"Be prosaic, and overlook the poetic, side of the man. sides his logic," it has been well said, "there was his strong and realizing faith. God, heaven, hell, the sinfulness of sin, the beauty of holiness, the glory of Christ, and the claims of the gospel were as substantial realities to his mind and heart as the valley of the Connecticut or the mountains of Berkshire." 1 At times he was transported into a species of ecstasy by his contemplation of divine verities. In his personal narrative we find testimonies like these: "Sometimes, only mentioning a single word caused my heart to burn. within me, or only seeing the name of Christ, or the name of some attribute of God. . . . The sweetest joys and delights I have experienced have not been those that have arisen from a hope of my own good estate, but in a direct view of the glorious things of the gospel. When I enjoy this sweetness it seems to carry me above thoughts of my own estate; it seems at such times a loss that I cannot bear, to take off my eye from the glorious, pleasant object I behold without me, to turn my eye in upon myself, and my own good estate. . . 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 ex1 Tracy, The Great Awakening, p. 214. cellent, 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 me the greater part of the time in a flood of tears and weeping aloud. I felt an ardency of soul to be, what I know 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 several other times had views very much of the same nature, and which have had the same effects." In writing upon the "Religious Affections," therefore, Edwards was dealing with a congenial theme. As might be expected, he strongly asserts in this able treatise the high worth of the affections in the sphere of religion. "It is evident," he says, "that religion consists so much in the affections as that without holy affection there is no true religion. No light in the understanding is good which does not produce holy affection in the heart; no habit or principle in the heart is good which has no such exercise; and no external fruit is good which does not proceed from such exercises. . . . Where there is a kind of light without heat, a head stored with notions and speculations with a cold and unaffected heart, there can be nothing divine in that light; that knowledge is no true spiritual knowledge of divine things. If the great things of religion are rightly understood they will affect the heart. The manner of slighting all religious affections is the way exceedingly to harden the hearts of men, to en courage them in their stupidity and senselessness, to keep them in a state of spiritual death as long as they live." While thus emphasizing emotion as a necessary constituent of genuine religion, Edwards seeks to guard against a distempered subjectivity. All impressions which have not an immediate ethical significance, which are not inseparably connected with a positive principle of holiness and spirituality, he reckons of very small account. So far does he disparage mere impressions or inward suggestions, as compared with a spiritual disposition, that he declines to make the former any factor in the assurance of the believer. Not a sentence in the understanding, but the birth of a gracious temper in the heart, or the outflow of the heart in filial trust and love, attests acceptance with God. "The witness of the Spirit of which the apostle speaks," he says, "is far from being any whisper, or immediate suggestion; but is that gracious, holy effect of the Spirit of God in the hearts of the saints, the disposition and temper of children, appearing in sweet, child-like love to God, which casts out fear. . . . The strong and lively exercises of evangelical, humble love to God give clear evidence of the soul's relation to God. as His child; which very greatly and directly satisfies the soul. . . . Love, the bond of union, is seen intuitively; the saint sees and feels plainly the union between his soul and God." In addition to this stress upon a dominant ethical temper, Edwards provides a safeguard against subjective vagaries in the way in which he links religious emotions with the understanding. He finds a principal fountain of these emotions in the contemplation of the beauty and majesty of divine verities. This is their proper objective ground, as a divinely wrought inward sensibility is their subjective spring. In the mind of Edwards, ecclesiasticism was at a minimum. God was to him all in all. Piety meant the special presence and agency of God in the soul. Whatever place he may have given to the legal conception of God's relation to men in one part of his system, when his thought was directed to religious experience he dwelt emphatically upon the divine immanence and indwelling. Herein he furnished a bond of fellowship with eminent minds in succeeding times, who have been far from accepting some of the sombre phases of his teaching. We have passed over the outward life of this most celebrated of the colonial divines. It makes, in fact, but a brief story. He was born in 1703, entered Yale College at thirteen, served there as tutor for two years (1724-1726), and was settled over the church at Northampton in 1727. After his dismission from Northampton in 1750, occasioned by his insistance upon strict terms of communion, he served as missionary in Stockbridge, preaching both to the congregation in that town. 1758, very soon after he had dency of Princeton College. Indians and the white His death occurred in entered upon the presi The wife of Edwards was his equal in religious sensibility and devotion. It was therefore with great fitness that he dictated to her, from his death-bed in Princeton, this message: "Tell her that the uncommon union which has so long subsisted between us has been of such a nature as I trust is spiritual, and therefore will continue forever. VII. PRESBYTERIANS, BAPTISTS, QUAKERS, METHODISTS, A section of Presbyterian history, it must be allowed, came under the régime of an establishment. But it was only a small section, that which included the progress of the Dutch Reformed Church in New York for a little more than a generation before the English occupation. American Presbyterianism, as a whole, has not been the subject of specific State recognition and patronage. The heading, therefore, which has been given to this division of our subject involves only a moderate trespass against accuracy. In a general glance the religious bodies enumerated may be classified as non-established communions. - 1. PRESBYTERIANS. From continental Europe there were three considerable classes of immigrants who had been wonted to a Presbyterian polity. These were the Dutch, the German, and the French representatives of the Reformed Church, or that group of communions which took its pattern from Zurich and Geneva. A large proportion of the German Reformed came from the Palatinate on the Upper Rhine. These as well as the Dutch were sufficiently numerous and concentrated to maintain, with comparative ease, a distinct organization. The French Reformed, or Huguenots, on the other hand, in their scattered condition tended toward absorption in other religious bodies.1 1 On the important contribution which this element made to the country, see the preceding volume, p. 513. |