short way into such argumentation; but Edwards delights in applying
similar logical puzzles over and over again to confute the notions of a
'self-determining power in the will,' or of a 'liberty of indifferency;'
of the power of suspending the action even if the judgment has
pronounced its verdict; of Archbishop King's ingenious device of putting
the cart before the horse, and declaring that our delight is not the
cause but the consequence of our will; or Clarke's theory of liberty, as
consisting in agency which seems to erect an infinite number of
subsidiary first causes in the wills of all created beings. A short cut
to the same conclusions consists in simply denying the objective reality
of chance or contingency; but Edwards has no love of short cuts in such
matters, or rather cannot refuse himself the pleasure of following the
circuitous route as well as explaining the more direct method.
This main principle established, Edwards has of course no difficulty in
showing that the supposed injury to morality rests on a misconception of
the real doctrine. If volitions, instead of being caused, are the
products of arbitrary chance, morality becomes meaningless. We approve
or disapprove of an action precisely because it implies the existence of
motives, good or bad. Punishment and reward would be useless if actions
were after all a matter of chance; and if merit implied the existence of
free-will, the formation of virtuous habits would detract from a man's
merit in so far as they tend to make virtue necessary. So far, in short,
as you admit the existence of an element of pure chance, you restrict
the sphere of law; and therefore morality, so far from excluding,
necessarily involves an invariable connection between motives and
actions.
Arguments of this kind, sufficiently familiar to all students of the
subject, are combined with others of a more doubtful character. Edwards
has no hesitation about dealing with the absolute and the infinite. He
dwells, for example, with great ingenuity upon the difficulty of
reconciling the Divine prescience with the contingency of human actions,
and has no scruple in inferring the possibility of reconciling virtue
with necessity from the fact that God is at once the type of all
perfection, and is under a necessity to be perfect. If such arguments
would be rejected as transcending the limits of human intelligence by
many who agree with his conclusions, others, equally characteristic, are
as much below the dignity of a metaphysician. Edwards draws his proofs
with the same equanimity from the most abstruse speculations as from a
child-like belief in the literal inspiration of the Scriptures. He
'proves,' for example, God's foreknowledge of human actions from such
facts as Micaiah's prophecy of Ahab's sin, and Daniel's acquaintance
with the 'horrid wickedness' about to be committed by Antiochus
Epiphanes. It is a pleasant supposition that a man who did not believe
that God could foretell events, would be awed by the authority of a
text; but Edwards' polemic is almost exclusively directed against the
hated Arminians, and he appears to be unconscious of the existence of a
genuine sceptic. He observes that he has never read Hobbes (v. 260); and
though in another work he makes a brief allusion to Hume, he never
refers to him in these speculations, whilst covering the same ground as
one of the admirable _Essays_.
This simplicity is significant of Edwards' unique position. The doctrine
of Calvinism, by whatever name it may be called, is a mental tonic of
tremendous potency. Whether in its theological dress, as attributing all
events to the absolute decrees of the Almighty, or in its metaphysical
dress, as declaring that some abstract necessity governs the world, or
in the shape more familiar to modern thinkers, in which it proclaims the
universality of what has been called the reign of law, it conquers or
revolts the imagination. It forces us to conceive of all phenomena as so
many links
In the eternal chain
Which none can break, nor slip, nor overreach;
and can, therefore, be accepted only by men who possess the rare power
of combining their beliefs into a logical whole. Most people contrive to
shirk the consequences, either by some of those evasions which, as
Edwards showed, amount to asserting the objective existence of chance,
or more commonly by forbidding their reason to follow the chain of
inferences through more than a few links. The axiom that the cause of a
cause is also the cause of the thing caused, though verbally admitted,
is beyond the reach of most intellects. People are willing to admit that
A is irrevocably joined to B, B to C, and so on to the end of the
alphabet, but they refuse to realise the connection between A and Z. The
annoyance excited by Mr. Buckle's enunciation of some very familiar
propositions, is a measure of the reluctance of the popular imagination
to accept a logical conclusion. When the dogma is associated with a
belief in eternal damnation, the consequences are indeed terrible; and
therefore it was natural that Calvinism should have become an almost
extinct creed, and the dogma have been left to the freethinkers who had
not that awful vision before their eyes. Hobbes, Collins, and Hume, the
three writers with whom the opinion was chiefly associated in English
literature, were also the three men who were regarded as most
emphatically the devil's advocates. In the latter part of the eighteenth
century, it was indeed adopted by Hartley, by his disciple Priestley,
and by Abraham Tucker, all of whom were Christians after a fashion. But
they reconciled themselves to the belief by peculiar forms of optimism.
Tucker maintained the odd fancy that every man would ultimately receive
a precisely equal share of happiness, and thought that a few thousand
years of damnation would be enough for all practical purposes. If I
remember rightly, he roughly calculated the amount of misery to be
endured by human beings at about two minutes' suffering in a century.
Hartley maintained the still more remarkable thesis that, in some
non-natural sense, 'all individuals are always and actually infinitely
happy.' But Edwards, though an optimist in a very different sense, was
alone amongst contemporary writers of any speculative power in asserting
at once the doctrine that all events are the result of the Divine will,
and the doctrine of eternal damnation. His mind, acute as it was, yet
worked entirely in the groove provided for it. The revolting
consequences to which he was led by not running away from his premisses,
never for an instant suggested to him that the premisses might
conceivably be false. He accepts a belief in hell-fire, interpreted
after the popular fashion, without a murmur, and deduces from it all
those consequences which most theologians have evaded or covered with a
judicious veil.
Edwards was luckily not an eloquent man, for his sermons would in that
case have been amongst the most terrible of human compositions. But if
ever he warms into something like eloquence, it is when he is
endeavouring to force upon the imaginations of his hearers the horrors
of their position. Perhaps the best specimen of his powers in this
department is a sermon which we are told produced a great effect at the
time of revivals, and to which, we may as well remember, Phebe Bartlet
may probably have listened. Read that sermon (vol. vii., sermon xv.) and
endeavour to picture the scene of its original delivery. Imagine the
congregation of rigid Calvinists, prepared by previous scenes of frenzy
and convulsion, and longing for the fierce excitement which was the only
break in the monotony of their laborious lives. And then imagine Edwards
ascending the pulpit, with his flaccid solids and vapid fluids, and the
pale drawn face, in which we can trace an equal resemblance to the stern
Puritan forefathers and to the keen sallow New Englander of modern
times. He gives out as his text, 'Sinners shall slide in due time,' and
the title of his sermon is, 'Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.' For
a full hour he dwells with unusual vehemence on the wrath of the Creator
and the sufferings of the creature. His sentences, generally languid and
complex, condense themselves into short, almost gasping asseverations.
God is angry with the wicked; as angry with the living wicked as 'with
many of those miserable creatures that He is now tormenting in hell.'
The devil is waiting: the fire is ready; the furnace is hot; the
'glittering sword is whet and held over them, and the pit hath opened
her mouth to receive them.' The unconverted are walking on a rotten
covering, where there are innumerable weak places, and those places not
distinguishable. The flames are 'gathering and lashing about' the
sinner, and all that preserves him for a moment is 'the mere arbitrary
will and uncovenanted unobliged forbearance of an incensed God.' But
does not God love sinners? Hardly in a comforting sense. 'The God that
holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider or some
other 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 as abominable in His eyes
as the most hateful and venomous serpent is in ours.' The comparison of
man to a loathsome viper is one of the metaphors to which Edwards most
habitually recurs (_e.g._ vii. 167, 179, 182, 198, 344, 496). No relief
is possible; Edwards will have no attempt to explain away the eternity
of which he speaks; there will be no end to the 'exquisite horrible
misery' of the damned. You, when damned, 'will know certainly that you
must wear out long ages, millions of millions of ages, in wrestling and
conflicting with this Almighty merciless vengeance: and then when you
have so done, when so many ages have actually been spent by you in this
manner, you will know that all is but a point to what remains.' Nor
might his hearers fancy that, as respectable New England Puritans, they
had no personal interest in the question. It would be awful, he says, if
we could point to one definite person in this congregation as certain to
endure such torments. 'But, alas! instead of one, how many is it likely
will remember this discourse in hell? It would be a wonder if some that
are now present should not be in hell in a very short time, before this
year is out. And it would be no wonder if some persons that now sit here
in some seats of this meeting-house in health, and quiet and secure,
should be there before to-morrow morning.'
With which blessing he dismissed the congregation to their dinners, with
such appetites as might be left to them. The strained excitement which
marks this pleasing production could not be maintained; but Edwards
never shrank in cold blood from the most appalling consequences of his
theories. He tells us, with superlative coolness, that the 'bulk of
mankind do throng' to hell (vii. 226). He sentences infants to hell
remorselessly. The imagination, he admits, may be relieved by the
hypothesis that infants suffer only in this world, instead of being
doomed to eternal misery. 'But it does not at all relieve one's reason;'
and that is the only faculty which he will obey (vi. 461). Historically
the doctrine is supported by the remark that God did not save the
children in Sodom, and that He actually commanded the slaughter of the
Midianitish infants. 'Happy shall he be,' it is written of Edom, 'that
taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones' (vi. 255).
Philosophically he remarks that 'a young viper has a malignant nature,
though incapable of doing a malignant action' (vi. 471), and quotes with
approval the statement of a Jewish Rabbi, that a child is wicked as soon
as born, 'for at the same time that he sucks the breasts he follows his
lust' (vi. 482), which is perhaps the superlative expression of the
theory that all natural instincts are corrupt. Finally, he enforces the
only doctrine which can equal this in horror, namely, that the saints
rejoice in the damnation of the wicked. In a sermon called 'Wicked Men
useful in their Destruction only' (vol. viii., sermon xxi.), he declares
that 'the view of the doleful condition of the damned will make them
(the saints in heaven) more prize their own blessedness.' They will
realise the wonderful grace of God, who has made so great a difference
between them and others of the same species, 'who are no worse by nature
than they, and have deserved no worse of God than they.' 'When they
shall look upon the damned,' he exclaims, 'and see their misery, how
will heaven ring with the praises of God's justice towards the wicked,
and His grace towards the saints! And with how much greater enlargement
of heart will they praise Jesus Christ their Redeemer, that ever He was
pleased to set His love upon them, His dying love!'
Was the man who could utter such blasphemous sentiments--for so they
undoubtedly appear to us--a being of ordinary flesh and blood? One would
rather have supposed his solids to be of bronze, and his fluids of
vitriol, than have attributed to them the character which he describes.
That he should have been a gentle, meditative creature, around whose
knees had clung eleven 'young vipers' of his own begetting, is certainly
an astonishing reflection. And yet, to do Edwards justice, we must
remember two things. In the first place, the responsibility for such
ghastly beliefs cannot be repudiated by anyone who believes in the
torments of hell. Catholics and Protestants must share the opprobrium
due to the assertion of this tremendous doctrine. Nor does Arminianism
really provide more than a merely verbal escape from the difficulty.
Jeremy Taylor, for example, draws a picture of hell quite as fearful and
as material as Edwards', and, if animated by a less fanatical spirit,
adorned by an incomparably more vivid fancy. He specially improves upon
Edwards' description by introducing the sense of smell. The tyrant who
fastened the dead to the living invented an exquisite torment; 'but what
is this in respect of hell, when each body of the damned is more
loathsome and unsavoury than a million of dead dogs, and all those
pressed and crowded together in so strait a compass? Bonaventure goes so
far as to say that if one only of the damned were brought into this
world, it were sufficient to infect the whole earth. Neither shall the
devils send forth a better smell; for, although they are spirits, yet
those fiery bodies unto which they are fastened and confined shall be of
a more pestilential flavour.' It is vain to attempt an extenuation of
the horror, by relieving the Almighty from the responsibility of this
fearful prison-house. The dogma of free-will is a transparent mockery.
It simply enables the believer to retain the hideous side of his creed
by abandoning the rational side. To pass over the objection that by
admitting the existence of chance it really destroys all intelligible
measures of merit and of justice, the really awful dogma remains. You
still believe that God has made man too weak to stand alone, that He has
placed him amidst temptations where his fall, if not rigidly certain in
a given case, is still inevitable for the mass, and then torments him
eternally for his wickedness. Whether a man is slain outright, or merely
placed without help to wander at random through innumerable pitfalls,
makes no real difference in the character of the action. Theologians
profess horror at the doctrine of infantile damnation, though they
cannot always make up their minds to disavow it explicitly, but they
will find it easier to condemn the doctrine than effectually to
repudiate all responsibility. To the statement that it follows logically
from the dogma of original sin, they reply that logic is out of place in
such questions. But, if this be granted, do they not maintain doctrines
as hideous, when calmly examined? It is blasphemous, we are told, to say
with Edwards, that God holds the 'little vipers,' whom we call 'helpless
innocents,' suspended over the pit of hell, and drops millions of them
into ruthless torments. Certainly it is blasphemous. But is an infant
really more helpless than the poor savage of Australia or St. Giles,
surrounded from his birth with cruel and brutal natures, and never
catching one glimpse of celestial light? Nay, when the question is
between God and man, does not the difference between the infant and the
philosopher or the statesman vanish into nothing? All, whatever figment
of free-will may be set up, are equally helpless in face of the
surrounding influences which mould their characters and their fate.
Young children, the heterodox declare, are innocent. But the theologian
replies with unanswerable truth, that God looks at the heart and not at
the actions, and that science and theology are at one in declaring that
in the child are the germs of the adult man. If human nature is corrupt
and therefore hateful to God, Edwards is quite right in declaring that
the bursting bud must be as hateful as the full-grown tree. To beings of
a loftier order, to say nothing of a Being of infinite power and wisdom,
the petty race of man would appear as helpless as insects appear to us,
and the distinction between the children or the ignorant, and the wise
and full-grown, an irrelevant refinement.
It is of course true that the patient reception of this and similar
doctrines would indicate at the present day a callous heart or a
perverted intellect. Though, in the sphere of abstract speculation, we
cannot draw any satisfactory line between the man and the infant, there
is a wide gap to the practical imagination. A man ought to be shocked
when confronted with this fearfully concrete corollary to his theories.
But the blame should be given where it is due. The Calvinist is not to
blame for the theory of universal law which he shares with the
philosopher, but for the theory of damnation which he shares with the
Arminian. The hideous dogma is the existence of the prison-house, not
the belief that its inmates are sent there by God's inscrutable decree,
instead of being drafted into it by lot. And here we come to the second
fact which must be remembered in Edwards' favour. The living truths in
his theory are chained to dead fancies, and the fancies have an odour as
repulsive as Taylor's 'million of dead dogs.' But on the truths is
founded a religious and moral system which, however erroneous it may
appear to some thinkers, is conspicuous for its vigour and loftiness.
Edwards often shows himself a worthy successor of the great men who led
the moral revolt of the Reformation. Amongst some very questionable
metaphysics and much outworn--sometimes repulsive--superstition, he
grasps the central truths on which all really noble morality must be
based. The mode in which they presented themselves to his mind may be
easily traced. Calvinism, logically developed, leads to Pantheism. The
absolute sovereignty of God, the doctrine to which Edwards constantly
returns, must be extended over all nature as well as over the fate of
the individual human soul. The peculiarity of Edwards' mind was, that
the doctrine had thus expanded along particular lines of thought,
without equally affecting others. He is a kind of Spinoza-Mather; he
combines, that is, the logical keenness of the great metaphysician with
the puerile superstitions of the New England divine; he sees God in all
nature, and yet believes in the degrading supernaturalism of the Salem
witches. The object of his faith, in short, is the 'infinite Jehovah'
(vi. 170), the God to whose all-pervading power none can set a limit,
and who is yet the tutelary deity of a petty clan; and there is
something almost bewildering in the facility with which he passes from
one conception to the other without the smallest consciousness of any
discontinuity. Of his coincidence in the popular theories, and
especially in the doctrine of damnation, I have already given instances.
His utterances derived from a loftier source are given with equal
emphasis. At the age of fifteen or sixteen he had said 'God and real
existence are the same; God is, and there is none else.'[10] The same
doctrine is the foundation of the theories expounded in his treatises on
Virtue and on the End of God in Creation. In the last of these, for
example, he uses the argument (depending upon a conception familiar to
the metaphysicians of the previous age), that benevolence, consisting in
regard to 'Being in general,' must be due to any being in proportion to
the degree of existence (ii. 401). Now 'all other being is as nothing in
comparison of the Divine Being.' God is 'the foundation and fountain of
all being and all perfection, from whom all is perfectly derived, and on
whom all is most absolutely and perfectly dependent; whose being and
beauty is, as it were, the sum and comprehension of all existence and
excellence, much more than the sun is the fountain and summary
comprehension of all the light and brightness of the day' (ii. 405). As
he says in the companion treatise, 'the eternal and infinite Being is,
in effect, being in general, and comprehends universal existence' (vi.
59). The only end worthy of God must, therefore, be his own glory. This
is not to attribute selfishness to God, for 'in God, the love of Himself
and the love of the public are not to be distinguished as in man,
because God's being, as it were, comprehends all' (vi. 53). In
communicating His fulness to His creatures, He is of necessity the
ultimate end; but it is a fallacy to make God and the creature in this
affair of the emanation of the Divine fulness, 'the opposite parts of a
disjunction' (vi. 55). The creature's love of God and complacence in the
Divine perfections are the same thing as the manifestation of the Divine
glory. 'They are all but the emanations of God's glory, or the excellent
brightness and fulness of the Divinity diffused, overflowing, and, as it
were, enlarged; or, in one word, existing _ad extra_' (vi. 117). In more
familiar dialect, our love to God is but God's goodness making itself
objective. The only knowledge which deserves the name is the knowledge
of God, and virtue is but the knowledge of God under a different name.