Just as the Will Edwards exalted had little in common with the Will-power of our current advertisements, the Infinite before which he sank was far removed from the Infinite of New Thought, an Infinite with which the worm man can be “in tune,” a friendly, consoling Infinite. For Edwards, the word had not lost its meaning; it had not become a sales-point of popular philosophy.
Edwards’ life was not easy. He was uncompromising wherever God was concerned and, after a time, he found himself unable to admit unconverted Christians—those who had been baptized, but had never experienced the conviction of sin and regeneration—to full communion in the church. A great principle was involved in the politics of both the church and the state. As only members could vote, the pressure for looser requirements for admission to the church was always great. The Halfway Covenant had gone a little way, but the communion of the Lord’s Supper was still refused to those who failed to give proof of Christian experience. Edwards’ grandfather regarded the Last Supper as having a magical property, regardless of the fitness of the communicant, and had made concessions. For a time Edwards followed him; then, feeling that this doctrine led to sacramentalism in violation of the Puritan spirit, he rejected it. He proposed a series of sermons to discuss certain improper admissions to the church. The town rebelled.
Allen, Edwards’ biographer, notes that the quarrel might have been composed except for another difficulty. “As the story runs, a discovery had been made that certain books of an obscene character were in circulation among the young people of the parish of both sexes, the result of which was licentious conversation and immoral practices. The first act of the pastor was a sermon in which the facts were known to the congregation,—an impressive sermon, which led the officers to unite with him in calling for an examination of the offenders. But when Edwards came to read from the pulpit the names of the guilty persons and of those also who were summoned to give their witness in the case, it appeared that almost every family in the church of any consideration was involved. Those who had hitherto favored an investigation now resisted it. The consequence was that the proposed discipline was dropped, while a certain disaffection towards Edwards began to be felt which put an end to the extraordinary influence he had hitherto exercised.”
Edwards resigned. The town, infuriated, voted that he should not enter the pulpit even while another preacher was being sought. He left and, at the age of 47, went with his wife to convert the Indians in the wilderness. He was beset with difficulties there; among other things, a member of a prominent family subverted funds intended for the savage. But finally he made his way out. One of his daughters, Esther, had married Aaron Burr, the president of Nassau Hall and, at his death, the aging Edwards was called to the Presidency of Princeton. He wanted much more to write a history of Redemption, but accepted the call. He was inoculated against smallpox and died, shortly after, in his fifty-fifth year. After his death, rumors persisted that he had written an heretical work. In 1851, Dr. Bushnell refused to make public Edwards’ manuscripts owing to the nature of their contents. Thirty years later, on the insistence of Oliver Wendell Holmes, a manuscript was published. Whether it is the only one seems uncertain. It is not shocking. Edwards last published word to humanity is a description of the Trinity: Life, Light, Love.
When he decided upon a topic for meditation, he would walk or ride into the woods, making notes on bits of paper, and pinning them to his greatcoat. His manuscripts are described by a descendant: “He used to make rough blank-books out of odds and ends, backs of letters, scraps of notes sent in from the congregation; and there is one long parallelogram of a book made entirely out of strips from the margin of the old London Daily Gazetteer of 1743. There is another most curious manuscript, made out of circular scraps of paper, 147 leaves, being in the shape of half moons, intermingled with the patterns of caps and such other like remnants of housewifery.”
From his account books, biographers have culled a few items: “A gold locket and chain, £11.” “One dozen long pipes” occurs twice in three months. And, for a “little viper,” the devout Dwight, or the mother perhaps of the traitor Burr, or possibly for Pierrepont who was to disgrace the name, there is “1 child’s plaything, 4/6.”
Nobody can hate God, said Spinoza. Looking ahead to a century of men who sought God with fury and impatience, by devious routes, with strange purposes, one wonders whether many of them loved Him as devoutly as Edwards did.
[1] The reader is warned that the following chapter is not in any sense a complete account of the work of Jonathan Edwards; it is only a sketch of those elements in his work which appear in action in the following chapters. I have simplified, perhaps too much, the subjects which interested Edwards and have almost entirely omitted the more abstruse problems of the freedom of the will.
III. Times of Refreshing.
THE work of Jonathan Edwards was interrupted by the War of the Revolution. It was resumed, with a difference, in 1800. In the half century following his death, a new nation came into existence and, in the judgment of the faithful, the old religion was jeopardized. Deists (generally called atheists), infidels, and Universalists had been as prominent as orthodox Christians in directing the war.
When the time came to frame a constitution, God was considered an alien influence and, in the deliberations of the Assembly, his name was not invoked. “Inexorably,” say Charles and Mary Beard in their story of The Rise of American Civilization, “the national government was secular from top to bottom. Religious qualifications . . . found no place whatever in the Federal Constitution. Its preamble did not invoke the blessings of Almighty God . . . and the First Amendment . . . declared that ‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion. . . .’ In dealing with Tripoli, President Washington allowed it to be squarely stated that ‘the government of the United States is not in any sense founded upon the Christian religion’”— a sad issue, surely, of the theocracy of Edwards.
Among the evangelizing religions, Methodism alone was favored by the break-down and change in authority which came with the creation of the Republic, and Methodism created, in the first years of the century, the characteristic revival form, the camp-meeting. Baptists and Presbyterians were eventually to shriek and fall into fits as their preachers were driven to emulate the enthusiasm of the Methodist itinerant but, at the beginning, religion fell away, was lost in the jumble of new interests and opportunities, or was rejected because it was not spiritually appropriate to the new order. Essentially, the established religion, which had its roots in English soil, taught obedience; America taught freedom. Calvinism looked backward to the glorious past before the Fall: the eyes of new America were toward the future. The great hope offered by Congregationalism was redemption from sin; America had definitely begun to be interested only in Progress.
Wherever we turn, the irreligion of the early republic is evident. In the churches themselves, the movement away from Calvinism, theocracy, and the trinity, toward religions of universal forgiveness, is marked. “In 1782, King’s Chapel in Boston formally and officially declared in favor of unitarianism” and, a generation later, the movement which was to split Congregationalism in two was openly inaugurated by Channing in the same city. The work of Francis Asbury, the Methodist, claimed three hundred thousand converts between the 1770’s and the 1820’s; and each conversion, although a religious exercise in itself, was a fresh danger to the more austere churches. The association of Church and State, abolished in the Federal Government, grew gradually weaker in the several states. The association of the church with education, art, literature, science, mechanical progress, and international policy was either totally lacking or persistently on the losing side. In the home, romances supplanted volumes of sermons. And even New Englanders learned to go to the theater instead of being satisfied with “meetings.” Colleges which had been founded to supply ministers of the Gospel began to be heretical or infidel. The New World, which had been exploring the mysteries of Heaven, began to press across the fronti
ers of the West, to search out the mysteries of the Mississippi basin or of the Oregon. The American Republic had come into existence at the beginning of the scientific era which was to reach its climax with the trans-continental railway and the publication of the Origin of Species.
If all this shows how irrelevant the Great Awakening was to the problems of the new country, or how disappointing the fruits of that revival had been, it also shows why the revivalists of 1800 felt their call so deeply. The infidelism of “Voltaire, Paine, and Volney” (to adopt the usual grouping of the time) had made headway. The French Revolution had not entirely discredited the Encyclopedia. Infidels were in the Federal Government. They were representing us abroad. They were making fortunes as merchants in Philadelphia. Everywhere they were breaking down the authority of God’s word. A thousand new names were spoken daily: names signifying political conflict, westering convoys, ships around the Horn, research into the nature of things, speculation (in both the philosophic and the financial sense), material problems, material ambition, material conquest. Only the name of the Lord was not heard. Infidelism was the spur to the evangelist’s spirit; the enemy was the universal, gross, unmitigated materialism of the early Republic. And insofar as the revivals inspired social experiments and led to the foundation of cooperative colonies, they provided the only break in the prevailing system of unscrupulous selfishness, a system of craft, of guile, and of gain.
This does not mean that there was no honest man, no charitable man, in America. There were thousands of noble and generous individuals. And there existed a notable idealism, in intellectual men and women. The dominant interest was, none the less, conquest of nature. The dominant methods were self-seeking and guile. This had been so even before the Revolution; but the removal of foreign discipline, the opening of fresh fields of exploitation, the liberation of hundreds of thousands from imposts and disabilities at the close of the war, made the Yankee of the early days of the Republic a man who not only could, but had to, conquer a world. He had to be hard in the forest and smart with his adversaries, and eternally watchful. He had to be ingenious and inventive. Opportunities crowded round him. Remorseless necessity weighed him down. Many of the Europeans who came early to this country are reliable guides. They came before catchwords were applied to our national habits and their judgments are based on fresh observation. Thus a French engineer, Chevalier, who came in the 1830’s, has analyzed for us the character of the Americans upon whom the revivalists were earnestly at work. While others accused us briefly of trying only to get rich, Chevalier (although he remarked our devotion to “le make-money”) recognized the deeper motives. To exist at all we had to subjugate nature. To exist as a nation we had to develop a system of transportation quicker and cheaper than Europe needed to conceive. “His [the American’s] single means [of satisfaction] and his single thought is the domination of the material world,—industry in its divers branches, business, speculation, action, work.” Education, politics, art, the laws of family life and of the state, all are made to serve this solitary enterprise. The American cannot imagine himself without a job. And the Yankee does not even suspect the existence of that variety of the human species which is known as “a man of leisure.” The American system of government, the independence and individualism which are the essence of Protestantism, are favorable to business enterprise, to inventiveness, to movement and to work: the four great characteristics of the American. “No one assimilates a new method more rapidly; he is always ready to change his tools, his system, or his profession. He is a mechanic in his soul. Among us, every college boy has written his skit, or his novel, or his Constitution of an ideal republic or monarchy. In Connecticut or Massachusetts there isn’t a farmer who hasn’t invented his machine, nor a man of reasonable means who hasn’t projected his railway or planned his city or town, or secretly nourished some great speculation. . . . A colonizer par excellence, the type American . . . is not only a laborer, he is a wandering laborer. He has no roots in the soil, is a stranger to the cult of native land and ancestral house; he is always in humor to be off, ready to go by the earliest boat even from the place where he has only just landed. He is eaten by the necessity of locomotion—he must go and come, must always be moving his muscles. If his feet are not in motion, he has to move his fingers and whittle with his ubiquitous knife, his eternal piece of wood.”
Chevalier’s summary is equally remarkable:
“If movement and the rapid succession of ideas and sensations constitute life, in America you live a hundred-fold. Everything is circulation, mobility, and a terrifying agitation. Experiences crowd on experiences, undertakings on undertakings. Wealth and poverty are on each other’s trail and pass each other in turn. While the great men of to-day are busy dethroning those of yesterday, they are themselves already half unseated by the great men of to-morrow. Fortunes last a season, and reputations are as brief as lightning flashes. An irresistible current drags everything along, melts everything down, and recasts all things in new shapes. People change houses, climate, business, conditions, parties, and religion; states change laws, governors, constitutions. The earth itself, or at least the buildings on it, partake of the universal instability.”[1]
Another friendly observer, Morris Birkbeck had seen, years earlier, another manifestation of American mobility. In the frontier West (of 1818), he found a hunter who had in twelve months built three cabins, each one deeper in the forest than the other, each one further west and, having sold them, was preparing for his fourth remove. “Not a settlement in this country,” he writes, “is of a year’s standing—no harvest has yet rewarded their toil, but our approach, as I anticipated, will dislodge many of them, unless they should be tempted by our dollars to try the effect of labor, instead of the precarious supply derived from their beloved rifle. Half-a-dozen of these people, who had placed themselves round a beautiful prairie, have, in fact, come forward to sell us their all,—fat cattle, hogs, and this their first crop of corn, now just maturing; if we purchase they will go to some deeper recess, and build other cabins, and prepare cattle and corn, to be again quitted at the approach of some succeeding adventurers like ourselves. . . .”
To illuminate Chevalier’s “mécanicien dans l’âme,” we have capital testimony of another sort. On January 14, 1789, Eli Whitney made a contract to supply ten thousand stand of arms to the Federal Government. The exceptional merit he claimed for his workmanship was this: that by substituting the scientific accuracy of machinery for the variable workmanship of the human hand, he could make his product uniform. A contemporary, visiting Whitney’s factory at East Rock, near New Haven, was impressed by his cotton gin, but much more by his gun-making machinery “so accurate that any article belonging to any one of the muskets will equally well fit any [other] of them.” The “uniformity system” as it was called in 1880—the system of interchangeable parts, as we call it, in a Ford factory—was therefore in practical operation before 1800, with all its essential advantages foreseen. The Yankee mind, dealing with machinery, has been uninterruptedly ingenious. It early discovered the essential problem of machine production— and its unique merit—and for a century and a half has been solving the problem in more and more effective ways.
Widely conceived, this was the great American preoccupation. It produced a manufacture suitable to a wide domain. It assumed transportation and the conquest of the wilderness. It involved big business by swift stages. In the half century before the Civil War, the United States was becoming preëminently a manufacturing country. By the time Lincoln took office the dominance of industry was obvious. For such a revolution to take place, the minds of the entire population had to be turned unwaveringly to a single object. Call it conquest of the frontier, or progress of mechanics, or desire for gain; when compared with the earlier absorption of the colonists in the affairs of the next world, it amounts to the same thing.
In the time of Jonathan Edwards and John Wesley, the average man had to be recalled from sloth and indifference to a contem
plation of the horrors of hell. In the times of Eli Whitney, Fulton, Howe, Boone, Astor and the glorious companies of nameless pioneers who made the West, the average man was expectant of man-made miracles. He had to be called from wonder at his own achievements to think of the glories of salvation. It was not only a change of color, it was a change of focus.
At this time, when the typical activities of post-Revolutionary America were ungodly, the evangelists began their labors in the backwoods and the hinterland. They caught the pioneer in that unhappy middle period when he had already become a settler, but was not yet a villager. The ardor of pushing on had ebbed and the charred clearing, the inundated cornfield, and the solitude pressed down upon him. It is easy to overestimate the dreariness of these secluded lives, if we compare them with the comfort and variety of our own. The frontiersman, who had no such standards, suffered much less than we imagine. His willingness to “get along” without every comfort, his indifference to the society of his fellowmen, his apathy before disaster, his failure of emotional life, are themselves sharp lights on his dim way of living. The face of the first stranger seen in three months excited his instincts of hospitality, but evoked no curiosity and hardly any interest in the richer background from which the visitor came. Mrs. Frances Trollope, mother of the novelist, in her journey from New Orleans to Cincinnati, descended on a farm which, materially, was far above the worst:
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