21. =Divine and Supernatural Light.= The original title-page of this, the
author's second published sermon, reads as follows: "A Divine and
Supernatural Light, Immediately imparted to the Soul by the Spirit of God,
shown to be both a Scriptural, and Rational Doctrine; In a Sermon Preach'd
at Northampton, and Published at the Desire of some of the Hearers. By
Jonathan Edwards, A.M. Pastor of the Church there. Job 28, 20. Whence
then cometh wisdom? and where is the place of understanding? Prov. 2, 6.
The Lord giveth wisdom. Is. 42, 18. Look ye blind, that ye may see. 2.
Pet. 1, 19. Until the day dawn and the day-star arise in your hearts.
Boston: Printed by S. Kneeland and T. Green, M,DCC,XXXIV." The sermon has
a preface in which Edwards modestly disclaims any forwardness or vanity in
publishing it and begs his readers to peruse it without prejudice on this
score, or because of the unfashionableness of the subject. This to the
general public. What he says to his own people shows how affectionate
their relations to their young minister were at this time and how high his
regard was for them; it has a pathetic interest in view of their
passionate rejection of him at the last. "I have reason to bless God," he
writes, "that there is a more happy union between us, than that you should
be prejudiced against any thing of mine, because 'tis mine." He
felicitates them on having been instructed in such doctrines as those in
the sermon from the beginning. "And I rejoice in it," he adds, "that
Providence, in this day of Corruption and Confusion, has cast my lot where
such doctrines, that I look upon so much the life and glory of the Gospel,
are not only own'd, but where there are so many, in whom the truth of them
is so apparently manifest in their experience, that any one who has had
the opportunity of acquaintance with them, in such matters, that I have
had, must be very unreasonable to doubt of it."
This is justly regarded as "one of the most beautiful and most eloquent"
of Edwards's sermons (A. V. G. Allen, _Jonathan Edwards_, p. 67). It was
preached at a time when the signs were multiplying of an increased
interest in religion among the people of Northampton, preluding the great
revival of the next and the following years. The original manuscript bears
the date, August, 1733. The death of Mr. Stoddard in 1729 had removed the
restraints of a long-established and unquestioned authority, and the
results, as Edwards describes them, were deplorable. "It seemed," he says,
"to be a time of extraordinary dullness in religion: licentiousness for
some years greatly prevailed among the youth of the town; they were many
of them very much addicted to night walking, and frequenting the tavern,
and lewd practices, wherein some by their example exceedingly corrupted
others." "But in two or three years ... there began to be a sensible
amendment of these evils," and "at the latter end of the year 1733, there
appeared a very unusual flexibleness and yielding to advice" in the young
(_Narrative of Surprising Conversions_). The improved conditions reacted
on the preacher and, as a consequence, we have the sermon on Spiritual
Light.
The principle enunciated in this sermon is the cardinal and controlling
principle of the whole revival. The revival is just its exhibition and the
experienced evidence, for Edwards at least, of its truth. Nothing in his
account of the movement is more impressive than the way he studies it,
tracing minutely the details of the process, wondering at its variety,
whereby the Holy Spirit makes real and effectual the divine message (see
Allen, _op. cit._ pp. 143 ff.). There was nothing essentially new in the
principle itself; that God directly influences the soul, that the soul is
capable of an immediate intuition of divine things, this had been the
common teaching of all, and especially of all the Christian, mystics.
Indeed, it may be doubted whether religion as a form of personal
experience does not universally involve a consciousness of some such
transcendent relationship (see W. James, _Varieties of Religious
Experience_, Boston, 1902, _passim_). What was new in Edwards's
formulation of the doctrine was his manner of defining it, the way in
which he relates it to the other parts of his system, his insistence on
the supernatural character of this divine illumination, his sharp
distinction between common and special grace. His doctrine of supernatural
light appears, in fact, as a necessary corollary of his conception of the
relation of man and God in the work of redemption expressed in his sermon
on Man's Dependence. It is partly, at least, from this point of view that
it seems to him not only scriptural, but reasonable. It was a doctrine
intimately connected with his views of conversion. It was on this account
no less than because of its emphasis of a mystical rather than a moral or
legal principle in religion, that Edwards can speak of the doctrine as
"unfashionable." The tendency of the age was to find more power in the
natural constitution of man than he was willing to allow. Historically,
however, it is in just this emphasis on the inner experience of the light
and life of God in the heart that Edwards makes the transition from the
older Calvinism to the more liberal theology of our own day.
The manuscript of this sermon is more than usually full of erasures and
insertions, making it almost impossible to read, but suggesting something
of the labor and care expended on its composition. It is written on
twenty-six pages of the size of the facsimile in this volume, the last
page containing only a line and a half. But the printed sermon is more
fully elaborated.