BY THE REV. DONALD BEATON, WICK.
III.—Jonathan Edwards’ Religious Affections.
THE author of this well-known religious classic was born in the year 1703 at Windsor, in Connecticut, where his father was minister. His mother was a daughter of the celebrated Rev. Solomon Stoddard, of Northampton. He entered college at the age of twelve, and showed more than ordinary aptitude in acquiring knowledge. It was during his second year at college that he came across a copy of “Locke on the Human Understanding,” the reading of which awakened those philosophical powers that were yet to produce such remarkable fruit. In 1720 he took his B.A. degree, but remained two years longer at college studying theology, and at the end of his course was licensed to preach the gospel. On invitation, he went to New York and preached for eight months with great acceptance to a small congregation of English Presbyterians. But owing to certain difficulties in the way he did not see his way to accept a call from them. Three years after taking his Bachelor’s degree he took his M.A. degree, and was appointed tutor at Yale College, where he remained for two years. At the end of this period a call was presented to him from Northampton, where his grandfather was minister. This call he accepted, and was ordained colleague and successor to his grandfather on the 15th February, 1727, in the twenty-fourth year of his age. And so began a blessed and fruitful ministry that was to end sadly enough in Northampton.
The religious experience of those whom the Lord has blessed and used as instruments in the advancement of His kingdom, is always interesting to pious minds, and it must be admitted that the religious experience of Jonathan Edwards, as recorded in his diary, is peculiarly so. He tells us that he had concern about his soul from childhood. During an awakening in his father’s congregation he was very much impressed. He used to pray five times a day, and spend much of his time in religious exercises and conversation. He and his schoolmates met together for prayer. He had much recourse to secret prayer, and tells how lively were his affections, and what delight he had in it. But these feelings passed away, and as a warning to others he adds, “I am ready to think that many are deceived with such affections and such a kind of delight as I then had in religion, and mistake it for grace.” Thoughts of eternity again came back to him during a severe attack of pleurisy which he had at college. It had a sobering effect for a season, for he acknowledges that God brought him nigh to the brink of the grave and shook him over the pit of hell. But in the vigour of renewed health, the grave and what was beyond were soon forgotten. For a time this spirit of indifference took possession of him, but it soon gave place to a spirit of unrest. He could not get himself away from the thought of the great realities of eternity, and vainly tried to pacify his conscience with vows and resolutions to depart from all outward forms of sin. The salvation of his soul was now the great question, as he himself confesses. “I was indeed brought to seek salvation in a manner that I never was before; I felt a spirit to part with all things in the world for an interest in Christ. My concern continued and prevailed, with many exercising thoughts and inward struggles; but yet it never seemed to be proper to express that concern by the name of terror.” During this period the doctrine of God’s sovereignty was a source of great trouble to him, but a time came when he was enabled to acquiesce in it, the Holy Spirit showing him the reasonableness and justice of this great and profound truth. From that day he says, “I scarce ever have found so much as the rising of an objection against it in the most absolute sense in God’s showing mercy to whom He will show mercy, and hardening whom He will. . . . This doctrine has very often appeared exceedingly pleasant, bright, and sweet. Absolute sovereignty is what I love to ascribe to God. But my first conviction was not so.”
And now comes what he himself regarded as the great crisis in his life. It is best told in his own words. “The first instance,” he says, “that I remember of that inward, sweet delight in God and divine things that I have lived much in since, was on reading 1 Tim. i. 17, Now unto the King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only wise God, be honour and glory for ever and ever. Amen. As I read the words there came into my soul and was, as it were, diffused through it, a sense of the glory of the divine Being; a new sense, quite different from anything I ever experienced before. Never any words of Scripture seemed as these words did. I thought with myself, how excellent a Being that was, how happy I should be if I might enjoy that God, and be rapt up to Him in heaven and be, as it were, swallowed up in Him for ever. I kept saying and, as it were, singing over these words of Scripture to myself, and went to pray to God that I might enjoy Him, and prayed in a manner quite different from what I used to do, with a new sort of affection. But it never came into my thought that there was anything spiritual, or of a saving nature, in this.” After this there followed a period in which his heart found its chiefest joy in the contemplation of the glory of the Person of Christ and the suitableness of the way of salvation. It was the joy of a soul finding Heaven’s pearl of unspeakable price, but it was not incompatible with a painful realisation of the seething mass of iniquity in his heart. Scarcely could any words be found to express with greater force what he felt than the words he uses. “I know not,” he says, “how to express better what my sins appear to me to be than by heaping infinite upon infinite and multiplying infinite by infinite. Very often for these many years these expressions are in my mind and in my mouth, ‘Infinite upon infinite—infinite upon infinite.’ When I look into my heart and take a view of my wickedness, it looks like an abyss infinitely deeper than hell. And it appears to me that were it not for free grace, exalted and raised up to the infinite height of all the fulness and glory of the great Jehovah, and the arm of His power and grace stretched forth in all the majesty of His power, and in all the glory of His sovereignty, I should appear sunk down in my sins below hell itself; far beyond the sight of everything but the eye of sovereign grace, that can pierce even down to such a depth. And yet it appears to me that my conviction of sin is exceeding small and faint; it is enough to amaze me that I have no more sense of my sin.” Such is the confession of one who had discovered some of the dark recesses of his heart.
We turn now to another chapter in his life—a sadder one it is true, but not without its lessons for us. For him in the eventide of his life the clouds gathered and darkened his pathway for a season. The whole affair is a painful enough business even to read of, and casts a lurid light on the fickleness of the multitude once their prejudices are aroused. The history of this affair is as follows:—In 1744 it had been reported to him that some of the young people of his congregation, who were also communicants, were reading obscene books. He informed his congregation of the matter, and asked some of the leading men to lend him their aid in stamping out influences that were so degrading in their tendencies. This was readily agreed to. A day and place were appointed for meeting, when the culprits were to be examined. The names of the witnesses and the guilty were published before hand, when it was discovered that many of the youths belonged to the most influential families in the town. Immediately the whole town was in a state of feverish excitement, which gave place to anger, not against the dissolute youths, but against the conscientious minister. The result of this worse than foolish behaviour on the part of the parents, was that some of the youths defied the jurisdiction of the church and ignored its discipline, while those who submitted to examination did so in a most insolent and unbecoming manner. From that day the influence of Jonathan Edwards over the young people of his congregation was gone, and that simply through the paternal folly that shielded vice at the expense of a wholesome discipline. Shortly after this another incident occurred that helped to make the breach wider. In New England very lax views had prevailed as to admission to the Lord’s table. Stoddard, Jonathan Edwards’ grandfather, held that the Lord’s Supper was a converting ordinance, and that therefore sanctification was not a necessary qualification in communicants. For twenty years Edwards held the same view, but on fuller study of the question he regarded it as most unscriptural. This change of view gave great offence to his people, and so exasperated were they that they would not even listen to an explanation of his new view, their first thought was to have him dismissed. Edwards, to vindicate his position, published his convincing “Humble Inquiry as to the Qualifications of Church Members,” but few of his people read it. Nothing would appease them but his dismissal, and on the 1st July, 1744, Jonathan Edwards preached his farewell sermon to them. The words were from 2 Cor. i. 14, “As also you have acknowledged us in part, that we are your rejoicing, even as ye also are ours in the day of our Lord Jesus.” The doctrine insisted on was that ministers and the people who have been under their care must meet each other before Christ’s tribunal at the day of judgment. The solemn and impressive sentences must have moved the congregation to the deepest awe as he who once was their beloved pastor and whom many of them acknowledged as their spiritual father, bade them farewell in such painful circumstances. He weathered this terrible storm with all the heroism born of Christian fortitude, and to show the beautiful spirit of the man, he offered his services to them any Sabbath they had no preacher, until at last their enmity became so inveterate that they would not listen to him. The following year he left Northampton and laboured for six years among the Indians at Stockport, with very notable results. In 1757 he received an invitation to become President of Princetown College (the College of the Alexanders and the Hodges), and after some hesitation he accepted it. But his career was now near its close for in the following year he died of a fever, in the 55th year of his age. The last words as he passed over were, “Trust in God and ye need not fear.” So ended the career of one of the greatest thinkers and the foremost theologian of the New World.
A word must be said of Edwards as a preacher. His sermons must have had a tremendous effect on his audience; even yet some of them make one tremble in the very reading. His sense of the absolute sovereignty of God and the dark abysmal depths of sin in the human heart, made him preach, as occasion called, the awful terrors of the Lord, as well as the unsearchable riches of Christ. His most notable sermon is said to be the one entitled Sinners in the hands of an angry God. Under his ministry there were two notable revivals. To guard against extravagances that were likely to accompany these movements, he preached a notable sermon, “The Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God,” and it was with the view of counteracting the same tendencies that he published his “Religious Affections.” It was first given to the public in 1746, but had been preached to his own congregation during 1742 and 1743. Its great theme is the marks which distinguish a true work of grace from a false, and in its own line it is one of the most remarkable works dealing with Christian experience. Its even balance, careful and Scriptural statement, and even the rigid standard it holds up to the believer appeals to the earnest seeker who is feeling that the way of life is a narrow way, and that the battle is one against fearful odds. The whole work may be said to be a commentary on the words—that the righteous scarcely are saved. It consists of three parts. Part I. deals “with the nature of the affections and their importance in religion;” part II. shows “what are no certain signs that religious affections are truly gracious, or that they are not;” and part III. shows “what are distinguishing signs of truly gracious and holy affections.” It is not a book which the hypocrite or the self-righteous Pharisee will find very entertaining. But notwithstanding its searching analysis of Christian experience it is a work that every professor should read. In dealing with his great theme Jonathan Edwards touches on such subjects as people seeing visions; for instance, seeing Christ on the Cross, etc., and hearing Him speaking to them, and resting on this as a ground for their salvation. This delusion he characterises in no measured terms. He also enters a caveat against the careless and indiscriminate use some people make of passages of Scripture coming to their mind. When the Holy Spirit sends a passage of Scripture to the mind it has a spiritually enlightening and sanctifying influence. Whereas if it is only the memory that is responsible, no such influence will be felt. He also touches on the subject of judging, and has some very wise remarks on the same. “The true saints,” he says, “have not such a spirit of discerning that they can certainly determine who are godly and who are not. For, though they know experimentally what true religion is in the internal exercises of it, yet these are what they can neither feel nor see in the heart of another. There is nothing in others that comes within their view, but outward manifestations and appearances, at best uncertain and liable to deceit. ‘The Lord seeth not as man seeth; for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the Lord looketh on the heart.’ They commonly are but poor judges and dangerous counsellors in soul cases, who are quick and peremptory in determining person’s states, vaunting themselves in their extraordinary faculty of discerning and distinguishing in these great affairs; as though all was open and clear to them. They betray one of these three things; either that they have had but little experience; or are persons of a weak judgment; or have a great degree of pride and self-confidence and so ignorance of themselves. Wise and experienced men will proceed with great caution in such an affair.”
The work, however, by which Edwards is best known is that on “Free Will.” This was his great masterpiece, and is regarded as one of the classics of metaphysics. The work is a defence of the Calvinist doctrine as to the bondage of man’s will, and is a criticism of the Arminian doctrine. It is so powerful and logical that it has received no convincing answer. Edwards had one of the most remarkable of minds, which enabled him to move among the dim and hazy abstractions of metaphysics with all the ease of one who is perfectly at home. He was one of God’s greatest gifts to the Church, and Dwight’s lines do not exaggerate the position he occupied in the philosophic world.
“From scenes obscure did Heaven His Edwards call,
That moral Newton and that second Paul.
He, in clear view, saw sacred systems roll,
Of reasoning worlds, around their central soul;
Saw love attractive every system bind;
The parent linking to each filial mind;
And end of Heaven’s high works resistless showed.”