The Stammering Century Read online

  Nevertheless, these effects were the “physical jerks” which were to become common phenomena of the camp meeting and the revival. Even then they did not pass without rebuke. The Pentecostalism which, in 1927, stirred the congregation of Dr. John Roach Straton, was denounced by the General Convention of Congregational Ministers in Massachusetts Bay as early as 1743, with testimony against “errors in doctrine and disorders in practice.” The staid Episcopalian, Dr. Chauncy, who disagreed with Edwards on essentials of religion, disapproved of these methods. He led the Old Lights, the serene Fundamentalists of his time, in believing that man cannot press into the Kingdom, but can only take care to observe the appointed means of salvation: prayer, reading, and hearing the word of God. He held that emotion, impulses, impressions, were all due to a debased and abnormal condition of the spirit, and that bodily effects were not the proof of divine power, but of human weakness.

  Edwards himself admitted that “enthusiasm, superstition, and intemperate zeal” marked the course of revivals, but he did not condemn the outcries and fainting fits. These interruptions were not unwelcome, since they testified to the efficacy of the work, as though a company should meet in the field to pray for rain and should be halted by a plentiful shower. “Would to God that all the public assemblies in the land were broken off from their public exercises with such confusion as this the next Sabbath day! We need not be sorry for breaking the order of means by obtaining the end to which that order is directed. He who is going to fetch a treasure need not be sorry that he is stopped by meeting the treasure in the midst of his journey.”

  Edwards was too powerful for direct attack. We can best measure his work and the hostility it evoked by noting a related case. Dr. Chauncy brought charges, not against Edwards, but against a less intelligent, and more violent practitioner, the Reverend Mr. Davenport, whose methods are described by an eyewitness:

  “At length he turned his discourse to others and with the utmost strength of his lungs addressed himself to the congregation under these and such-like expressions, viz.: ‘You poor unconverted creatures in the seats, in the pews, in the galleries, I wonder you don’t drop into Hell! It would not surprise me. I should not wonder at it, if I should see you drop down this minute into Hell. You Pharisees, hypocrites; now, now, now you are going right into the bottom of Hell. I wonder you don’t drop into Hell by scores and hundreds. . . .’ And in this manner he ended the sermon! ’Tis then added: After a short prayer he called for all the distressed persons (which were near twenty) into the foremost seats. Then he came out of the pulpit and stripped off his upper garments and got up into the seats and leapt up and down some times and clapt his hands together and cried out in these words: ‘The war goes on, the fight goes on, the Devil goes down, the Devil goes down’; and then betook himself to stamping and screaming most dreadfully. And what is more than might be expected to see people so affrighted as to fall into shrieks and fits under such methods as these?”

  So, in Edwards’ own time, we find the whole paraphernalia of revivalism in action, the loud denunciation, the pretended secret assurance that the world was soon to come to an end, the personal appeal, the anxious bench, the stamping and leaping to induce frenzy, the frenzy induced and communicated to others. The Great Awakening had begun. Three months after Wesley had read Edwards’ account of the work of God in Northampton, physical manifestations first occurred in his own revivals. When Whitefield came he specifically prayed for physical signs, and John Wesley approved, although his brother Charles was aloof and once, seeing signs of approaching convulsions, notified his hearers that the victims would be carried out of the assembly; his assumption that jerks were motivated in part by a desire to exhibit one’s grace before others, was right; on that occasion, at least, the audience did not jerk. Edwards had noted that there was a rivalry in “bodily effects,” that converts were puffed with pride, and recorded one case in which envy of another’s salvation was the cause of conversion. But he believed intensely in the immediate contact between the Holy Spirit and the human heart; and in spite of its abuses, he clung to his doctrine.

  It is easy to miss the point of Edwards’ revivalism by saying that he hated gaiety in others—perhaps because he had none himself—and was determined, by envy, to put down what he could not enjoy. This may be true of the “sour Puritan,” of those who lacked vitality, or heartiness, whose lives were meager, whose blood cold. But in Edwards we have a man of a higher type. He lived intensely and to him the Will, determined to evil though it was, remained the essential quality of mankind and the chief glory of God. He was an energetic man, violent in godliness. It is not what he hated, but what he loved, that determines his character. He loved the power of God and the ecstasy of communion with God. He refused to make light of God’s grace by assuming that it was a free gift to all men. What time could there be for night-walking and frolics when the tremendous business of salvation was not yet done?

  He had perhaps the most acute mind of his time. His work on the Will is a masterpiece of logic directed to the resolution of a paradox. He is never off his guard. Yet he failed to foresee that his doctrine of direct communication between man and God was certain to break down the whole authority of the church and eventually to make each man the judge of his own salvation. This doctrine was a necessary part of his system but, as he let himself be carried away by violent manifestations of divine grace, he opened the way for others less austere than himself. If conversion was so important, the means could not matter. Presently, the ignorant saw visions, the unscrupulous caused miracles to happen, all to the great end of causing conversions and so hastening the Millennium. Men spoke to God without the intervention of his appointed ministers, and said that God answered. They stormed Heaven or testified that Heaven descended upon them. Edwards had made conversion difficult. He was accused of giving or withholding certificates of regeneration. He insisted upon intelligence as a factor in knowing God. But the weakness of his method overcame its strength. Wesley was to come and preach a softer doctrine, calling for repentance, conviction of sin, and conversion to Christ’s holiness. He made conversion easy by weakening the Calvinist’s distinction between elect and non-elect, and by letting men believe that it was in the competence of their will, as much as of God’s, to be saved.

  By setting a high price on salvation, Edwards had deterred thousands from attempting to achieve it. The unregenerate refused to make the effort. But when an easier way was shown them, they took it. In the century after Edwards’ death, the most precious thing to him in the world was cheapened and, as a result, the great influence of his church, the Congregationalist, was weakened. Sects, promising anarchy, sprang up. Colleges were denounced as heretical. Famous chapels went over to the doctrine, abominable in Edwards’ eyes, of universal salvation. The doctrine that Christ’s death had actually saved mankind, not merely given the chance of salvation, was accepted. Saved men, taking an easy way to glory, encouraged Messiahs everywhere. Some believed that man, accepting Christ, was incapable of sin. Others, thinking that all labor for glory showed a lack of trust in the Lord, remained utterly passive, awaiting His pleasure. By making salvation the single end of man, by insisting that it was wholly God’s work, and at the same time accepting the physical signs of personal communication with the Holy Spirit, Edwards broke down the wall surrounding the ministry, and cleared the way for cults, which he utterly abominated. He had over-reached himself.

  This was not the only way in which Edwards defeated his own ends. Everything essential in his work was confuted and destroyed by time and most of it either through inherent weakness in his methods, or because of the austerity and violence of his temper. We say, casually, “If he could have foreseen the end!” But there was something incorruptible at the heart of Edwards’ character which would not have been touched by the prophecy of failure. He had more than the assurance of righteousness; he had himself the immediate contact with Divine Grace which he held out as possible for every man. This hard man who condemned humanity t
o Hell was a poet. The merciless logician was a mystic and experienced the mystic’s ecstasy. Thinking of him in the dim dreary churches of colonial New England, engaged in disputation, driving grim men and starved women into frenzies of fear and hysteria, we find it hard to say the word but, in justice it must be said, he knew the essence of rapture. He had what he brought once to a young woman, one of the greatest company-keepers of his town: “a new heart, truly broken and sanctified.” He rejected the phrase “Godded with God and Christed with Christ,” but he could not help believing that the saints came close to union with God. Of his fellow-preacher, David Brainerd, Edwards wrote: “His love of God was primarily and principally for the supreme excellency of His own nature, and not built on a preconceived notion that God loved him, had received him into favor, and had done great things for him, or promised great things to him: so his joy was joy in God, and not in himself.”

  He could have said the same thing of himself. He did not ask special gifts, feared them rather, preferring one quarter hour of enjoying “the sweet influences of the Spirit” to a whole year of visions and revelations. But when, as a youth, he attained conversion, nothing of vision, nor of the ecstasy of saints, was denied him:

  “After this my sense of divine things gradually increased, and became more and more lively, and had more of that inward sweetness. The appearance of everything was altered; there seemed to be, as it were, a calm, sweet cast or appearance of divine glory in almost everything. God’s excellency, his wisdom, his purity and love, seemed to appear in everything; in the sun, moon, and stars; in clouds and blue sky; in the grass, flowers, trees; in the water and all nature; which used greatly to fix my mind. I often used to sit and view the moon for continuance; and in the day, spent much time viewing the clouds and sky, to behold the sweet glory of God in these things: in the meantime singing forth, with a low voice, my contemplations of the Creator and Redeemer. . . . It always seemed natural to me to sing, or chant forth my meditations; or, to speak my thoughts in soliloquies with a singing voice. Holiness, as I then wrote down some of my contemplations on it, appeared to me to be of a sweet, pleasant, charming, serene, calm nature; which brought an inexpressible purity, brightness, peacefulness, and ravishment to the soul. In other words, that it made the soul like a field or garden of God, with all manner of pleasant flowers; all pleasant, delightful, and undisturbed; enjoying a sweet calm, and the gently vivifying beams of the sun. The soul of a true Christian, as I then wrote my meditations, appeared like such a little white flower as we see in the spring of the year; low, and humble on the ground, opening its bosom, to receive the pleasant beams of the sun’s glory; rejoicing, as it were, in the calm rapture; diffusing around a sweet fragrancy; standing peacefully and lovingly, in the midst of other flowers round about; all in like manner opening their bosoms, to drink in the light of the sun. There was no part of creature-holiness, that I had so great a sense of its loveliness as humility, brokenness of heart, and poverty of spirit; and there was nothing that I so earnestly longed for. My heart panted after this,—to lie low before God, as in the dust; that I might be nothing, and that God might be All.”

  Psychologists have yet to discover from the meager biographical details available, what it was that turned Edwards away from his early interest in philosophy to the dark theology he adopted, but whatever the explanation, they cannot deny the authentic tone of rapture in these words. It is rapture without hysteria, without sham, and it never left him. Whenever he saw Nature he recovered the emotion, because he knew that the world was the work of God, created to communicate “an Image of His own excellence.” The golden edges of an evening cloud, the sun in his strength, the apparition of comets, the ragged rocks, all exalted him. His heart was lifted up.

  How high it was lifted is not hard to guess. There is no trace of common hallucination in any word he uttered but there is a tone of authority which we meet often in the voice of those who begin by believing themselves divinely appointed and end, this side of lunacy, in believing themselves divinely inspired. The confidence with which Edwards spoke of the ways of God was not uncommon in his time. It was when he began to speak of the Will, that his spirit soared. There are few trivial things in Edwards’ life. His belief that America, New England, possibly Northampton, would be the center from which the last Redemption would radiate was one; not because it was humorless (what place has humor in the saving of the world?), but because it is self-aggrandizing. He had a habit, also, of seeing miracles. A balcony in one of the churches fell, and no one was killed; Edwards saw the hand of God directing each single person to sit where no timber would fall. The French Armada was shattered off Cap Breton, “the very night after our day of fasting,” proving the Almighty’s special interest in New England. But these small things join with great: the sense of God’s exceptional concern with all that concerned himself is parallel to the ecstatic abasement before God which Edwards practiced. He lowered himself infinitely, and the infinity of his lowness met, in the infinite, the Infinity of God; met, and became one with it. The two poles of man’s life, as Edwards knew them, were to be lower than the dust before God, and to know God: the ecstasy of abasement and the ecstasy of union. As he accomplished both it is possible that somewhere, in the obscure places of his heart, he felt himself God.

  For when we ask what it is that Edwards chiefly worshiped in God, we find that it was neither Power nor Goodness. It was Will; and not strength of will, but freedom. God alone is infinitely free. The whole mystery of Edwards’ denial of free will to man is in this: that he would not diminish, by the slightest degree, the glorious freedom of God. Even in the all-important matter of moving toward Heaven, man was not free; for if man were free, if he could move in this direction or another, what became of God’s foreknowledge, what became of His freedom? The action of the Divine will would become subject to mortal power, or mortal whim, and God, too feeble to govern the world he created, would be at the mercy of man. To the jealous lover of God’s omnipotence and freedom, this was an unthinkable blasphemy; it is the essence of God’s freedom that man should have none. In lesser disciples of Calvin, we feel that the natural corruption of man and his tied will are whips to lash the unworthy; in Edwards, they become banners to honor the incorruptible, illimitable essence of God.

  The element of nobility is thus not omitted from Edwards’ determinism. The fact of our damnation contributes to the glory of God. The terminology seems archaic, the problem irrelevant. But we may remember that, since his time, science has again and again been interpreted in similar terms. Every fresh discovery of law binds us further. From Evolution to Psychoanalysis each decade has cut in on our freedom. We are continually being persuaded that our heredity, our environment, or the dreams of our immemorial ancestors, condition every move we make. We are all a party in a parlor—if not all silent, at least all damned. Damned to Hell, said Edwards, and to the glory of God; damned anyway, say the moderns, to no Hell but life, and to no glory.

  The fires of hell pale in Edwards’ discussion of the Will. He is more interested in the fact that our Will is not ours. To enlarge and ennoble the power of God, he endows the human will with every attribute, except freedom. He gave it a prime place in religion, and what he denied in man he worshiped in God. The contemplation of God’s free will brought him to a state of exaltation. It was one source of God’s satisfaction. Only let God be supremely happy, he cried, as a lover might, or a father. It was to this end that God created the world, not to love it, since God cannot love any other thing but Himself—as Spinoza says, “with an infinite intellectual love.” The movements of the Divine Will conform to Divine Wisdom, are identical with Divine Necessity. God alone is free to do only what is right, while man, not free, is bound to evil and wrong. In God, Edwards found the harmonious operation of the spirit, the essential unity. In man, he was aware, there was division between what we want and what we ought, what we intend and what we accomplish. In God there was no break between necessity, will, and action. Edwards, says Allen,
his biographer, was “penetrated with the mystic’s conviction of some far-reaching, deep-seated alienation which separated man from God” and saw a counterpart of this separation in the divided nature of man himself, impotent, at the end, to do the thing he desires.

  Like most philosophies which glorify the Will, Edwards’ doctrine is pessimistic. But in comparison with his, modern pessimism is tawdry and modern worship of the will is hysterical and feeble. The Will to Edwards, is the essence of life; lack of it is annihilation, nothingness, “that which the sleeping rocks do dream of.” He worshiped the Will and gave it to God and then, in a maze of logic, he set out jealously to defend it. He met his own paradoxes fairly. He reconciled predestination with man’s moral responsibility. He said that consciousness was a delusion, implanted in man to give him a sense of responsibility. His definition of the will is a little ambiguous, he seems to say that freedom consists not in making a choice, but in pursuing an inclination, and that the acts of the human will are caused otherwise than by mere power of willing. He somehow makes it appear plausible that men, who cannot be converted except by God’s will, should attempt to force that will. Despairing perhaps of making clear what was so necessary to his thought, he exclaims that language contradicts itself!

  It is left for philosophers and theologians to confute or uphold Edwards’ Freedom of the Will. What the layman knows is that it never falters in exalting the Will. He knows that Edwards’ worship can be translated, in a moment, from God to Man. He attributed all things to God, but New England Puritanism after having accepted his ideas of the Will, gradually applied them to Man. Here, again in Edwards’ own despite, he stands at the beginning of a long series of movements and cults. Remove from his work the idea of God, and there remains a powerful impulse to self-development, to exercise of the Will. The cult of the Will moved exactly away from Edwards, but he is the starting-point none the less. It runs through Emerson and, gradually losing power and dignity, it reappears in our own time in anarchism on one side and, on the other, in the combination of a feeble variety of New Thought with commercialized will-culture.