, never to do any manner of thing, whether in soul or body, less or more, but what tends to the glory of God, nor be nor suffer it, if I can possibly avoid it.

Resolved, to live with all my might, while I do live.

Resolved, never to do anything which I should be afraid to do if it were the last hour of my life.

Resolved, never to count that a prayer nor to let that pass as a prayer, nor that as a petition of a prayer, which is so made that I cannot hope that God will answer it.

The boy here was father to the man. The spirit of loftly resolve characterized his entire life. When he took charge of the church at Northampton at twenty-five, he did so as a student who would not let his Hf e be frittered away in useless employments. The preacher was the messenger, and the strength of life must be devoted to getting and giving the message. He sought first of all a better knowledge of the Bible. He made few visits, feeling that they were too often but the gratification of social nature. He gave thirteen hours a day to hard study. His life was one of simplicity, discipHne, toil — devotion to the highest things.

There was little or no recreation. He had a gracious and gifted wife. One of the most quaint and beautif ul letters — it might be called a love-letter — was the one written to the young girl who afterward shared his desires and his toils. The wife in both mental and spiritual gifts was a fit companion for the husband. Children were born to them. There must have been play and laughter, and the sweet joys and sports of childhood. But little of this breaks in upon the prevailing seriousness of life. He knows nothing of recreation, accountable no doubt for his own description of his later constitution — '* attended with vapid and scarce fluids and a low tide of spirits." Towards the end of his life he happened upon a novel that in some mysterious way had found entrance into his house, the " Clarissa " of Richardson, and he got such delight out of it, such rest for his mind overtaxed in a single and fixed direction of thought, such food for the human sympathies, starved a little by concentration upon the absolute and etherial goodness, that he confesses that he had made a mistake in not knowing more of the joys of imagination in poetry and fiction, and the rest and renewal of nature.

Lyman Beecher, a true successor of Edwards in nature and doctrine and work, kept the balance of life and preserved his youthful sympathy and spirit by his fondness for rod and gun, and by the frolics and discussions with his eager crew of boys. Edwards was essentially an ascetic — not the sour and repellent kind — but the truer and nobler type — by the dominance of his moral earnestness. His denial was not for merit, with little morbid self-consciousness, but for work; the discipline of his own life and that of his household for the higher purpose that he felt to be for the glory of God.

But the most beautiful and dominant trait of Edwards' character was his passion for the divine. He might be called, as Maurice was, " a God-possessed man." He was an IdeaHst and a Mystic. God was all. The external world was the expression of God in finite modes. The human soul was God working in the sphere of mind. '' He was penetrated with the mystic's conviction of some far-reaching, deep-seated alienation which separates man from God " — and also of the immediate communication to men of spiritual light and life. One of his first published sermons (1734) was from the words of Christ to Peter: ** Blessed art thou, Simon Barjona; for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven." And his doctrine — *' A divine and supernatural light immediately imparted to the soul, shown to be both a Scriptural and Rational doctrine." The modern verse voices his spirit exactly :

Beyond the sacred page I seek Thee, Lord: — My spirit pants for Thee, O Living Word.

We read in his Diary in the early years of his ministry : ** Once as I rode out into the woods for my health, in 1737, having alighted from my horse in a retired place, as my manner commonly has been to walk for Divine contemplation and prayer, I had a view that for me was extraordinary, of the glory of the Son of God, as mediator between God and man, and his wonderful, great, full, pure, and sweet grace and love, and meek and gentle condescension. This grace that appeared so calm and sweet, appeared also great above the heavens. The Person of Christ appeared ineffably excellent with an excellency great enough to swallow up all thought and conception — which continued, as near as I can judge, about an hour; which kept one the greater part of the time in a flood of tears, and weeping aloud. I felt an ardency of soul to be, what I knew not otherwise how to express, emptied and annihilated; to lie in the dust, and to be full of Christ alone; to love him with a holy and pure love; to trust in him; to live upon him; to serve and follow him; and to be perfectly sanctified and made pure, with a divine and heavenly purity. I have had several other times very much of the same nature, and which have had the same effects."

A nature intense and spiritual, a mind speculative and rational, a faith pure and elevated — and you have the rare and noble personality. It is this that must ever be held in thought as the all pervasive and effective force in considering his influence as a preacher.

The person of Edwards expressed the lofty soul within. Tall and slender — of grave and gracious manner, his face with something of the feminine cast — but without weakness ; a face speaking of a delicate and nervous organization, implying at once capacity for both sweetness and severity, he had the presence and the spirit that we associate with St. John.

Put a man so dowered by nature, and so under spiritual forces, into a Puritan community like Northampton at the beginning of the eighteenth century, and the religious movement termed the " Great Awakening '' seems the natural result. It does not lessen the fact that the Spirit of God touched men, to keep before us the natural conditions for His working.

What was the message of Edwards' sermons ? The truths of the older Calvinism — shaped by his idealism and made vivid by the intensity and reality of his spiritual conceptions.

He has been called a monotheistic idealist, with the emphasis upon the mono. " In a sense there is nothing but mind and its ideas — those of man being effects from those of God." Nature is thus the continuous creation of God.

His philosophy governed his theology and shaped his preaching. *' God is and there is none else." " Creation is the disposition of God to communicate himself, to diffuse His own fullness." " Religion is imitation of God." " Virtue is love to the greatest happiness, or governed by the very end for which God made the world. True virtue is love for God."

His sense of the dreadfulness of sin increased with his vision of the fullness and perfection of God. The fall had wrought catastrophe in human life. It had made a gulf between God and Man.

In his representations of the nature of God, he seems to take the opposite pole from modern thought, viz., the Divine distinct and different from anything human. *' The human and the divine have nothing in common." He makes nothing of the objection that all the attributes of God's holiness, as justice, love — are seen to belong to the nature of man, at least in germ. Here is the distinct advance of modern theology. '' All religious philosophy will admit that in God there is the Eternal Prototype of humanity. All religious thinking must recognize in the Deity an Eternal basis for the nature, the advent, the career and ideal of humanity. What possible interest can human beings have in the Infinite, if society is not organized out of His life, if He is not the ground of its order and hope ? " ^

This of course affected Edwards' view of man's nature, his doctrine of sin and regeneration. As there was nothing in human nature since the Fall that had anything in common with the divine nature, human nature was totally sinful. He drew a sharp distinction between the natural and the spiritual. All the moralities of common life — its duties, its loves, its delights — were only natural, they were without God, cut off from the operations of his spirit. At times he teaches that the common operations of the Spirit may affect men in the family and in society — but there is no divine life in them. And so he portrayed as never before or since the evil of the human heart, pursuing with his persistent logic the sin into every motive and action of life. His view of total depravity is the picture of life as he conceived it, totally without God's influence. He says of children : ** As innocent as young children seem to be to us, yet if they are out of Christ, they are not so in God's light, but are young vipers, and infinitely more hateful than vipers, and are in a most miserable condition as well as grown persons."

Such a doctrine is wrought out in the study — letting his logic work with the exactness of mathematical processes — but is not the conclusion from his study of the scriptures and human life. Let a life be without a particle of divine influence — with absolute separation, alienation from God — and the result would be the picture of Edwards. But such a picture is an abstraction of his own brain. Such is not life. No life

1 Gordon, Geo. A,, ** The Christ of To-day," p. 115.

IS absolutely without the influences of the Spirit. God's spirit is as real and present and universal as man's sin. And all men are the children of God, however much they have wandered from the Father's house and life. '* Nothing could be subHmer than Edwards' conception of God at his best; nothing could be more incredible than the treatment to which he subjects the race under God. His theology is living, powerful ; it is bound to become in the new century a profounder influence ; his anthropology has become a mythology." ^

Edwards made prominent in the teaching of the pulpit the Doctrine of Regeneration. " That there is an absolute and universal dependence of the redeemed on God for all their good " he taught in the first printed sermons (1731). In regeneration something was imparted absolutely different from the sinful or natural life. And this new life was to be imparted by the will of God. He rejected the natural, instinctive working of the conscience against the absolute sovereignty of God, as an evil to be overcome, and he brought himself to receive sovereignty as the chief fact. His theory of the will — hailed by Hume and others of the empirical school as a doctrine of necessity and so essentially anti-Christian — turned the thought to sovereignty and regeneration rather than repentance and faith. One is free only to follow disposition. The disposition towards holiness is the direct impartation of the Spirit. " An inclination is nothing but God's influencing the soul according to a certain law of nature." And so Edwards preached the holiness of God, the divine excellence of Christ, the nature of true affec-

1 Edwards, " Retrospect," p. 65.

tion, the awful state of the sinner, and the majority of his hearers who were led to faith passed through long and agonizing periods of self-examination — alternations of hope and fear — before they felt the assurance and joy of the new life. Even tragic experiences attended his preaching — souls waiting for the heavenly change, and left hopeless in growing darkness of the mind.

In contrast to this moral inability, this helpless dependence upon the sovereignty of God, contrast the modern appeal to will. I take a paragraph from Dr. Taylor's Paul the Missionary — Paul before Agrippa : '' The will is the rudder of the soul, and turneth it whithersoever it listeth ; and when that will chooses to give in and give up to Christ, the man becomes a Christian. Thus, in a very solemn sense, God has placed our everlasting destiny in our own choice. If we receive life from Christ, it is because we will to come to him; and if we die eternally, it is because we will to die. No man becomes a Christian against his will ; it is by willing to be so that he becomes a Christian, and it is over this willing that the whole battle of conversion has to be fought. There is no one here who may not be saved, if he will."

In the first year of his ministry Edwards wrote his sermons and read them. In later years he often preached without writing. He was quiet in his manner, making few gestures, his voice never loud, marked by little physical earnestness, but with a penetration and spiritual intensity that carried his truth to the innermost being and lighted up the most hidden recesses of motive and affection. This quiet, philosophic preacher had greater mastery over his audiences than Whitefield. The body itself sympathized with the writhings of the spirit. And at times hell seemed yawning under their feet, and men rose and laid hold of the pillars of the church for fear their feet should slide into the place of torment.

" It was his manner also which helped to make him what he is confessed to have been, the greatest preacher of his age. His gift was individual, original; he was neither made nor spoiled by the schools. He was inimitable, his power was never described. He was no glowing orator. He spoke quietly and with little gesture, but as one who knew. His eyes were seeing things of which he talked, and not the people to whom he spoke. He was calm and pale, he had the form of an ascetic; rapt and serious in look, it was his habit to lean upon the pulpit with marvelous eyes alight, a face illuminate from within, earnest, confident, authoritative, with nothing in his vesture or manner priestly except that his heart was touched with the feeling of our infirmities." ^

The style on the whole is plain, marked by few beauties, making its appeal directly to reason and conscience, through the arguments from scripture and experience. Here is an example of the plain, practical preaching that follows the keen analysis of the scripture and the doctrine derived from it. It is from a sermon on Joseph's Temptation and Deliverance. One of the inferences is '* We may in many things determine whether any custom be of a good tendency by considering what the eflfect would be if it was openly and universally owned and practiced." And then he applies the principle to frolics (probably country balls) :

1 Edwards, p. 103.

I desire our young people to suffer their ears to be opened to what I have to say on this point, as I am the messenger of the Lord of hosts to them, and not determine that they will not harken, before they have heard what I shall say. Try this custom by these rules, and see whether it will bear the test or not. Two things will be found:

1. Where there is most of this carried on among young people, it will be found that the young people are commonly a loose, vain and irreligious generation; little regarding God, heaven or hell or anything but vanity. And that community in those town where most frolicking is carried on, there are the most frequent breaking out of gross sins; fornication in particular.

2. They are the persons furthest from serious thought, and are the vainest and loosest on other accounts. And whence should this be, if such a practice was not sinful, or had not a natural tendency to lead persons into sin?

And so he goes on. He has used his powers of intellect to build up a massive doctrine and then he uses inference after inference to pursue the soul, to hunt out and condemn the particular practice that he feels is hostile to the eternal welfare of the soul. It is a fair example of the practical spirit of his sermons.

One is impressed perhaps most of all in reading the sermons with Edwards' sense of the dreadfulness of sin and his portrayal of the terrible reality of it. Whatever be the text or doctrine, you will find some vivid picture of sin. Here is one from the sermon on the ** Free Christian Life." He has been describing the heavenward journey, and then he places another picture beside it by way of sharp contrast :

Some men spend their whole lives, from their infancy to their dying days, in going down the broad way to destruction. While others press forward in the straight and narrow way to life, and laboriously travel up the hill towards Zion against the inclinations and tendency of the flesh; these run with a swift career down towards the valley of eternal death; towards the lake of fire; towards the bottomless pit.

A wicked man is a servant of sin ; his powers and faculties are all employed in the service of sin, and in fitting for hell.

Thus do all unclean persons, that live in lascivious practices in secret. Thus do all malicious persons. Thus do all profane persons, that neglect duties of religion. Thus do all unjust persons; and those that are fraudulent and oppressive in their dealings. Thus do all backbiters and revilers. Thus do all covetous persons, that set their hearts chiefly on the riches of the world. Thus do far the greater part of men; the bulk of mankind are hasting onward in the broad way of destruction.

In many of the sermons — nearly all that I have read — the appeal is made boldly and terribly to the sense of fear. There is little appeal to the higher elements — too little showing of the '* winsom and perfect form of goodness." In a single volume are ** God's Enemies," " The Damnation of Sinners," " The Punishment of the Wicked," ** Eternity of Hell Torments," and " Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God":

We can conceive but little of the matter (he says) — one cannot conceive what that sinking of the soul in such a case is. But to help your conception, imagine yourself to be cast into a fiery oven, all of a glowing heat, or into the midst of a glowing brick-kiln, or of a great furnace, where your pain would be as much greater than that occasioned by accidentally touching a coal of fire, as the heat is greater. Imagine also that your body were to lie there for a quarter of an hour, full of fire, as full within and without as a bright coal of fire, all the while full of quick sense; what horror would you feel at the entrance of such a furnace! And how long would that quarter of an hour seem to you! If it were to be measured by a glass, how long would the glass seem to be running! And after you had endured it for one minute, think how overbearing would it be to you to think that you had it to endure the other fourteen !

And he goes on increasing the minutes to hours, and the hours to years, and to millions of years, and with each addition the horror grows. But why go on? One example is enough. Such realism of hell has never been portrayed outside of Dante and Dore. In fact, Edwards is the very Dore of the pulpit in his minute, realistic, materialistic portrayal of suffering. Human nature cannot endure it. It must cry out. A minister who heard the sermon on '* Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" plucked Edwards by the tails of his coat, crying out in his agony, ** Oh ! Mr. Edwards, is not God a God of mercy? "

But we shall get a partial and wrong view of these sermons if we think of them chiefly for their notes of warning. There are transcendental views of love in them, and the sense of beauty and the poetic elements of imagination and feeling. There is a mind like Wordsworth in some of his observations :

The Son of Man creates the world for this very end, to communicate himself in an image of His own excellency. He communicates himself properly only to spirits, and they only are capable of being proper images of His excellency, for they only are properly beings. Yet he communicates a sort of shadow or glimpse of His excellencies to bodies which, as we have shown, are but the shadows of beings and not real beings.

So that, when we are dehghted with flowery meadows and gentle breezes of wind, we may consider that we see only emanations of the sweet benevolence of Jesus Christ. When we behold the fragrant rose and lily, we see His love and purity. So the green trees and fields, and singing birds are the emanations of His infinite joy and benignity. The crystal rivers and murmuring streams are the footsteps of His favor, grace and beauty. That beauteous light with which the world is filled in a clear day is a lively shadow of His spotless holiness, and happiness and delight in communicating himself.