define who they were.

define who they were.

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People still living remembered Puritans in England who had su√ered grievously for their faith when Charles II and Anglicanism were reestablished in 1660. For most Connecticut people, recounting such awful events still helped define who they were.

Timothy Cutler had been brought from eastern Massachusetts to Connecticut in 1709 to counteract Anglican e√orts attempting to gain a foothold in the town of Stratford. His reputation as pastor there was so commendable that a decade later the newly united Yale called him to be rector. When shortly after his apostasy the stunned Yale trustees questioned him on his betrayal, he confessed, to their dismay, that one of his reasons for leaving the pastorate for the college was that he was already leaning toward Anglicanism. During his tenure at Yale he had been meeting regularly with a group of dissident clergy, including former Yale tutor Samuel Johnson and tutor Daniel Brown, to read Anglican works and discuss the merits of episcopal church government. The availability of the Dummer collection of books, which included Anglican works of every stripe, provided grist for their high church mill. When Cutler announced his apostasy, six of this group openly joined the rebellion and may have been heard in the New Haven crowd intoning their ''amens.''∑

The consternation this caused may be di≈cult to appreciate. Nevertheless the evidence is abundant. As far away as Boston it was the talk of the town. Judge Samuel Sewall, friend of both Solomon Stoddard and the Mathers, described it as ''thunder-claps'' from Yale. ''The colony, the town, the society from whence it came accented every sound.'' Connecticut, New Haven, and Yale were supposed to be bastions of orthodoxy. Sewall wrote to Connecticut's Governor Saltonstall that the event put him in mind of the pouring out of the vials of judgment predicted in Revelation 16. ''I am fully of Mr. [John] Cotton's opinion; that Episcopacy is that upon which the Fifth Vial [of God's wrath] is poured out.'' Cutler ''could not easily have lit upon a subject so indefensible, as that of the English Episcopacy,'' which was ''perfectly the King's creature'' and thus clearly a human invention.∏

The Mathers, who saw this betrayal of the founders' principles in equally cosmic terms, were up in arms. At Cotton Mather's Old North Church, they held a Tuesday fast for ''the pouring out of God's Spirit on New England, especially the rising generation.'' Aging Increase Mather, in virtually his last public utterance, ''prayed, much bewailed the Connecticut apostasy'' as Sewall reported it.π Though Increase was failing, Cotton Mather still served as the general at headquarters. The orthodox Connecticut clergy immediately

Anxieties ∫∑

turned to him for help, urging him accept the Yale rectorship. ''Our fountain, hoped to have been and continued the repository of truth, and the reserve of pure and sound principles, doctrine and education, in case of a change in our mother Harvard,'' they lamented, ''shews itself in so little time so corrupt.''∫

Cotton Mather was not prepared to leave Boston at this late point in his career. Always trusting in the power of the pen, however, he sent a circular letter to the Connecticut clergy urging them ''to trace the pious steps of their forefathers.''Ω

Meanwhile, the Mathers' opponents in Boston were having a field day. The virulent outbreak of anticlericalism of the previous year, spearheaded by James Franklin and the New England Courant, who opposed the Mathers' championing of smallpox inoculations, had just subsided. In spring 1722, the Courant was still comparing Mather to ''a peevish mongrel,'' ''dunghill cocks,'' and a ''baboon.'' About this time, James' sixteen-year-old brother Benjamin entered the fray with a memorable pen name that caricatured Cotton, Silence Dogood.∞≠

When the news from Connecticut broke, widow Dogood weighed in with her views on the virtues of religious moderation. Playing the role of a critic of the apostasy, she remarked that the Anglican rebels in Connecticut had displayed an ''indiscreet zeal'' in declaring that ordination except by bishops was invalid. That meant that all ordinations in New England by mere presbyters were invalid, including the rebels' own. Hence ''we may justly expect a suitable manifesto of their repentance for invading the priest's o≈ce.'' There were ''blind zealots among every denomination of Christians,'' she observed, but excessive zeal always hurt a cause.

In the same issue a rustic, ''Jethro Standfast'' of ''Nuhaven'' lamented the ''most grevous rout and hurle-burle amung us.'' ''Sum of owr pepel danse after thare pipe,'' he went on, ''and tel us that owr Ministurs formurlay ware ordan'd by Midwives and Coblurs, but others sa that this is folce Doktrin, and belongs to the Church of Rume.'' A few weeks later a ''Nausawlander'' wrote to the Courant that ''it behooves all men . . . to love and cherish their wives'' since their marriages may be declared invalid because they had not been performed by clergy of apostolic succession. So great was the outcry, genuine as well as mocked, that three of the Anglican rebels—James Whetmore, Samuel Johnson, and Daniel Brown—wrote to the Courant denying that Mr. Cutler had ever claimed there was no salvation outside the Church of England and deploring the common equation of the Church of England with ''popery.''∞∞

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The issue was profoundly political, not simply a matter of religious preference. New England's identity was built around an established church that was Congregational or Presbyterian. New England's churches were not just tolerated ''dissenters'' as Congregationalists and Presbyterians were in England, they were the state church. If Anglicans became strong in New England, it was not hard to imagine the day when the colonies would be brought into conformity with the mother country, with an Anglican episcopal establishment. The current royal governor of Massachusetts, Samuel Shute, although from an English dissenter family, had recently come out of the closet as an Anglican, adjourning the Council for Christmas—an extra-biblical Anglican holy day that Puritans abhorred—and partaking in Anglican communion. Rumors flew in an ongoing pamphlet war. Some even accused high church Anglicans of being sympathetic to the Jacobite e√ort, most recently attempted in 1715, of placing the Roman Catholic Stuart ''Pretender'' back on the British throne.∞≤

While real and exaggerated political fears made the Anglican apostasy at Yale a sensation, serious doctrinal issues worried the Reformed clergy just as much. If crypto-Anglicans had been teaching at the Connecticut college, they may have been subtly undermining the Calvinist orthodoxy of their young wards, including a future generation of clergy. For the Mathers and their allies, Anglicanism meant opening the floodgates to ''Arminianism.''

''Arminianism,'' named for the sixteenth-century Dutch Protestant theologian Jacobus Arminius, had become a catch-all term for most challenges to strict Calvinist teachings. Although Arminians a≈rmed that God's grace was essential to salvation, they also believed that people retained some natural ability to choose God's grace or to resist it. Salvation was not simply the result of God's sovereign decree from eternity to save some and not others.

''Calvinism'' is and was an imprecise term also. New Englanders did not often use the word nor concern themselves much with the precise teachings of John Calvin. Rather they saw themselves as the heirs to what they considered the truly biblical outlook of ''the Reformers.'' That tradition included Puritan, Presbyterian, and continental ''Reformed'' authors and came in many varieties. Despite the variations, those who considered themselves orthodox held to a core set of doctrines regarding God's sovereignty that contrasted with the ''Arminian'' view.∞≥

New Englands' champions of orthodoxy thought of most Anglicans as Arminian—although they knew there were also Anglican Calvinists as well. In seventeenth-century England, Puritan e√orts to purify the Anglican es-

Anxieties ∫π

tablishment had included opposition to Arminians, especially in high places. Now, in the eighteenth century, optimism regarding human abilities had grown widely within fashionable Anglicanism and even among some dissenters. In eighteenth-century New England one of the appeals of Anglicanism was as a refuge for those fleeing Calvinist rigors.

Yale was the last place to expect heresy. Connecticut's clergy, loyal to the essential doctrines of their Puritan forebears, had founded their own college partly in reaction to fears that Harvard would lose its orthodoxy after Increase Mather was ousted from its presidency in 1701. Cotton Mather, expecting the worst, had supported their e√orts. Yet while Harvard had indeed become more cosmopolitan, it remained essentially orthodox, as did Boston's Congregational clergy.∞∂ Now it was a shock to find that Yale in conservative Connecticut had turned out to be the real hotbed of apostasy.

Yale's trustees made sure no such thing would happen again. All future rectors, tutors, and trustees, they declared, would have to subscribe the Confession of Faith in the Saybrook Platform of the Connecticut churches (essentially the Westminster Confession of Faith) and give satisfaction ''of the soundness of their faith and opposition to Arminian and prelatical corruptions or any other of dangerous consequences to the purity and peace of our churches.'' In the absence of a rector, they appointed two young men of unquestioned orthodoxy, James Pierpont Jr. and William Smith, to serve as tutors.∞∑ Both had graduated from the college just before Cutler arrived. Pierpont (Yale 1718) was the son of James Pierpont Sr., the late revered pastor New Haven's First Church, who until his death in 1714 had been the principal trustee of the college. William Smith (Yale 1719) was the older brother of Jonathan's dear New York friend, John Smith. Edwards was very much in the same circle as the new tutors.

In the midst of the aftershocks from the previous commencement, we can sense the drama of the occasion for which young Jonathan was preparing his address in 1723. He was addressing one of the subjects, Arminianism. He may have viewed this as an important public declaration so far as his future was concerned. After all, he had studied with Cutler. He had admired the impressive rector and been a star pupil. He had read the Dummer books, including many controversial Anglican works, probably more than any other student. Yet he was going to prove that he had come through the test all the wiser. If it was not clear already, he was declaring himself unmistakably in the party of orthodoxy.

Typically, Jonathan not only saw his future at stake, but he viewed the

∫∫ Anxieties

[To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.]

Drawing of an early Yale commencement

issue in cosmic terms. Like Judge Sewall and most New England clergy, he considered this world a transient stage where a cosmic drama was being carried out. The key to this drama—the key to history—was the mysterious writings of the Apocalypse, or the biblical Book of Revelation. Early in the summer he had written an outline commentary on the Book of Revelation and had begun adding to this new notebook expositions of particular verses and topics. This was one of his principal projects that summer, one that he would resume immediately after his M.A. oration.

Like almost all Protestants, he saw the Church of Rome as the Antichrist that would be defeated in the last epoch of human history before the millennium. Guided by other expositors, he had made literal calculations from

Anxieties ∫Ω

biblical prophecies and worked out a scheme for when these events were likely to take place. One conventional Protestant interpretation of prophesies concerning ''the beast'' in Daniel and the Apocalypse, for example, was that Antichrist or the papacy would be defeated 1,260 years after the rise of the papacy. Edwards followed those who said that a.d. 606 marked the Pope's ascendancy, so that meant the decisive blow against papal power was likely to occur around 1866.∞∏

In assessing such apocalyptic thinking, we must be reminded that such expositions of biblical prophecies were commonplace among some of the best thinkers of the era. Isaac Newton is the most prominent example. Newton was as antipapist as Edwards and shared the Protestant assumption that the Church of Rome was Antichrist. Because the Bible was accepted as an authoritative text, it made sense to subject it to scientific and mathematical analysis, just as one might analyze God's secondary revelation in nature. Questions on how biblical prophecies fit with history and the future were topics that the best-educated people might argue about endlessly. In Newton's younger days his elder friend Henry More, the Cambridge Platonist and greatest English philosopher of his era, had calculated the date of the rise of the papacy to as early as the reign of Theodosius, around the year 400. Newton thought it should date from the rise of papal apostasy, which he dated at 607.∞π Newton took up the subject again in old age. We can imagine that at some moment in the summer of 1723 both Newton and Edwards may have been sitting in their respective gardens, working to crack the prophetic code.

New England's spiritual leaders almost universally interpreted contemporary history in such apocalyptic lights, and they continued to do so through the Revolutionary era.∞∫ Typically they reminded their audiences of this larger meaning in their fast day and militia day sermons. Wars with the Roman Catholic Spanish or French powers and their allies were not merely international rivalries or colonial power struggles but were also scenes in the later acts of the struggles between Christ and Antichrist.

We must consider how the world looked to New Englanders of the early eighteenth century if we are to understand their apocalyptic interpretations of contemporary events. Most of Europe's wars of the past two centuries, as Protestants of New England perceived them, were best understood as part of this fundamental struggle for reform of Christendom. Although in retrospect we know that in the eighteenth century the religious dimensions of the European struggles would diminish as they became clearly subordinate to interests of nation-states, that was not self-evident in the 1720s. It still made

Ω≠ Anxieties

sense to believe that, even though reasons of state were always present, an era of predominately religious conflict would continue into the indefinite future.

Edwards had a keen sense of participating in this world historical drama. His early memories were of Queen Anne's War, of his father going away to serve as a military chaplain in the struggle against the Catholic menace. More recently, as his religious experience deepened, so did his partisanship for ''the Protestant interest.'' In New York he acquired the habit of eagerly searching newspapers for any ''news favorable to the interest of religion in the world.''∞Ω

The Reformation was the great turning point that defined his calling on the world scene. It was the beginning of the defeat of the Antichrist of Rome. When Revelation 14 depicted an angel ''having the everlasting gospel to preach unto them that dwell on the earth, and to every nation and kindred and tongue and people, saying with a loud voice, 'Fear God and give him the glory,' '' Edwards commented, ''this is doubtless at the Reformation.''≤≠ When New Englanders said they were ''Reformed,'' they were identifying with what they saw as the purest expression of the larger international Protestant cause.

Although perhaps his highest dream was to be among those who would preach ''the everlasting gospel'' to ''every nation,'' Edwards also saw his talents as suited to an important intellectual role in the spiritual combat. His commencement oration would be a first foray. In his notebook exposition of the Apocalypse, he had interpreted one of the prophecies as predicting a heroic role for the logician in the latter days. In the last verse of Revelation 16, in connection with the pouring out of the final and seventh vial on apostate Babylon, the vision revealed that ''there fell upon men a great hail out of heaven, every stone about the weight of a talent.'' Edwards' gloss was: ''by this hail seems chiefly to be meant such strong reasons and forcible arguments and demonstrations, that nothing will withstand them; and [they] will irresistibly beat down and immediately batter to pieces the kingdom of Antichrist, and kill men as to popery, as at one blow, as if they were dashed to pieces by stones from heaven.''≤∞ Although it might take more than a hundred years (if the decisive blow were to be struck around 1866) for these arguments to have their accumulated devastating e√ects, that was not long in an era when theological works had life spans of many centuries. Whatever Edwards' role in stocking the Reformation arsenal, already well supplied with the scholastic works of the past century, he was confident that the triumph was sure.≤≤

To understand Edwards throughout his career, we must appreciate the premium that he and other educated eighteenth-century people placed on logic. Along with the study of language and the classics, logic was the bedrock

Anxieties Ω∞

of the educational system. Every schoolboy was trained in the basics of dialectic. In New England, ordinary parishioners had cut their eyeteeth on the logic of carefully argued sermons. Many eighteenth-century philosophers believed that most major philosophical disputes could be permanently settled if only they could get their premises straight and think clearly about them. Many eighteenth-century citizens, laymen as well as clergy like Timothy Cutler and his friends, were willing to risk their careers on matters they regarded as demonstrated principle. In such a setting, a penetrating intellect such as Edwards' was a powerful weapon. No one trusted in it more than he. But like any source of power, it was also a source of danger. Sometimes oblivious to danger, from this first day of his public career to his last, he would wield this weapon relentlessly in the service of the Lord.

In his commencement oration Edwards was entering the lists to prove himself worthy to fight for the true Protestant cause in two respects: he would demonstrate his loyalty to the orthodox party, and he would display his syllogistic skills, suited to play a leading role in the battle for the truth. The proposition he was defending was most basic to ''Reformed religion'': ''a sinner is not justified in the sight of God except through the righteousness of Christ obtained by faith.'' Arminian opponents of this Reformed formula argued that God justified sinners, at least in part, on the basis of their sincere repentance and reformation. Edwards countered that, in addition to such a doctrine being inconsistent with Scripture, it involved a number of plain contradictions that could be demonstrated by logic alone.≤≥

The commencement examiners may have also quizzed Edwards in Latin on the other of the subjects—whether ''God has left many things in worship to human determination.'' At least he hastily sketched some Latin syllogistic arguments on this topic on the back of his oration manuscript. While these jottings are not complete, he had commented on this issue in his ''Miscellanies'' earlier in the summer. The strict Reformed view was that worship must be guided by biblical principles alone. If the ceremonies of the Church of England were valid and legally binding, even though extrabiblical human inventions, Edwards argued, then the prior laws of the Church of Rome would be binding so that one would be required ''not at all to obey the Church of England but the Church of Rome.'' That was, of course, absurd. Hence the claims that the Church of England was the true apostolic church could be laid to rest.≤∂

Although we must imagine that Jonathan succeeded admirably in the

[To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.]

Central New Haven, from a 1748 map. The Pierpont home is next to the green on the right, within sight of Yale College.

Anxieties Ω≥

syllogistic jousting before the Latin speakers of the commencement crowd, we do have a clue as to why he feared failure and rejection, despite his obvious skills. Far more rode on the performance than a mere degree. He had resolved particularly ''to avoid ostentation,'' perhaps realizing that in New Haven he had a reputation for being being aloof and proud. A good impression could open up an ideal career opportunity. For one thing, the Anglican apostasy had left a number of churches open in the New Haven area. That such possibilities were in the air we know from a letter written by Tutor James Pierpont. Loyal to his illustrious father's memory, James was determined to keep Yale orthodox. Having completed his B.A. two years before Edwards, he was one of New Haven's bright young men and knew Edwards well enough to vouch for him. In early November he wrote to Yale trustee Timothy Woodbridge, suggesting that Edwards would be just the sort of person to be settled at the nearby church in North Haven. It would be, he urged, ''both for the interest of the trustees and safety of the college to have the neighboring clergy both able and well principled both which in my account Mr. Edwards bids very fair for.''≤∑ From Jonathan's point of view, to be located in North Haven near the Yale library, rather than at the crossroads hamlet of Bolton, where he seemed headed otherwise, must have been an alluring prospect.

The Yale library may not have been all for which he pined. James Pierpont Jr. had a younger sister, Sarah. In 1723 she was thirteen and Jonathan had known her at least since he moved to New Haven in 1719. He attended New Haven's First Church where he would see the family of the former pastor every week. Sarah's mother, Mary Hooker Pierpont, came from one of the most distinguished ministerial families in Connecticut and was the granddaughter of the renowned founder of Hartford, Thomas Hooker. Timothy Edwards had been an ally of the staunchly orthodox James Pierpont Sr. and would have paid his respects to the widow when in New Haven. Possibly Jonathan was a regular visitor in their home, which was diagonally across the green from the college building.

If tradition is correct, she was already much in his thoughts. What we do know is that he wrote a prose poem about her. Though the original is now lost, it is supposed to have been written in 1723 on a blank endpaper of a book he presented to her.≤∏

They say there is a young lady in [New Haven] who is beloved of that almighty Being, who made and rules the world, and that there are certain seasons in which this great Being, in some way or other invisible, comes to her and fills her mind with exceeding sweet delight, and that she

Ω∂ Anxieties

hardly cares for anything, except to meditate on him—that she expects after a while to be received up where he is, to be raised out of the world and caught up into heaven; being assured that he loves her too well to let her remain at a distance from him always. There she is to dwell with him, and to be ravished with his love, favor and delight, forever. Therefore, if you present all the world before her, with the richest of its treasures, she disregards it and cares not for it, and is unmindful of any pain or a∆iction. She has a strange sweetness in her mind, and sweetness of temper, uncommon purity in her a√ections; is most just and praiseworthy in all her actions; and you could not persuade her to do anything thought wrong or sinful, if you would give her all the world, lest she should o√end this great Being. She is of a wonderful sweetness, calmness and universal benevolence of mind; especially after those times in which this great God has manifested himself to her mind. She will sometimes go about, singing sweetly, from place to [place]; and seems to be always full of joy and pleasure; and no one knows for what. She loves to be alone, and to wander in the fields and on the mountains, and seems to have someone invisible always conversing with her.≤π

This was quintessential Jonathan. Whatever his underlying emotions, he expressed them as pure platonic Christian love. Sarah was his Beatrice. Indeed, Edwards lived in a world of spiritual realities that was in some respects closer to the medieval Dante's than to our own. Sarah was the perfectly embodied ideal of all that he aspired to be, the pure spiritual being, sweet tempered, singing sweetly, always full of joy and pleasure. The last sentence—

of conversing with God in the fields—is strikingly a mirror image of himself. Perhaps he had heard her speak of this delight; perhaps he had heard it from others. Sarah was the same age as Jonathan's most pious younger sister, Jerusha. It is possible Jerusha had accompanied her father and Jonathan to New Haven and reported to her brother of this soul mate. In any case, Jonathan was sure that in Sarah he had found a kindred spirit.

On the Sabbath evening, September 22, the day after his return home from New Haven, he wrote in his diary, ''To praise God, by singing psalms in prose, and by singing forth the meditations of my heart in prose.''≤∫ Singing God's praises, already his practice, was to reflect the harmonies of the spiritual universe in which all dimensions of reality were balanced. Everything was good if kept to its proper proportions in this universe of relationships and of loves. To sing spiritual songs, best expressed in the words of the sweet singer of Israel, was to be in tune with the Creator-Redeemer. Jonathan could also think of those harmonies as putting him in tune with the sweet young singer

Anxieties Ω∑

of New Haven, yet his burden for the next four years would be to think of her as essentially spirit.

The next day he was back at work on his notebooks. ''My time is so short,'' he wrote in his diary, ''that I have not time to perfect myself in all studies: wherefore resolved, to omit and put o√, all but the most important and needful studies.''≤Ω His time was short because he would soon have to take a position somewhere, at Bolton if nothing else opened up. Probably what he most urgently wished to work on were his complex reflections on the ''excellency,'' as emanating in God's beauty and love and designed to elicit rightly proportioned harmonious responses from all spiritual beings. It was around this time that he deleted the beginning of an entry of his ''Miscellanies'' on ''excellency'' and rewrote it as the beginning of a new notebook on ''The Mind.''≥≠ The spiritual nature of love, beauty, and harmonies seen in his ode to Sarah Pierpont fit exactly with these deeper thoughts on the nature of the cosmos. As usual, he was working on many fronts at once, giving as close attention to the mundane as to the sublime. One of the last things he did during the ensuing month was to complete and carefully transcribe his ''Spider'' letter, dated from Windsor, October 31, 1723.

Apparently he was not so happy about the prospect of accepting the pastorate at Bolton. The town was only recently settled, mostly by people from Windsor and East Windsor.≥∞ Taking this modest position near to home seems to have been mainly his father's idea. On October 4, he confided to his diary: ''Have this day fixed and established it, that Christ Jesus has promised me faithfully, that, if I will do what is my duty.'' He resolved to accept God's will no matter what his condition in life and ''if I find need of faith in the matter, that I will confess it as impiety before God. Vid. Resolution 57, and June 9.'' Resolution 57 and the June 9 entry were resolves to do his ''duty,'' even ''when I fear misfortunes and adversities.''≥≤

Two weeks later, October 18, he determined, ''To follow the example of Mr. B—— who, though he meets with great di≈culties, yet undertakes them with a smiling countenance, as though he thought them but little; and speaks of them as if they were very small.'' By this time the inevitability of going to Bolton for lack of an alternative was closing in. He had been clinging onto the possibility of going back to New York, but recently it became clear there was no position there. In the meantime, his expressions of continuing interest in New York had hurt his chances in the New Haven area.≥≥ By early November he dutifully moved to Bolton and on November 11 signed the town book agreeing to be their pastor.

Ω∏ Anxieties

Two weeks later he confided to his diary: ''Nov. 26. 'Tis a most evil and pernicious practice in meditations on a∆ictions, to sit ruminating on the aggravations of the a∆iction, and reckoning up the evil, dark circumstances thereof, and dwelling long on the dark side; it doubles and trebles the a∆iction.'' The cure, he decided, was to think positively. ''If we dwelt on the light side of things in our thoughts, and extenuated them all that possibly we could, when speaking of them, we should think little of them ourselves; and the a∆iction would really, in a great measure, vanish away.''

This resolution to accentuate the positive seems to have carried over to his preaching. His sermons written at Bolton were among his most consistently in cheerful major keys. His own needs may have been a factor. One of the first sermons, which remained a favorite with him, was on The Pleasantness of Religion. His theme was, ''Religion does not deny a man the pleasures of sense, only taken moderately and with temperance and in a reasonable manner.'' One of the first things his new parishioners must have noticed about the spindly twenty-year-old was how abstemiously he ate, even when they set great quantities of home cooking in front of him.≥∂ Nonetheless, he wanted to assure them that Christianity had a place for the proper pleasures of the flesh. ''Religion allows us to take the full comfort of our meat and drink, all reasonable pleasures are to be enjoyed in conversation or recreation; allows of the gratification of all our natural appetites.'' The secret for keeping these pleasures reasonable was to enjoy them in the perspective of the far greater pleasures of spiritual things. Reason showed the vast superiority of things eternal, so it would be folly to enjoy pleasures of the flesh for their own sake. The righteous, by contrast, subordinate earthly passions to higher spiritual enjoyments so that they live in harmony with themselves, ''all the powers are of one consent, and there is peace among them, and they all concur in the same thing.''≥∑

In another early sermon at Bolton, Edwards developed one of his most characteristic themes, drawing on a motif in the Puritan heritage and his own religious experience. Preaching on A Spiritual Understanding of Divine Things Denied to the Unregenerate, he emphasized that when ''the eyes of believers are opened'' in regeneration, ''they do as it were see divine things.'' It is as though the work of the Holy Spirit gives them a sixth sense so that they not only know about divine things, but can experience their beauty directly. ''Thus,'' in his most repeated illustration, ''it is not he that has heard a long description of the sweetness of honey that can be said to have the greatest understanding of it, but he that has tasted.'' In a touching passage, he drew on his own longings:

Anxieties Ωπ

''Thus with respect to earthly beauty, 'tis not the hearing of elegant descriptions of a beautiful face that can ever make a person have a sense of the sweetness and amiableness of the beauty; 'tis not the slight notion of beauty by hearsay that causes love to burn in the heart: but it is the sight of the eye. One glance of the eye doth more than all the most particular descriptions that can be given.''

Like everything, the ''glance of the eye'' that causes ''love to burn in the heart'' must point toward higher spiritual things. Spiritual sensibilities counter the disabling shortsightedness of the worldly-minded. ''Wicked men'' have only ''a low and narrow sort of knowledge'' based on their immediate senses. Rather than knowing about only ''the appurtenances of this clod of dirt,'' he urged the country folk of Bolton, they should seek the excellency of ''the great Creator, the first and the last.''≥∏

Spiritual harmony, he quickly discovered, was not any more characteristic of the people of Bolton than was broadness of vision. They were at each other's throats. In one particularly blunt sermon preached in late December he practically pleaded with his congregation to live peaceably with one another: ''We are but a little handful, Christ has but a little flock; and shall his sheep devour one another?'' Typically, he argued his case in terms of a sort of Platonic view of human nature, in which reason teaches people to seek the spiritual rather than being subject to their animal passions. ''We are all reasonable creatures,'' he urged. '' 'Tis the part of beasts, of wolves, tigers, dogs and the beasts of the forest to bite and devour one another. 'Tis exceeding hateful amongst creatures that have reason and understanding, and of such a noble make.''

Edwards' call for peace was so strong that he sounded almost like one of Boston's Calvinist moderates. ''The gospel spirit is a catholic spirit, a noble and unconfined benevolence, like unto that of our Creator, not confined to any particular part of mankind exclusive of others.'' Christians should hate the sin but love the sinner: ''To make the wickedness of men the cause of contention and strife in us, is to make one sin the cause of another. We cannot please the devil better than by hating men's persons under pretense of duty.'' Even doctrinal di√erences are no excuse for hatred. People can not help what they believe. '' 'Tis as unreasonable to strive with others because they can't be in everything of our minds, as to quarrel with another because he di√ers in the color of his hair or the features of his face. . . . However pernicious his tenets, yet we ought, as much as in us lies, [to] endeavor to live peaceably with him.''

The fledgling pastor, who had a lot of personal experience in suppressing

Ω∫ Anxieties

resentments, even presented some homely advice: ''By stepping a little back when we are resisted, the blow of the enemy loses its force, as a woolsack stops and deadens a bullet sooner than an oak tree because it gives way. So a man of a meek and mild temper kills strife sooner than he that resists.''≥π

Edwards would never be the Poor Richard of the pulpit, but he did work hard at communicating. It was around this time that he wrote in his diary, for Friday, January 10, ''Remember to act according to Prov. 12:23, 'A prudent man concealeth knowledge.' '' In his Bolton sermons we can sense his Herculean e√orts to make some of his most profound ideas intelligible to ordinary people. Imagery and analogy were his most powerful weapons. In a sermon titled Nothing upon Earth can Represent the Glories of Heaven, for instance, he used the text Revelation 21:18, ''And the city was pure gold, like unto clear glass.'' We can imagine the tall, intense young man lecturing in a freezing meetinghouse to the huddled farm families on the glories of the heavenly city. The very setting of the unadorned room made the biblical pictures all the more important for exciting the imagination. One by one, Edwards recounted the similes used in Scripture to describe heaven—a crown, a kingdom, a treasure, a city, and so forth. His larger point was that, however wonderful it might be to imagine these things, earthly images are not really adequate. So the text provides an image that is like nothing on earth, gold that is clear as glass.

These biblical images, he explained, are ''very faint shadows'' that represent the joys of heaven humans are intended to enjoy. Here Edwards attempted to bring in the central thought of one of his most important recent ''Miscellanies'' entries. ''God created man for nothing else but happiness,'' he assured his congregation. ''He created him only that he might communicate happiness to him.'' His parishioners would have learned that ''Man's chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever,'' as the first question of the Westminster Catechism put it. Edwards assured them, ''this is not di√erent: for he created them that he might glorify himself this way, by making them blessed, and communicate his goodness to them.''

The abstractions that followed in explaining this point may have sailed over the heads of some of his parishioners, but he came back down to earth with a theme he never tired of hammering home. How absurd would it be, he asked, to be satisfied with merely ''earthly pleasures,'' ''the same kinds of things that the beasts enjoy.'' The lesson for the farmers should be plain. ''What reasonable [persons] cannot see the folly of groveling on the ground for a little dirt and dung, and all the while disregarding such manner of things

Anxieties ΩΩ

as we have heard of, which are eternal and are o√ered even unto them, and they are urged to accept of? How dreadfully will such persons in torment cry out of this folly, how will they accuse and curse themselves forever for such neglects.''≥∫

Even though he spoke boldly from the pulpit, Jonathan had to remind himself not to lose his own eternal perspectives in his everyday e√orts to be pleasing to others. In his diary he worried: ''Monday, Jan. 20. I have been very much to blame, in that I have not been as full, and plain and downright, in my standing up for virtue and religion, when I have had fair occasion, before those who seemed to take no delight in such things.'' He was, he feared, being too tactful in not speaking of religious matters to those who scorned such conversation. ''I have in some degree,'' he confessed, ''minced the matter, that I might not displease, and might not speak right against the grain, more than I should have loved to have done with others, to whom it would be agreeable to speak directly for religion. I ought to be exceedingly bold with such persons, not talking in a melancholy strain, but in one confident and fearless, assured of the truth and excellence of the cause.''

While he worried about his role as a country pastor through the lonely winter of 1724, at least once, probably in the spring, the old spiritual ecstasy flamed forth. In his ''Personal Narrative'' (in his only surviving mention of Bolton), he recalled: ''having one special season of uncommon sweetness: particularly once at Bolton, in a journey from Boston, walking out alone in the fields.''

Perhaps in connection with this experience he wrote in his ''Miscellanies'' one of his most beautiful meditations on the spiritual glories of nature. It begins with what must be a contemplation on Sarah, but which, as all else in nature, points to ''the excellencies of Christ.'' ''When we behold a beautiful body, a lovely proportion, a beautiful harmony of features of face, delightful airs of countenance and voice, and sweet motion and gesture, we are charmed with it; not under the notion of a corporeal, but a mental beauty. For if there could be a statue that should have exactly the same, could be made to have the same sound, and have the same motions precisely, we should not be so delighted with it; we should not fall entirely in love with the image, if we knew certainly that it had no perception or understanding.'' The highest raptures by which ''when we love the person for the airs of voice, countenance and gesture; which have much greater power upon us'' have to do with our resonating with the ''excellencies of the mind.'' Physical beauties only point to those higher spiritual excellencies.

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