secutors of a nobler rank. It is impossible to guess what their course would have been had they foreseen the issue. It is certain that their zeal for learning, starting with the theological pretext of enabling every one of their citizens to have free access to the Scriptures, resulted in opening to their youth ample stores of secular wisdom, and to the students of their colleges the intellectual treasures of Greece and Rome, as well as of Palestine. "God make thee a good Christian and a good scholar" is the recorded prayer of a New England matron ere the close of their second generation, the English envoy, the Earl of Bellomont, could congratulate the people that "they were not put to travel for learning, but had the Muses at their doors." 1

The astounding accounts of the Hebrew, Latin, and Greek of seventeenth century undergraduates, require to be corrected by consideration of the slight attention then paid to graces of style, and of the infancy of Physical Science. In this latter domain, however, the colonies, before the middle of the eighteenth century, could boast such names as those of Josselyn, Wood, Winthrop the friend of Boyle, Banister the correspondent of Ray, and the Pennsylvanian Bartrams. In classical learning the leading controversialists, as Cotton, Shepard, Hooker, the erratic Ward, the philanthropic Eliot and Williams, were notable proficients. The ripest fruits of New England lore were dedicated to the service of that theology, which it would require a long life, implicit faith, and more than the patience of Job, to read through. Most of those old writers, with almost miraculous fluency of phrase, keep droning over the same themes. Their thoughts soon cease to be interesting, because they are so manifestly fettered by tradition; and their style, when not merely commonplace, is a contorted reflex of the contorted euphuistic style of English seventeenth century controversy. It is

1 Quoted from Coit Tyler, vol. i. p. 100.

REESE

OF THE

LIBRARY

UNIVERSITY CALIFOR

EARLY SCIENCE-THE MATHERS.

impossible for a modern critic to be enthusiastic over "the dynasty of the Mathers," who ecclesiastically governed the colony for eighty years. They were all physically and intellectually strong; producing an inordinate number of children, and a still more inordinate number of sermons; but they are nowhere sufficiently graceful or original to attract the attention of others than antiquarians. Richard, the first, famous for his big voice and majestic manner, a great bookworm and "moderator," begat Increase, who had a "tonitruous cogency in his perorations," worked sixteen hours a day, and was the author of the omnium gatherum of Remarkable Providences. Increase begat Cotton, "the literary behemoth," who, blown like a bladder with selfesteem and zeal, wished "to resemble a rabbi in the Talmud, whose face was black by reason of the number of his fasts" -a pedant, who, vexed with toothache, "set himself to consider how he had sinned with his teeth." Taking "Fructuosus" for his motto, "Be short" as his door-sign for visitors, he published, in one year, fourteen forgotten books; but is still remembered as the author of a tract, Good to be Devised, highly commended by Benjamin Franklin for its benevolent sagacity, and the Magnalia Christi, a ponderous work on the ecclesiastical history of New England, with biographical notices of her saints, that—with a larger bulk of inaccurate matter and rhetorical froth-may be, in respect of pious enthusiasm, compared with the more classic English works of Bede, Fuller, and Fox. Cotton begat Samuel,-as learned, but without the wit, -whose argument against the loyalists of the Revolution time, (when he is content to describe "the Tories" as "infamous scoundrels") consists mainly of abuse. With him the race died out. Belonging to the same age are a few recalcitrants, in and out of the Church, notably John Wise, who vigorously defended the laity against the pretensions of the Matherian Ultramontanism; and, writing, "The end of all good govern

ment is to cultivate humanity," was, as "the first great American democrat, called up from his grave by the men who were getting ready for the Declaration of Independence." Worthy of like mention are also Samuel Sewall, one of the first to denounce negro slavery and witch persecution; William Douglass-the Scotch immigrant Boston doctor, who stood out for "natural religion;" and Livingston, the New York lawyer, afterwards statesman, who published a travesty of the Thirty-nine Articles, in the interests of Free Thought. But these few rebellious pages were like the mutterings of a storm that, for the time, passes with a threat. Nothing like a fixed idea of religious liberty had got abroad in America, till near the close of the eighteenth century, the first half of which is filled with the fame of a man who gathered into a focus, made brighter or fiercer by his power, the learning, the faith, and the fanaticism of the preceding generations.

JONATHAN EDWARDS, born in Connecticut, 1703, began preaching at New York in 1723, and died in 1758, as President of New Jersey College, leaving a name at which the free-thinking world of his age and nation grew pale. It were mere flippancy, in the course of a brief literary survey, to discuss the abstract metaphysics of the treatise on the Will, on which his fame mainly depends. Brown and Mill show how his premises may be accepted without their practical conclusions: Kant, Fichte, Maine de Biran, and Jouffroy how the premises themselves may be disputed. The reputation of Edwards has been exalted by Chalmers, who calls him "the greatest of theologians;" by Mackintosh, who says that "for power of subtle argument he was unmatched;" still more by an American critic, who, with the exaggeration of heroworship, proclaims him to have been "not inferior to Bacon," and "the first man of the world" during the second quarter of a century emblazoned by the genius of Rousseau, Frederick

1 Tyler, vol. ii. p. 116.

JONATHAN EDWARDS.

53

II., and Voltaire. But he surpassed his American predecessors in the incisiveness of his thought, and in the grace of a style that has got wholly rid of the affected conceits and pedantries of his age.

Edwards is remarkable in many respects;-for the extraordinary precocity which, at the age of twelve, showed itself in a schoolboy's letter against the doctrine of the materiality of the soul; for his minute observation, not much later, of external, especially insect, nature, in his paper on the habits of spiders; for his general scholarship, for the clear vigour of his logical thought, for his singular lucidity of expression, magnetic force of persuasion, and his simple, unassuming, gentle life. The facts relating to the last, one of struggle against physical weakness, trouble, and penury, borne with Christian resignation and carried on with enduring purpose, is one of the numerous instances of pleasant surprise, which help to countervail others of grievous disappointment, we meet with in the biographies of eminent men; for next to his reputation as a metaphysician is that he holds as a terrorist among preachers. No Hooker or Mather in the New, or Torquemada in the Old World, more ruthlessly pressed home to his hearers the idea of the Juggernaut whom he worshipped under the name of an all-merciful God. The following passage is a specimen of his pulpit oratory :-

"The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked; He looks upon you as worthy of nothing else but to be cast into the fire. . . . You are ten thousand times more abominable in His eyes than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours. You hang by a slender thread, with the flames of divine wrath flashing about it, and ready every moment to singe it and burn it asunder. If you cry to God to pity you, He will be so far from pitying you in your doleful case, or showing you the least regard or favour, that instead of that He will only tread you under foot, and though He will know that you cannot bear the weight of omnipotence treading upon you, He will not regard that; but He will crush you under His feet without mercy; He will crush out your blood and make it fly, and

it shall be sprinkled on His garments, so as to stain all His raiment. He will not only hate you, but He will have you in the utmost contempt; no place shall be thought fit for you but under His feet, to be trodden down as the mire of the streets."

The logical defect of this is that, according to his logic, it could have no effect; the practical, that hardly any one can. now believe it: but such was the force of the preacher's earnest though quiet delivery, that it burned through his hearers like hot iron. The whole congregation groaned, the women went into wild hysterics, and the men shivered under "the fury of its power." Whether, in a rude age and rough land, this habit of holding people and shaking them over the pit was more for good or ill were hard to say. In any case it is pleasant to leave this intellectual phenomenon, who was also prone to dwell on "sweetness and beauty," with this description of his future wife.

"They say there is a young lady in Newhaven 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 for ever. 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 affection. 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 sweetness, calmness, and universal benevolence of mind, especially after this Great God has manifested Himself to her mind. She will some

times 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 some one invisible always conversing with her."

Edwards remains the most salient advocate of UltraCalvinism he is remarkable as an example of the aftermath