Jonathan Edwards

“ We have mighty universities, libraries, and laboratories, but we have no man who thinks more clearly, writes more logically, speaks more vigorously than did Jonathan Edwards, and we have never had such a combination of spirit and power in any other American. This mastery is revealing itself in various ways in hundreds of his descendants to-day, and it has never ceased to do it since his blood gave tonic to the thought and character of his children and his children's children. ”

“ Jonathan Edwards stamped his genius on the whole character of New England theology, and won the highest honor as a metaphysician, even from European (p. 336) admirers. His treatise on the Freedom of the Will has secured the praises of philosophers and divines of all sects and parties from Hume to Chalmers, and can "never be attentively perused without a sentiment of admiration at the strength and stretch of the human understanding." ”

“ Eminent names in the medical annals of San Francisco, Chicago, Detroit, New York, Boston, and other cities can be traced to Jonathan Edwards.
The Jukes neglected all religious privileges, defied and antagonized the church and all that it stands for, while the Edwards family has more than a 100 clergymen, missionaries, and theological professors, many of the most eminent in the country's history. America has had no more brilliant preachers and theologians than some of those that bear the names of Edwards, Dwight, Woolsey, Park, Ingersoll. ”

“ Meanwhile, Jonathan Edwards, his senior by three years, had the fate common to men who are unfitted for the struggles of daily life, and whose philosophy does not harmonise with the dominant current of the time. ”

“ The commentary of the laymen on the preaching and practising of Jonathan Edwards was, that, after twenty-three years of endurance, they turned him out by a vote of twenty to one, and passed a resolve that he should never preach for them again. A man's logical and analytical adjustments are of little consequence, compared to his primary relations with Nature and truth: and people have sense enough to find it out in the long ran ”

“ As the grandson of Jonathan Edwards, the son of the Reverend Aaron Burr, and reared by relatives of that same morbid, hideous, unhuman school of early New England theology, it only needed a wayward nature in addition to brain and spirit to send him flying on his own tangent as soon as he was old enough to think. ”

“ Edwards' legacy to the world, it is well to study some conditions of his life. It would not be easy to find a man whose surroundings and training in childhood were better than those of Jonathan Edwards. The parsonage on the banks of the Connecticut was a delightful home. His parents and his grandparents were ideal American Christian educated persons. He was prepared for college by his father and mother. ”

“ Those who know what Gates, Mather, Tyler, and Todd have stood for as president and professors of Amherst will appreciate what Jonathan Edwards' blood has done for this college.
Of the Jukes, 440 were more or less viciously diseased. The Edwards family was healthy and long lived. Of the eleven children of Mr. and Mrs. Edwards, four lived to be more than seventy years of age,—seventy-three, seventy-five, seventy-seven and seventy-nine,—and three others were fifty, fifty-six, and sixty-three. Only one died unmarried, none died in childhood. ”

“ This sermon was so powerful that the association published it. This was his first appearance in print. So profoundly moved by this effort were the churches of New England that the clergymen generally gave public thanks to the Head of the Church for raising up so great a teacher and preacher. Thus was born the fame of Jonathan Edwards.
It is nearly 170 years since then. Science and invention, enterprise and ambition have done great things for America and for Americans. ”

“ The danger in drawing conclusions about a whole century, as we have been doing, is that the facts may be forced to seem far simpler than they were. It should be kept in mind that these are only certain broad currents of thought, tendencies which were obscured by all sorts of cross waves and chop seas. And it should be mentioned that the Puritan with the greatest mind of them all, Jonathan Edwards, was only a year old when Mrs. Knight made her journey to New York, and that to the end of his life, in 1758, he struggled in vain to keep alive the logic of the old religious doctrines. ”

“ That Jonathan Edwards, the great theologian and thinker,—in the opinion of Robert Hall, "the greatest of the sons of men,"—never had the degree of doctor of divinity or doctor of laws conferred on him, while they were showered on scores of his commonplace contemporaries. That Sir John Suckling and Richard Lovelace, so famous as courtiers and poet cavaliers, the pets of the king and the people, the much admired and adored by the female sex, died in wretchedness and despair,—the former taking poison, and the latter dying in rags in a miserable alley in London. ”

“ Oliver Wendell Holmes favored the club with a very graphic exposition of old-time New England Calvinism. The brilliant doctor's treatment of this difficult topic was appreciative and friendly, though by no means acquiescent in the doctrines presented. He said, indeed, that "the feeling which naturally arises in contemplating [p. 287] the character of Jonathan Edwards is that of deep reverence for a man who seems to have been anointed from his birth; who lived a life pure, laborious, self-denying, occupied with the highest themes, and busy in the highest kind of labor." ”

“ Sparks required a Life of Jonathan Edwards for his American Biography, he selected Dr. Miller to write it, and, in the truly liberal spirit that [Pg 13] always governed his editorial labors, and, indeed, his whole literary life, published the memoir of the great Calvanist "without the alteration of a single word." It was here, too, in Baltimore, in consequence of a sermon against Unitarianism by the late Rev. Dr. Wm. E. Wyatt, of St. Paul's, that Mr. Sparks published his volume of Letters on the Ministry, Ritual, and Doctrines of the Protestant Episcopal Church. ”

“ When they have this sight it will excite them to joyful praises,' that's a choice bit from Jonathan Edwards. What do you think of the diversions of 'the saints in glory?'"
"It's blasphemy!"
"Blasphemy! Tell it not in Hampton! But listen to Jonathan again. Here is his picture of a sinner just condemned. His parents are witnesses of his terror and agony, and thus they righteously gloat: 'When they shall see what manifestations of amazement will be in you at the hearing of this dreadful sentence ”

“ How truly these American Calvinists and Quakers prefigured the mystical part of Concord philosophy, may be seen by a few of their sayings.
[Pg 128]
Jonathan Edwards, in 1723, when he was twenty years old, and the fair saint of his adoration was fifteen, thus wrote in his diary what he had seen and heard of Sarah Pierpont:—
"There is a young lady in New Haven who is beloved of that Great Being who made and rules the world ”

“ Windsor, Connecticut. His earliest known ancestor was Richard Edwards, Welsh by birth, a London clergyman in Elizabeth’s reign. His father Timothy Edwards (1669-1758) , son of a prosperous merchant of Hartford, had graduated at Harvard, was minister at East Windsor, and eked out his salary by tutoring boys for college. His mother, a daughter of the Rev. Solomon Stoddard, of Northampton, Mass., seems to have been a woman of unusual mental gifts and independence of character. Jonathan, the only son, was the fifth of eleven children. ”

“ But however little original may be the content of his thought, [Pg xviii] there is nothing that is not in the highest degree original in his manner of thinking. The significant thing about Edwards is the way he enters into the tradition, infuses it with his personality and makes it live. The vitality of his thought gives to its product the value of a unique creation. ”

“ All the dark and tragic aspects of the vision, which for him is intensely real, take their place along with the other aspects, in a system, a system wherein every part derives meaning and worth from its relation to the whole. People have wondered how Edwards, the gentlest of men, could contemplate, as he said he did, with sweetness and delight, the awful doctrine of the divine sovereignty interpreted, as he interpreted it, as implying the everlasting misery of a large part of the human race. The reason is no revolting indifference, callous and inhuman, to suffering ”

“ It is a great furnace of wrath, a wide and bottomless pit, full of the fire of wrath, that you are held over in the hand of that God, whose wrath is provoked and incensed as much against you as against many of the damned in hell. You hand by a slender thread, with the flames of divine wrath flashing about it and ready every moment to singe it, and burn it asunder ”

“ That world of misery, that lake of burning brimstone, is extended abroad under you. There is the dreadful pit of the glowing flames of the wrath of God; there is hell’s wide gaping mouth open; and you have nothing to stand upon, nor any thing to take hold of; there is nothing between you and hell but the air; it is only the power and mere pleasure of God that holds you up. ”

“ Would you not desire that your friend, though great and honorable, should be of such condescension and grace, and so to have the way opened to free access to him, that his exaltation above you might not hinder your free enjoyment of his friendship? -- And would you choose not only that the infinite greatness and majesty of your friend should be, as it were, mollified and sweetened with condescension and grace; but would you also desire to have your friend brought nearer to you? Would you choose a friend far above you, and yet as it were upon a level with you too? ”

“ That the reason why they are not fallen already, and don’t fall now, is only that God’s appointed time is not come. For it is said that when that due time, or appointed time comes, their foot shall slide. Then they shall be left to fall, as they are inclined by their own weight. God won’t hold them up in these slippery places any longer, but will let them go; and then, at that very instant, they shall fall to destruction; as he that stands in such slippery declining ground on the edge of a pit that he can’t stand alone, when he is let go he immediately falls and is lost. ”

“ There is no danger of your ever wanting a new one, I'm certain. Then your powder—it never diminishes! I have not filled your pouch for the last three weeks. Truly we should starve but for the eggs and vegetables; and the saints know that our larder has been empty for a long time!"
"What is the matter, my poor Jeannette?" said the priest, kindly, as he again looked up from his breviary. "I do not know how it is, but the game has fled from me lately."
"Say rather, Monsieur le Curé, that it is you who fly from the game! ”

“ So that when I state that William Edwards and Jonet were sent into their mother's fields to weed, and pick up stones, and scare the birds away from newly-sown lands before the boy was six years old, I cast no reflection on his mother, who had no experience of a different state of things.
Nay, for her time, she was enlightened, and being a woman with good natural feeling, she was careful they were not taxed beyond their strength, as she and her husband had been; but that children should spend their hours in play, when they were old enough to be of use, had never dawned on her imagination. ”

“ When not wanted beside William, she was ready to relieve Ales at the churn or the scouring of pots and pails. Then she had a fairly good temper and persuasive ways that made her a capital nurse for a sick child with a resolute will.
Jonet took to her amazingly. She brought some pieces of striped flannel, the refuse of her father's loom, and dressed up the little one's wooden doll like a real Welshwoman. And she brought green rushes from the brookside, and wove toy-baskets for her. ”

“ Edward stood in deep thought, his eyes fixed upon vacancy, his appearance suggesting profound melancholy. The general watched him furtively and finally with uneasiness. After all, the young man was a stranger to him. He had been drawn into the difficulty by his sympathies, and based his own safety upon his ability to read men. Experience upon the battle field, however, had taught him that men who have never been under fire sometimes fail at the last moment from a physical weakness unsuspected by even themselves. What if this man should fail? ”

“ As for poor little Jonet and William, they shrank whispering into corners out of everybody's way, or slunk out into the bit of ground that did duty for a garden, or strayed into the orchard, where they made themselves useful picking up windfall apples for the pony and the pigs, and did their best to make themselves ill by eating the unripe fruit at the same time; for although four years old Jonet was imitative in assuming a protectorate over her two years brother, she had not herself outlived a childish love for the crude and indigestible. ”

“ A new personality had emerged from that first embrace on the beach at Staten Island. Something had died within her at his kiss—something new and disturbingly wonderful had been born in its place. For a moment, forgetting the bitter reality, she let herself bathe in this dizzying sweet sensation. The hot blood rushed to her cheeks, but it was the blush of exultation. "Death" and "birth" did not seem to her the right words to describe the transformation. It was more of a blossoming, as when a butterfly outfolds its wings from a chrysalis. ”