Chapter 27

Edwards was thus a martyr to his severe sense of discipline. His admirers have lamented over the sentence by which the ablest of American thinkers was banished in a kind of disgrace. Impartial readers will be inclined to suspect that those who suffered under so rigorous a spiritual ruler had perhaps some reason on their side. However that may be, and I do not presume to have any opinion upon a question involving such complex ecclesiastical disputes, the result to literature was fortunate. In 1751 Edwards was appointed to a mission for Indians, founded at Stockbridge, in the remotest corner of Massachusetts, where a few remnants of the aborigines were settled on a township granted by the colony. There were great hopes, we are told, of the probable influence of the mission, which were destined to frustration from accidental causes. The hopes can hardly have rested on the character of the preacher. It is difficult to imagine a more grotesque relation between a minister and his congregation than that which must have subsisted between Edwards and his barbarous flock. He had remarked pathetically in one of his writings on the very poor prospect open to the Houssatunnuck Indians, if their salvation depended on the study of the evidences of Christianity (iv. 245). And if Edwards preached upon the topics of which his mind was fullest, their case would have been still harder. For it was in the remote solitudes of this retired corner that he gave himself up to those abstruse meditations on free-will and original sin which form the substance of his chief writings. A sermon in the Houssatunnuck language, if Edwards ever acquired that tongue, upon predestination, the differences between the Arminian and the Calvinist schemes, Liberty of Indifference, and other such doctrines, would hardly be an improving performance. If, however, his labours in this department 'were attended with no remarkable visible success' (i. 83), he thought deeply and wrote much. The publication of his treatise on the Freedom of the Will followed in 1754, and upon the strength of the reputation which it won for him, he was appointed President of New Jersey College in the end of 1757, only to die of small-pox in the following March. His death cut short some considerable literary schemes, not, however, of a kind calculated to add to his reputation. Various remains were published after his death, and we have ample materials for forming a comprehensive judgment of his theories. In one shape or another he succeeded in giving utterance to his theory upon the great problems of life; and there is little cause for regret that he did not succeed in completing that 'History of the Work of Redemption' which was to have been his _opus magnum_. He had neither the knowledge nor the faculties for making much of a Puritan view of universal history, and he has left a sufficient indication of his general conception of such a book.

The book upon the Freedom of the Will, which is his main title to philosophical fame, bears marks of the conditions under which it was composed, and which certainly did not tend to confer upon an abstruse treatise any additional charm. Edwards' style is heavy and languid; he seldom indulges in an illustration, and those which he gives are far from lively; it is only at rare intervals that his logical ingenuity in stating some intricate argument clothes his thought in language of corresponding neatness. He has, in fact, the faults natural to an isolated thinker. He gives his readers credit for being familiar with the details of the labyrinth in which he had wandered till every intricacy was plainly mapped out in his own mind, and frequently dwells at tiresome length upon some refinement which probably never occurred to anyone but himself. A writer who, like Hume, is at once an acute thinker and a great literary artist, is content to aim a decisive blow at the vital points of the theory which he is opposing, and leaves to his readers the task of following out more remote consequences; Edwards, after winning the decisive victory, insists upon attacking his adversary in every position in which he might conceivably endeavour to entrench himself. It seems to be his aim to answer every objection which could possibly be suggested, and, of course, he answers many objections which no one would raise, whilst probably omitting others of which no forethought could warn him. The book reads like a verbatim report of those elaborate dialogues which he was in the habit of holding with himself in his solitary ramblings. There is some truth in Goldsmith's remark upon the ease of gaining an argumentative victory when you are at once opponent and respondent. It must be added, however, that any man who is at all fond of speculation finds in his second self the most obstinate and perplexing of antagonists. No one else raises such a variety of empty and vexatious quibbles, and splits hairs with such surprising versatility. It is true that your double often shows a certain discretion, and whilst obstinately defending certain untenable positions contrives to glide over some weak places, which come to light with provoking unexpectedness when you are encountered by an external enemy. Edwards, indeed, guards himself with extreme care by an elaborate system of logical divisions and subdivisions against the possibility of so unpleasant a surprise; but no man can dispense with the aid of a living antagonist, free from all suspicion of being a man of straw. The opponents against whom he labours most strenuously were unfortunately very feeble creatures for the most part; such as poor Chubb, the Deist, and the once well-known Dr. Whitby, who had changed sides in more than one controversy with more credit to his candour than to his force of mind. Certain difficulties may, therefore, have evaded the logical network in which he tried to enclose them; but, on the whole, he is rather over than under anxious to stop every conceivable loophole. Condensation, with a view to placing the vital points of his doctrine in more salient relief, would have greatly improved his treatise. But the fault is natural in a philosophical recluse, more intent upon thorough investigation than upon lucid exposition.

Without following his intricate reasonings, the main position may be indicated in a few words. The doctrine, in fact, which Edwards asserted may be said to be simply that everything has a cause, and that human volitions are no more an exception to this universal law than any other class of phenomena. This belief in the universality of causation rests with him upon a primary intuition (v. 55), and not upon experience; and his whole argument pursues the metaphysical method instead of appealing, as a modern school would appeal, to the results of observation. The Arminian opponent of necessity must, as he argues, either deny this self-evident principle, or be confined to statements purely irrelevant to the really important question. The book is occupied in hunting down all the evasions by which these conclusions may be escaped, and in showing that the true theory, when rightly understood, is obnoxious to no objections on the score of morality. The ordinary mode of meeting the argument is by appealing to consciousness. We know that we are free, as Dr. Johnson said, and there's an end on't. Edwards argues at great length, and in many forms, that this summary reply involves a confusion between the two very different propositions: 'We can do what we will,' and 'We can will what we will.' Consciousness really testifies that, if we desire to raise our right hand, our right hand will rise in the absence of external compulsion. It does not show that the desire itself may either exist or not exist, independently of any preceding causes either external or internal. The ordinary definition of free-will assumes an infinite series of volitions, each determining all that has gone before; or, to let Edwards speak for himself, and it will be a sufficient specimen of his style, he says in a passage which sums up the whole argument, that the assertion of free-will either amounts to the merely verbal proposition that you have power to will what you have power to will; 'or the meaning must be that a man has power to will as he pleases or chooses to will; that is, he has power by one act of choice to choose another; by an antecedent act of will to choose a consequent act, and therein to execute his own choice. And if this be their meaning, it is nothing but shuffling with those they dispute with, and baffling their own reason. For still the question returns, wherein lies man's liberty in that antecedent act of will which chose the consequent act? The answer, according to the same principle, must be, that his liberty lies also in his willing as he would, or as he chose, or agreeably to another act of choice preceding that. And so the question returns _in infinitum_ and again _in infinitum_. In order to support their opinion there must be no beginning, but free acts of the will must have been chosen by foregoing acts of will in the soul of every man without beginning, and so before he had a beginning.'

The heads of most people begin to swim when they have proceeded but a short way into such argumentation; but Edwards delights in applying similar logical puzzles over and over again to confute the notions of a 'self-determining power in the will,' or of a 'liberty of indifferency;' of the power of suspending the action even if the judgment has pronounced its verdict; of Archbishop King's ingenious device of putting the cart before the horse, and declaring that our delight is not the cause but the consequence of our will; or Clarke's theory of liberty, as consisting in agency which seems to erect an infinite number of subsidiary first causes in the wills of all created beings. A short cut to the same conclusions consists in simply denying the objective reality of chance or contingency; but Edwards has no love of short cuts in such matters, or rather cannot refuse himself the pleasure of following the circuitous route as well as explaining the more direct method.

This main principle established, Edwards has of course no difficulty in showing that the supposed injury to morality rests on a misconception of the real doctrine. If volitions, instead of being caused, are the products of arbitrary chance, morality becomes meaningless. We approve or disapprove of an action precisely because it implies the existence of motives, good or bad. Punishment and reward would be useless if actions were after all a matter of chance; and if merit implied the existence of free-will, the formation of virtuous habits would detract from a man's merit in so far as they tend to make virtue necessary. So far, in short, as you admit the existence of an element of pure chance, you restrict the sphere of law; and therefore morality, so far from excluding, necessarily involves an invariable connection between motives and actions.

Arguments of this kind, sufficiently familiar to all students of the subject, are combined with others of a more doubtful character. Edwards has no hesitation about dealing with the absolute and the infinite. He dwells, for example, with great ingenuity upon the difficulty of reconciling the Divine prescience with the contingency of human actions, and has no scruple in inferring the possibility of reconciling virtue with necessity from the fact that God is at once the type of all perfection, and is under a necessity to be perfect. If such arguments would be rejected as transcending the limits of human intelligence by many who agree with his conclusions, others, equally characteristic, are as much below the dignity of a metaphysician. Edwards draws his proofs with the same equanimity from the most abstruse speculations as from a child-like belief in the literal inspiration of the Scriptures. He 'proves,' for example, God's foreknowledge of human actions from such facts as Micaiah's prophecy of Ahab's sin, and Daniel's acquaintance with the 'horrid wickedness' about to be committed by Antiochus Epiphanes. It is a pleasant supposition that a man who did not believe that God could foretell events, would be awed by the authority of a text; but Edwards' polemic is almost exclusively directed against the hated Arminians, and he appears to be unconscious of the existence of a genuine sceptic. He observes that he has never read Hobbes (v. 260); and though in another work he makes a brief allusion to Hume, he never refers to him in these speculations, whilst covering the same ground as one of the admirable _Essays_.

This simplicity is significant of Edwards' unique position. The doctrine of Calvinism, by whatever name it may be called, is a mental tonic of tremendous potency. Whether in its theological dress, as attributing all events to the absolute decrees of the Almighty, or in its metaphysical dress, as declaring that some abstract necessity governs the world, or in the shape more familiar to modern thinkers, in which it proclaims the universality of what has been called the reign of law, it conquers or revolts the imagination. It forces us to conceive of all phenomena as so many links

In the eternal chain Which none can break, nor slip, nor overreach;

and can, therefore, be accepted only by men who possess the rare power of combining their beliefs into a logical whole. Most people contrive to shirk the consequences, either by some of those evasions which, as Edwards showed, amount to asserting the objective existence of chance, or more commonly by forbidding their reason to follow the chain of inferences through more than a few links. The axiom that the cause of a cause is also the cause of the thing caused, though verbally admitted, is beyond the reach of most intellects. People are willing to admit that A is irrevocably joined to B, B to C, and so on to the end of the alphabet, but they refuse to realise the connection between A and Z. The annoyance excited by Mr. Buckle's enunciation of some very familiar propositions, is a measure of the reluctance of the popular imagination to accept a logical conclusion. When the dogma is associated with a belief in eternal damnation, the consequences are indeed terrible; and therefore it was natural that Calvinism should have become an almost extinct creed, and the dogma have been left to the freethinkers who had not that awful vision before their eyes. Hobbes, Collins, and Hume, the three writers with whom the opinion was chiefly associated in English literature, were also the three men who were regarded as most emphatically the devil's advocates. In the latter part of the eighteenth century, it was indeed adopted by Hartley, by his disciple Priestley, and by Abraham Tucker, all of whom were Christians after a fashion. But they reconciled themselves to the belief by peculiar forms of optimism. Tucker maintained the odd fancy that every man would ultimately receive a precisely equal share of happiness, and thought that a few thousand years of damnation would be enough for all practical purposes. If I remember rightly, he roughly calculated the amount of misery to be endured by human beings at about two minutes' suffering in a century. Hartley maintained the still more remarkable thesis that, in some non-natural sense, 'all individuals are always and actually infinitely happy.' But Edwards, though an optimist in a very different sense, was alone amongst contemporary writers of any speculative power in asserting at once the doctrine that all events are the result of the Divine will, and the doctrine of eternal damnation. His mind, acute as it was, yet worked entirely in the groove provided for it. The revolting consequences to which he was led by not running away from his premisses, never for an instant suggested to him that the premisses might conceivably be false. He accepts a belief in hell-fire, interpreted after the popular fashion, without a murmur, and deduces from it all those consequences which most theologians have evaded or covered with a judicious veil.

Edwards was luckily not an eloquent man, for his sermons would in that case have been amongst the most terrible of human compositions. But if ever he warms into something like eloquence, it is when he is endeavouring to force upon the imaginations of his hearers the horrors of their position. Perhaps the best specimen of his powers in this department is a sermon which we are told produced a great effect at the time of revivals, and to which, we may as well remember, Phebe Bartlet may probably have listened. Read that sermon (vol. vii., sermon xv.) and endeavour to picture the scene of its original delivery. Imagine the congregation of rigid Calvinists, prepared by previous scenes of frenzy and convulsion, and longing for the fierce excitement which was the only break in the monotony of their laborious lives. And then imagine Edwards ascending the pulpit, with his flaccid solids and vapid fluids, and the pale drawn face, in which we can trace an equal resemblance to the stern Puritan forefathers and to the keen sallow New Englander of modern times. He gives out as his text, 'Sinners shall slide in due time,' and the title of his sermon is, 'Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.' For a full hour he dwells with unusual vehemence on the wrath of the Creator and the sufferings of the creature. His sentences, generally languid and complex, condense themselves into short, almost gasping asseverations. God is angry with the wicked; as angry with the living wicked as 'with many of those miserable creatures that He is now tormenting in hell.' The devil is waiting: the fire is ready; the furnace is hot; the 'glittering sword is whet and held over them, and the pit hath opened her mouth to receive them.' The unconverted are walking on a rotten covering, where there are innumerable weak places, and those places not distinguishable. The flames are 'gathering and lashing about' the sinner, and all that preserves him for a moment is 'the mere arbitrary will and uncovenanted unobliged forbearance of an incensed God.' But does not God love sinners? Hardly in a comforting sense. 'The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider or some other 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 as abominable in His eyes as the most hateful and venomous serpent is in ours.' The comparison of man to a loathsome viper is one of the metaphors to which Edwards most habitually recurs (_e.g._ vii. 167, 179, 182, 198, 344, 496). No relief is possible; Edwards will have no attempt to explain away the eternity of which he speaks; there will be no end to the 'exquisite horrible misery' of the damned. You, when damned, 'will know certainly that you must wear out long ages, millions of millions of ages, in wrestling and conflicting with this Almighty merciless vengeance: and then when you have so done, when so many ages have actually been spent by you in this manner, you will know that all is but a point to what remains.' Nor might his hearers fancy that, as respectable New England Puritans, they had no personal interest in the question. It would be awful, he says, if we could point to one definite person in this congregation as certain to endure such torments. 'But, alas! instead of one, how many is it likely will remember this discourse in hell? It would be a wonder if some that are now present should not be in hell in a very short time, before this year is out. And it would be no wonder if some persons that now sit here in some seats of this meeting-house in health, and quiet and secure, should be there before to-morrow morning.'

With which blessing he dismissed the congregation to their dinners, with such appetites as might be left to them. The strained excitement which marks this pleasing production could not be maintained; but Edwards never shrank in cold blood from the most appalling consequences of his theories. He tells us, with superlative coolness, that the 'bulk of mankind do throng' to hell (vii. 226). He sentences infants to hell remorselessly. The imagination, he admits, may be relieved by the hypothesis that infants suffer only in this world, instead of being doomed to eternal misery. 'But it does not at all relieve one's reason;' and that is the only faculty which he will obey (vi. 461). Historically the doctrine is supported by the remark that God did not save the children in Sodom, and that He actually commanded the slaughter of the Midianitish infants. 'Happy shall he be,' it is written of Edom, 'that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones' (vi. 255). Philosophically he remarks that 'a young viper has a malignant nature, though incapable of doing a malignant action' (vi. 471), and quotes with approval the statement of a Jewish Rabbi, that a child is wicked as soon as born, 'for at the same time that he sucks the breasts he follows his lust' (vi. 482), which is perhaps the superlative expression of the theory that all natural instincts are corrupt. Finally, he enforces the only doctrine which can equal this in horror, namely, that the saints rejoice in the damnation of the wicked. In a sermon called 'Wicked Men useful in their Destruction only' (vol. viii., sermon xxi.), he declares that 'the view of the doleful condition of the damned will make them (the saints in heaven) more prize their own blessedness.' They will realise the wonderful grace of God, who has made so great a difference between them and others of the same species, 'who are no worse by nature than they, and have deserved no worse of God than they.' 'When they shall look upon the damned,' he exclaims, 'and see their misery, how will heaven ring with the praises of God's justice towards the wicked, and His grace towards the saints! And with how much greater enlargement of heart will they praise Jesus Christ their Redeemer, that ever He was pleased to set His love upon them, His dying love!'