And so, deprived of his pulpit, rejected by his own people, Jonathan Edwards went out to those who in his eyes were in darkness. Behold him a missionary to the Indians at Stockbridge. There is something at once pathetic and comic in his going up against the tradition of this wild offspring of Adam. It was an offering of the Puritan Heaven for a few and the Edwardean Hell for the many in place of the Happy Hunting Ground. How much Edwards dwelt upon the future state of his aboriginal parish is not exactly known. But one by one the braves and their families vanished into the forest and at the end of two years the preacher discovered that they had all gone and once more he was relieved of his charge, this time without a vote of record. Though he had made no headway in the conversion of the Indians, he had exemplified to them what justice meant on earth by freeing them from exploitation and oppression. And during his sojourn at Stockbridge he had found time to write a treatise on "Freedom of the Will," in which he said that "the term 'Calvinistic' is, in these days, among most, a term of greater reproach than the term 'Arminianism,'" and another treatise on "Original Sin" that remarked the "strange progress within a few years" of hostility to this doctrine. Jonathan Edwards had ceased to be the crusading pulpiteer and had settled down to be a true philosopher of religion. His reward for this came too late. At the close of the year 1757, he was called to the presidency of the college at Princeton, the earthly seat of Presbyterianism in America. Three months later, on March 22, 1758, at the age of fifty-five, he died of an inoculation for smallpox. In his latter days, Edwards arrived at a clearer understanding of the work he began amid the overwhelming tumult of clashing doctrines. Had he lived to see Arminianism lost as a theological boundary line and to feel the stirring of the new consciousness of human rights that inspired the prayer of those who knelt round Elder Clark on Lexington Green on that April morning of 1775, he would have preached the truer Calvinism-that the birth anew through grace consecrated life to God through service to brother men. The evangelistic message of Jonathan Edwards still lives and church edifices have deen dedicated in his name. He preached it without thought of material reward or personal glory. His own earnest belief in it, his own concern for those who heard it, impelled him. Long since, his God of wrath has become a God of love and the fires of his hell have receded. But down through the years, now faint, now strong, yet never ceasing, has come the voice of him who awakened America to its first great revival and, in the words of the prophet of old— "Repent ye, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand"opened the way for all the sons of men to discover and declare the faith that is in them. CHAPTER IV PENTECOSTAL CONSECRATION W Come, Holy Spirit, Heav'nly Dove, ISAAC WATTS, 1674-1748. HILE Jonathan Edwards was crying in the wilderness preparing the way of the Lord and making His paths straight, the Day of Pentecost was fully come in the ancient capital of the mother kingdom, even in Fetter Lane in London Town, where the Holy Ghost descended upon the "chosen few" who were to bear the Word over sea and land and bring their brother men out of their darkness and into the light of the Great Awakening of 1740. It was there in the Moravian Chapel, built in 1738 and afterwards attacked and dismantled by rival religionists, that the gift of at least one fiery tongue was bestowed upon John Wesley and George Whitefield as they knelt on that memorable day of 1739. And it is from this solemn hour that posterity must date the beginning of their message to a "lost and ruined world.” Strange was the neighborhood for a pervasion of the Presence. It was not a lane of fetters chaining felons or martyrs. Chaucer in his day called it "Faitours Lane," and to him a faitour was a "lazy, idle fellow." Others extended the meaning to include "pretenders, impostors, |