esty, however, to denounce its educational, social, and religious deficiencies at the end of its first century.

Samuel Willard wrote and published two hundred and fifty discourses on the Westminster Catechism; James Blair chose a better subject for his sermons (no less than one hundred and seventeen) on the sermon of all history: Christ's on the Mount. The general helpful and didactic purpose of the works was the same; but Blair was the more liberal of the two writers. On the opening of the college chapel, June 28, 1732, Blair preached a sermon from Prov. 22:6 "Train up a child in the he should go, way and when he is old he will not depart from it." President Blair of William and Mary and VicePresident Willard of Harvard were trainers of the young in the double capacity of preachers and teachers; they did a good work in their "day and generation," and it is no disparagement to that work that Willard's huge folio and Blair's five volumes now sleep on the dusty shelves of a very few libraries.

Of all the Americans who wrote before the Revolution, on other than political and scientific subjects, the reputation of Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards stood highest in the colonies. The clergy led the intellectual life, and Mather and Edwards deeply impressed the clergy with their achievements. The renown of both spread to England, to some extent, though English literature-and even English philosophy-in the eighteenth century was too selfabsorbed to pay much attention to American Congregational ministers and their weighty books.

Of the two, Edwards was in every way the greater

Edwards,

-in depth of learning, in the value of what he had to Jonathan say, and in the external style in which he 1703-1758. clothed his words. Philosophy, in colonial America, was the "handmaid of religion," and Edwards was above all a religious philosopher. His training at Yale had been bent toward philosophical studies, and his sober mind eagerly followed, even in youth, the most intricate problems of " fate, freewill, foreknowledge absolute." His independent studies supplemented the college curriculum, and soon he could teach his masters in their somewhat narrow field. Becoming a minister, of course, Edwards bravely fought the cold antinomianism of his Northampton church, which compelled him to leave and to go to Stockbridge as a pioneer worker among the Indians. In his " Humble Inquiry into the Rules of the Word of God Concerning the Qualifications Requisite to a compleat standing and full communion in the Visible Christian Church," he demanded that real conversion and a correct life should precede admission to the Supper of the Lord. He engaged, like most of the leading ministers of his day, in active theological controversies, by sermon and pamphlet, and the courage of his convictions was ever shown, at whatever personal loss. The doctrines of original sin and of eternal punishment he vigorously proclaimed in spoken, written, and printed words. He was the New England representative and mouthpiece of the spirit of Calvin, and in a lesser way he showed the influence of Locke. To reconcile Calvinistic theology with the laws of sound thought was the life-work which he set before himself. Four years

before his death (as President of Princeton College, New Jersey, in 1758) he completed in his lonely Stockbridge home that influential work on which his fame now wholly rests: "A Careful and Strict Inquiry into the modern notion of that Freedom of Will which is supposed to be essential to Moral Agency, Virtue and Vice, Praise and Blame."

The purpose of this great and long-powerful treatise, upon which Edwards lavished all Edwards his intellectual abilities, was to show that on the Will. sound philosophical and theological conclusions were identical, as regards the action of the mind and will of man. Edwards' theology was Calvinistic; and the scheme of God's moral government, as described by the great Geneva divine, was, in Edwards' view, in close agreement with true theoretical philosophy, and with the observations of the scientific student. The keynote of the Edwardsian philosophy was this: "The will is not self-determined"; and he elaborately argued that all its acts must be certain, and arranged from without, or else that there could be no really ruling God in the universe. Naturally, he was obliged to defend himself against the charge of being a necessitarian, and in subsequent writings he expounded the idea of the sinfulness of sin, and declared his belief that a wicked disposition in man was his personal fault, not his misfortune. This controversy has been continued, with diminishing force, until the present day; Edwards' defenders have been many, while, of course, Arminian theologians have repudiated his results and criticised his methods of reaching them.

It has long been the custom among many to declare that Edwards' conclusions are terrible, but his logic irresistible. I believe that this opinion, like so many others in literary and philosophical criticism, is based chiefly upon hearsay and tradition, not personal study. Some competent theologians and students of mental science, after faithful investigation, have, it is true, justified his logical method, but it has been declared unsound by others equally competent. Method and result are certainly not in accord with the consensus of Protestant statements at the present day, nor with the creeds or convictions of the continuous Christianity of past history. Edwards frequently maintains that liberty is necessarily fettered, and that there can be no real freedom other than that of unintelligent indifference; and that because the mind, after an act of choice, prefers A to B, it was not in a real state of freedom as regards A and B, classed together, before its choice.* He vir

* "Either human liberty is such that it may well stand with volitions, being necessarily connected with the views of the understanding, and so is consistent with Necessity—or it is inconsistent with and contrary to such a connexion and necessity. The former is directly subversive of the Arminian notion of liberty, consisting in freedom from all Necessity. And if the latter be chosen and it be said that liberty is inconsistent with any such necessary connexion of volition with foregoing views of the understanding, it consisting in freedom from any such Necessity of the Will as that would imply; then the liberty of the soul consists (in part, at least) in freedom from restraint, limitation, and government, in its actings, by the understanding, and in liberty and liableness to act contrary to the understanding's views and dictates: And consequently the more the soul has of this disengagedness, in its acting, the more liberty. Now let it be considered what this brings the noble principle of human liberty to, particularly when it is possessed and enjoyed in its perfection, viz.: a full and perfect freedom and liableness to act altogether at random, without the least connexion with, or restraint or government by, any dictate of reason, or any thing whatsoever apprehended, considered or viewed by the understanding; as

.

tually declares that because a man lives in a certain town, and must go north, south, east, or west to leave it, he is therefore so conditioned in his liberty of choice that his mind has no real freedom in willing which way he will go.* Again, his pet and final

being inconsistent with the full and perfect sovereignty of the Will over its own determinations. The notion mankind have conceived of liberty, is some dignity or privilege, something worth claiming. But what dignity or privilege is there, in being given up to such a wild contingence, as this, to be perfectly and constantly liable to act unintelligently and unreasonably, and as much without the guidance of understanding, as if we had none, or were as destitute of perception, as the smoke that is driven by the wind!" -“Freedom of the Will," Part II., § 13 (p. 155 of vol. v. of Edwards' works. Worcester, 1808).

*"I would lay down this as an axiom of undoubted truth, that every free act is done in a state of freedom, and not after such a state. If an act of the Will be an act wherein the soul is free, it must be exerted in a state of freedom, and in the time of freedom. It will not suffice that the act immediately follows a state of Liberty; but Liberty must yet continue, and coexist with the act; the soul remaining in possession of Liberty. Because that is the notion of a free act of the soul, even an act wherein the soul uses or exercises Liberty. But if the soul is not, in the very time of the act, in the possession of Liberty, it cannot at that time be in the use of it.

"Now the question is, whether ever the soul of man puts forth an act of Will, while it yet remains in a state of Liberty, in that notion of a state of Liberty, viz., as implying a state of Indifference, or whether the soul ever exerts an act of choice or preference, while at that very time the Will is in a perfect equilibrium, not inclining one way more than another. The very putting of the question is sufficient to shew the absurdity of the affirmative answer; for how ridiculous would it be for anybody to insist that the soul chooses one thing before another, when at the very same instant it is perfectly indifferent with respect to each! This is the same thing as to say, the soul prefers one thing to another at the very same time that it has no preference. Choice and preference can no more be in a state of Indifference than motion can be in a state of rest, or than the preponderation of the scale of a balance can be in a state of equilibrium. Motion may be the next movement after rest, but cannot coexist with it in any, even the least part of it. So choice may be immediately after a state of Indifference, but has no coexistence with it; even the very beginning of it is not in a state of Indifference. And therefore if this be Liberty, no act of the Will, in any degree, is ever performed in a state of Liberty, or in the time of Liberty. Volition and Liberty are so far from agreeing together and being essential to one another, that they are contrary one to another, and one ex