a spiritual desolation as the combined clerical and magisterial sanctions loosed their grip on New England.

Essentially, the whole downward movement that gathered impetus during the first three decades of the eighteenth century was the utter relaxation of the individual responsibility exacted by the pristine Puritan Church. The generosity of Stoddard's extension of the Half-Way Covenant, paradoxically, left to the Church only the austere formalism which had been a fault of its absolute sway. Personal religious incentive, once compelled, was now neglected till it was almost lost.

Then the prophet came to Northampton, once a stronghold of the theocratic régime and now bearing witness to its decline as the old-time "ingatherings" became feebler and farther apart till the revival power all but died away and none hardly knew what it was to be converted. Amid the gathering shadows of this year of 1727, Jonathan Edwards received his charge. Upon the youth of twentyfour were laid in token of ordination the hands of Solomon Stoddard, his revered grandfather, whose pulpit he was to share for two years before death ended the labors of the patriarch at the age of eighty-six.

Whatever of good was bestowed or whatever of havoc was wrought by the ministry that began this day can be accounted for in the mainsprings of the life of the young preacher who seems to have been anointed for his calling from his birth.

Jonathan was the fifth child and the only son of the family of eleven born to the Reverend Timothy Edwards and the daughter of Solomon Stoddard, "a woman surpassing her husband in native understanding." It was his mother that endowed Jonathan with brains. She was remarkable woman for her day in that she would not be

hurried into becoming a professor of religion, for, though the wife of a parson, she did not join the Church till Jonathan was twelve years of age.

At this time, however, Jonathan was writing letters to refute the idea of the material nature of the soul. Ever since the age of four he had been continually engaged in looking into his little mind and forming resolutions against faults he discovered lurking there, setting forth once a determination "never to do, be or suffer anything in soul or body but what might tend to the glory of God; to live with all my might while I do live; never to speak anything that is ridiculous or a matter of laughter on the Lord's Day, and frequently to renew the dedication of myself to God."

Thus the sermons upon which his ancestors had fed nourished the growing prophetic consciousness. All his inherited instincts, training and surrounding conditions molded this young Samuel who so long as he lived was to be "lent to the Lord."

Moreover, the very nature of his work was constantly before him, for East Windsor, Connecticut, the town of his nativity, was shaken throughout his youth by revivals of remarkable power and frequency. Rowelled from the pulpit, the lad was always confronting himself with selfaccusations, with the meaning of human existence and a sense of littleness and sinfulness within it, and with the awful nearness of God, with His wrath and its consequences.

No wonder he became, like so many other evangelists, including Whitefield and Wesley and Asbury, a sort of spiritual hypochondriac. His delicate, nervous constitution, taken with the tendency to asceticism, made him a sort of habitual invalid. His whole life was given to

moral introspection, "counting the spiritual pulse," as his own diary abundantly discloses. His career conforms to this rule which one commentator on revivalists has given:

"A gently complaining and fatigued spirit is that in which evangelical divines are very apt to pass their days.— There is an air of invalidism about most religious biographies."

A portrait of Edwards in his maturity reveals the man and the preacher. The forehead is high and unfurrowed. The eyes are calm and steady, bespeaking patience and resolution. The mouth is prim as that of a maiden lady and just as likely to be positive in the utterance of unswerving convictions.

The essential characteristics mirrored in this countenance were already strongly possessed by the boy of thirteen when he entered Yale College, where he was graduated four years later. Then, after two years of theological study, he preached for eight months in a newly organized church in New York, returning to Yale to be a tutor till the Northampton call came.

By nature religious rather than philosophical, Edwards began his apprenticeship to his grandfather by living alone, studying thirteen hours a day, abstaining from all amusements and any excess of food and rarely visiting the parishioners. After a few months of this stern regimen, a third woman came into his life. First there had been his mother and then his sister Jerusha, seven years his junior and also very devout, to whom he was tenderly attached. Now the Nemesis of Northampton took unto himself a wife.

The bride was Miss Sarah Pierrepont of New Haven, the seventeen-year-old daughter of a professor of moral philosophy at Yale. Her mother was a descendant of

Thomas Hooker, the founder of the Church in Connecticut. Edwards had known her since she was thirteen when he himself wrote of her: "She is spiritual to exaltation and ecstasy."

Throughout their lives together, her mind reflected his and, reinforcing his convictions, sustained him in his chosen course. This good woman also bore him eleven children, and of the ten who reached maturity, one daughter became the mother of Aaron Burr, soldier of the Revolution, Vice President of the United States, survivor of the duel in which Alexander Hamilton was fatally wounded and, though acquitted, one of the few Americans ever to be tried for treason to their country.

But the preaching progenitor of this high adventurer and dreamer of an empire knew only one realm of exploration and that was the Kingdom of God. He held himself aloof from the things of this world and from his exalted pinnacle of moral grandeur and purity he called the sinful sons of men to an accounting with the Justice of Heaven.

From childhood Edwards had rebelled against the Calvinistic doctrine of God's sovereignty and to him at first it seemed horrible "that God should choose whom He would and leave the rest eternally to be tormented in hell." But before he ascended the pulpit he had become actually happy in the acceptance of this dogma and he spent his life urging it upon others as their only hope.

His profound spiritual nature lent force to his extraordinary talent as a logician in expounding the thesis of original sin, the conception of a revengeful God and the conclusion that hell was the just desert of the greater part of the human race.

From the outset of his preaching at Northampton he

was a powerful controversialist and in him positive predestinarian Calvinism triumphed over "Arminianism,” that belief, given to the world in the last of the sixteenth century by Jacob Arminius, the Dutch divine, which held that "a sincere though necessarily imperfect obedience to the will of God would bring saving grace."

It was against this "heresy" that Edwards went up to battle when the death of Solomon Stoddard in 1729 left him alone in the pulpit of Northampton. It meant to him every kind of reaction against Calvinism. It was the loosely applied term of "Bolshevism" in the mouths of the presentday stalwarts of the established political and economic order.

Arminianism, to its followers, stood for toleration, free inquiry, reason, democratic methods in Church and State, in short, liberalism. But to Edwards and the strict Calvinists it was a word for disapproval, contempt and condemnation, an all-inclusive repository for the vices, social depravities, love of freedom and the world and presumptuous assertion of personal independence that characterized America of the eighteenth century.

It was the Arminianism of the Methodists that eventually split John Wesley and George Whitefield. And it was the spirit of Arminianism that led to the American Revolution. Accepting freedom of the will and the spiritual capacity of man, it first asserted faith in humanity and then advanced the concept of human liberty and equality.

So Arminianism went beyond its theological sense and became the expression of universal democracy. The Calvinistic doctrine of the sovereignty of God was probably a reflection of monarchism, the belief that "the king can do no evil." It was the spiritual version of the divine right