The Stammering Century

by Gilbert Seldes

  The members of the Enfield congregation were not aware of it but, as they dispersed to their homes, they carried with them the promise of libertarian religion in New England, of religions without Hell and cults without God. The rest of this book is concerned with the results of Edwards’ work. Its intention is to show how the religious exercises begun by Edwards affected the life of the American people. The Enfieldians joined the men and women of Northampton, hopefully saved seven years earlier, in the revival which specifically prepared the way for the Great Awakening in the early days of the Republic, and so, in a direct line, for Moody and Sunday, for every exaltation of the individual’s sense of communion with God, for every attack on the theocracy by which Edwards lived. The theology of Jonathan Edwards suffered the most spectacular defeat in the history of American religious life, his methods gained the greatest victory. Between them they are responsible not only for the normal development of religious theory, but for nearly every deluded Messiah, every strange cult and, indirectly, for a hundred political experiments, fads, pseudo-scientific social crazes, and movements. Whoever wishes to know the workings of the New England mind of the eighteenth century and the throbbing of its heart, wrote Bancroft, must spend his days and nights in the study of Jonathan Edwards. It is equally true that, if we want to understand the peculiar complex of activities which made the next hundred years so notably and so absurdly a century of reforms, we must begin with the solitary eminence of Edwards’ spirit.

  In any number of ways Jonathan Edwards justifies our interest. Even when he called children “little vipers” there was something magnificent and awful in his utterance. He was the greatest of the New England theocrats, of the Puritans who had the exalted idea that the legitimate ruler over mankind was not a king, not a congress, nor a press, nor a lobby; but God. In the practice of Massachusetts or Connecticut, theocracy came to mean that only churchmen could vote. Inversely, and more liberally, as late as 1834, every citizen of Massachusetts had to contribute to the support of some religious sect. Theocracy meant Establishment, the collaboration of Church and State. But it is impossible to dismiss in these terms, which are modern political interpretations, what was to Edwards, as to every Puritan, a natural and (as it is to any religious mind) a sublime conception, and a fixed reality. The God they worshiped was the undiminished God of the Bible. He was the only possible ruler, governing through the church, which Edwards, to the end of his life, considered superior to the State. Without God, there was no meaning in life; no authority in government. And God was God, an awful Presence, an Immanence, in whose mind alone the puny material universe had existence. He was not the Power which makes for Righteousness. He was not the Good. He was certainly not Nature or Providence. He was sublimely and awfully God, as real to Jonathan Edwards as his wife or children. God’s laws were as easy to comprehend as the edicts of the Privy Council. It was this feeling of the immediacy of God’s existence that gave point to the whole life of the Puritan; without it, his story becomes insignificant and the Puritan is dwarfed to the puny and irritating figure of a cartoon. Passing behind modern controversy and criticism, recapturing as far as we can the spirit of the time, we find Edwards, the highest expression of Puritanism, a giant.

  Even in the firmly established Church of his day, he had a giant’s work to do. There had been unlisted cargo in the hold of the Mayflower: a cargo of heresy. For, within a generation of their landing, the Puritan fathers found obtaining “nine unwholesome opinions” and no less than eighty-two other doctrines, some blasphemous, some erroneous, and all unsafe, which they consigned “to the devil of hell from whence they came.” But heresy refused to be banished. It flourished and New England, ill at ease in its clearings in the forest, hemmed in by cold, threatened with starvation, attacked by Indians, lacking every amenity, and forced to search everywhere for the evil which filled it with misgivings, concentrated all its apprehensions in the dreadful fury of the witch-hunt at the end of the century. This was the last convulsion of intolerance. Spasmodically thereafter, New England broke into violence, but the systematic oppression of the heretic began definitely to decline. To the embittered Puritan, aware in his heart that the grace of God was still withheld, toleration was compacting with the Devil. In 1702, Increase Mather, father of Edwards’ only rival in divinity, saw “the glory departing from New England.” The tone of reproach can still be heard in his jeremiad:

  “We are the posterity of the good old Puritan Non-conformists in England, who were a strict and holy people. Such were our fathers who followed the Lord into this wilderness. Oh, New England, New England, look to it that the glory be not removed from thee, for it begins to go. Oh, degenerate New England, what art thou come to at this day! How are those sins become common in thee that once were not so much as heard of in this land!”

  A year later, a fifth child, the only son in eleven children, was born to Timothy Edwards and the granddaughter of the Reverend Solomon Stoddard. He was to be the great glory of colonial New England and to imagine a greater glory still—the Latter-Day Glory—the redemption of the world which, by the application of logic to Biblical texts, Edwards had persuaded himself would radiate from the New World. To the end of his life he embraced hardship. He was the child of pioneers. The wilderness and the clearing marked him for austerity. As a little child, he would go to a hidden place in the forest to pray. The habit remained with him and he has left a record of his experience which still throbs with emotion. In all its harshness, nature rarely frightened him. He studied it, with the curiosity of a boy. But he was not long a child. When he was twelve, his mother joined the church. A year later, he entered Yale College, to which he afterwards gave a line of three Presidents in direct descent.

  His intellectual curiosity, his range, were rare in his time. The New England mind was preoccupied with God, inquiring how man could prepare for conversion when God was its sole author, asking whether the threatened punishments for sin were out of proportion to its guilt. These were not academic problems, since the conduct of life depended upon the answers. But Jonathan Edwards stepped beyond them and, in his Notes on the Mind, he asks boldly “Why is Proportion more excellent than Disproportion?” The voice in which he answers does not tremble with the fear of God; in complete sincerity it carries across the misunderstandings of two centuries: “Life itself is the highest good.” That note of vehement affirmation comes again and again into his speech and writing. On the twelfth of January, 1723, he dedicated himself to God, with the whole-heartedness and intensity which mark every movement of his spirit:

  “I made a solemn dedication of myself to God and wrote it down; giving up myself and all that I had to God, to be for the future in no respect my own; to act as one that had no right to himself in any respect; and solemnly vowed to take God for my whole portion and felicity, looking on nothing else as any part of my happiness, nor acting as if it were; and his law for the constant rule of my obedience, engaging to fight with all my might against the world, the flesh and the devil, to the end of my life.”

  And, in the Seventy Resolutions upon which he based his conduct, we find the same intrusion of his adoration of Life. They are the resolves of a Puritan: “Never to lose one moment of time, but to improve it in the most profitable way I possibly can.” They are the thoughts of a Calvinist: “Resolved, to act, in all respects, both speaking and doing, as if nobody had been so vile as I, and as if I had committed the same sins, or had the same infirmities or failings as others; and that I will let the knowledge of their failings promote nothing but shame in myself, and prove only an occasion of my confessing my own sins and misery to God.” And of an ascetic: “Resolved, if I take delight in it as a gratification of pride, or vanity, or on any such account, immediately to throw it by.” But the very first of the vows which he made is that he will do whatsoever he thinks most to the glory of God and “my own good, profit, and pleasure . . . and most for the Good and advantage of mankind in general.” And he has barely set down his duty to God when he breaks o
ut: “Resolved, to live with all my might, while I do live.”

  In the year of his dedication to God, he came to know the qualities of Sarah Pierrepont, “a rare and lustrous beauty,” then thirteen years old. “They say,” he wrote with the modesty of a lover, “there is a young lady in New Haven who is beloved of that great 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 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 up 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 and delight forever. Therefore, if you present all the world before her, with the richest of its treasures, she disregards and cares not for it, and is unmindful of any pain or affliction. She has a strange sweetness in her mind, and singular purity in her affections; is most just and conscientious in all her conduct; and you could not persuade her to do anything wrong or sinful if you would give her all the world, lest she should offend this great Being. She is of a wonderful calmness, and universal benevolence of mind; especially after this great God has manifested Himself to her mind. She will sometimes go about from place to place singing sweetly; and seems to be always full of joy and pleasure, and no one knows for what. She loves to be alone, walking in the fields and groves, and seems to have someone invisible always conversing with her.”

  He married her when she was seventeen, and it was said that, throughout her life, she knew a shorter way to Heaven than her husband had found; so that he had always in his sight an example of God’s indulgence.

  His grandfather had preceded him at Northampton and had been five times blessed with harvests of souls; but when Edwards took up the work, “licentiousness greatly prevailed among the youth of the town; there were many of them greatly addicted to night-walking, and frequenting the tavern, and lewd practices. . . . It was their manner very frequently to get together, in conventions of both sexes, for mirth and jollity which they called frolics.” In the autumn of 1734, Edwards began a series of sermons which developed into a revival—began, in fact, the Great Awakening.

  He descended upon his congregation like a visitation of Nature, “as if he spoke in the Divine name.” They must know that they are damned; they must recognize themselves as “inferior worms” (which he called himself, seeking an abasement which made “humbled to the dust” seem prideful, and desiring to “lie infinitely low before God”). They must know the reality of damnation. People spoke of their willingness to be damned, either for the glory of God or in atonement for the pleasures of their sins. Edwards warned them they could not know the actuality of the unimaginable tortures of hell-fire. He placed his imagination in their service with the most appalling power. When he spoke of coming to God, of pressing into the Kingdom, he made of it a great tragedy. The feeling of unworthiness spirals higher and higher, in a sort of ecstasy of fear and abasement, until the great fact of infinite sinfulness touches the great fact of forgiveness; or fails, and brings eternal damnation. He dealt always with infinities. The worm, the viper, that was man held intercourse with the Holy Spirit; the event could not be without magnificence, and its grandeur lay in its tragedy. Damned or blessed hereafter, man is associated with the eternal. If the choice is easy, if all men are or may be blessed, the tragedy sinks to melodrama; if they are damned, it remains noble and full of dignity. Then the saving grace of God becomes also infinitely precious, since it is rare, and His power and Justice are not mechanisms of a tawdry play, but high elements in an immortal tragedy.

  Edwards’ delivery was not moving; authority and conviction carried the bitter logic of his argument. His audience trembled as under the impact of a blow; it bent under the merciless wind from Heaven. Men and women shrank from the ghastly picture presented to them, shrieked in agony, saw visions, and came to God.

  Edwards wrote a Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God “wherein it pleased God . . . to display his free and sovereign mercy in the conversion of a great multitude of souls— turning them from a formal, cold, and careless profession of Christianity to the lively exercise of every Christian grace and the powerful practice of our holy religion.”

  “God was then served in our psalmody,” he exults; “religion was with all sorts the great concern, and the world was a thing only by the bye.” It is this account which John Wesley read one day while walking alone along the high road from London to Oxford. Surely, he exclaimed, “surely this is the Lord’s doing and it is marvelous in our eyes.”

  “There was scarcely a single person in the town, old or young, left unconcerned about the great things of the eternal world,” Edwards wrote. “Those who were wont to be the vainest, and loosest; and those who had been most disposed to think and speak slightly of vital and experimental religion, were now generally subject to great awakenings. And the work of conversion was carried on in a most astonishing manner, and increased more and more; souls did as it were come by flocks to Jesus Christ. From day to day, for many months together, might be seen evident instances of sinners brought out of darkness into marvelous light, and delivered out of a horrible pit, and from the miry clay, and set upon a rock with a new song of praise to God in their mouths.

  “This work of God, as it was carried on, and the number of true saints multiplied, soon made a glorious alteration in the town; so that in the spring and summer following, anno 1735, the town seemed to be full of the presence of God; it never was so full of love, nor of joy, and yet so full of distress, as it was then. There were remarkable tokens of God’s presence in almost every house. It was a time of joy in families on account of salvation being brought into them; parents rejoicing over their children as new born, and husbands over their wives and wives over their husbands. The goings of God were then seen in his sanctuary, God’s day was a delight, and his tabernacles were amiable. Our public assemblies were then beautiful; the congregation was alive in God’s service, everyone earnestly intent on the public worship, every hearer eager to drink in the words of the minister as they came from his mouth; the assembly in general were, from time to time, in tears while the word was preached; some weeping with sorrow and distress, others with joy and love, others with pity and concern for the souls of their neighbors.”

  So Edwards wrote of the work he had accomplished; but there was a witness he cared for more than for any other. He does not give her name; the decency of the husband is as pleasing as his earlier reticence as a lover, but he quotes Sarah Pierrepont Edwards:

  “Part of the night I lay awake, sometimes asleep, and sometimes between sleeping and waking. But all night I continued in a constant, clear, and lively sense of the heavenly sweetness of Christ’s excellent and transcendent love, of his nearness to me, and of my dearness to him; with an inexpressibly sweet calmness of soul in an entire rest in him. I seemed to myself to perceive a glow of divine love come down from the heart of Christ in heaven into my heart in a constant stream like a stream or pencil of sweet light. At the same time my heart and soul all flowed out in love to Christ, so that there seemed to be a constant flowing and reflowing of heavenly love, and I appeared to myself to float or swim, in these bright, sweet beams, like the motes swimming in the beams of the sun, or the streams of his light which come in at the window. I think that what I felt each minute was worth more than all the outward comfort and pleasure which I had enjoyed in my whole life put together. It was pleasure, without the least sting, or any interruption. It was a sweetness, which my soul was lost in; it seemed to be all that my feeble frame could sustain. . . . The glory of God seemed to overcome me and swallow me up, and every conceivable suffering, and everything that was terrible to my nature, seemed to shrink to nothing before it.”

  There were some extraordinary manifestations in this descent of the spirit, so that, the account goes on, “som
e compared what we called conversions, to certain distempers. And (so far as the judgment and word of a person of discretion may be taken, speaking upon the most deliberate consideration), what was enjoyed in each single minute of the whole space, which was many hours, was worth more than all the outward comfort and pleasure of the whole life put together; and this without being in any trance, or at all deprived of the exercise of the bodily senses. And this heavenly delight has been enjoyed for years together; though not frequently so long together, to such a height. Extraordinary views of divine things, and the religious affections, were frequently attended with very great effects on the body. Nature often sunk under the weight of divine discoveries, and the strength of the body was taken away. The person was deprived of all ability to stand or speak. Sometimes the hands were clinched, and the flesh cold, but the senses remaining. Animal nature was often in a great emotion and agitation, and the soul so overcome with admiration, and a kind of omnipotent joy, as to cause the person unavoidably to leap with all his might, with joy and mighty exultation. The soul at the same time was so strongly drawn towards God and Christ in heaven, that it seemed to the person as though soul and body would as it were of themselves, of necessity mount up, leave the earth, and ascend thither.”

  A little jealous of the purity of these signs, the young preacher adds that they were no new thing, and certainly “arose from no distemper catched from Mr. Whitefield,” whose labors, indeed, they preceded.

  “These effects appeared in a higher degree still, the last winter, upon another resignation to and acceptance of God, as the only portion and happiness of the soul, wherein the whole world, with the dearest enjoyments in it, were renounced as dirt and dung. All that is pleasant and glorious and all that is terrible in this world, seemed perfectly to vanish into nothing, and nothing to be left but God, in whom the soul was perfectly swallowed up, as in an infinite ocean of blessedness. . . .”