and an entire consecration to God, which, in a mind like his, are the never-failing conditions of success. "I have been before God and have given myself, all that I am and have to God, so that I am not in any respect my own. I can challenge no right in this understanding, this will, these affections which are in me. Neither have I any right in this body, or any of its members, no right in this tongue, these hands, these feet; no right in these senses, these eyes, these ears, this smell, or this taste. I have given myself clean away, and have not retained any thing of my own."

With these primary elements of a sound theology and a practical minister, we are not surprised to find the downward course of things in his parish, first checked and then turned back. This counter-scene opened in the remarkable Revival of 1734. An account of this work of grace, then so unusual, was given by Mr. Edwards, under the title of A Narrative of Surprising Conversions. This publication was followed by two others on the same general subject, which grew out of the second awakening, which commenced in Northampton in 1740, and extended into many parts of New England. One was Thoughts on the Revival of Religion, which, like the first, was eminently practical. The other was the Treatise on Religious Affections. The object is to distinguish a genuine from a spurious conversion. It is Biblical, though it draws largely on consciousness and Christian experience. It impresses men with the necessity of being thoroughly honest with themselves, and teaches them how to be so. If it has strong meat for men, it has also milk for babes. It is not perfect, as is no work of erring men; but in those moral eddies, and even whirlpools, occasioned by the bold reäffirmations of the purely gospel doctrines, it was what the condition of the churches required. Perhaps, like the Epistle to the Romans, for a certain few, it may need some previous culturing influences, as sedatives in the medical art must in some diseases precede the remedial agencies. But with the Pilgrim's Progress and the Saint's Rest this Treatise has been hallowed in the experience of the regenerate of all denominations, for more than a century.

These three Treatises are the exponents of a powerful reactionary movement, of which, in the providence of God, Edwards was made the instrument. They are the work of an eye-witness. Hence they are life-like and exact. They were produced in the glow of a bold and stalwart heart, kindled into what he calls "a sweet burning." Hence, though just, sometimes rigorously so to the proud and luxurious lovers of themselves, he is also gentle, tender, even as a mother, to all the consciously sin-worn and suffering of his kind. The work of God, of which they treat, makes an epoch in the churchhistory of New England, not unlike that recorded in the second chapter of the Acts, and makes up largely the first chapter of the Edwardean period of our history.

The scenes which marked the early history of Mr. Edwards, and the subjects that he was led to examine, increased his misgivings respecting the Half-way Covenant, particularly "with regard to the admission of those into the church, who made no pretence to real godliness." His difficulties led to examination, examination resulted in conviction, and this in action, when a new scene opens in his history, which was closed by the dissolution of his pastoral relations.

The removal of Mr. Edwards from Northampton to Stockbridge opens the second, and in some respects, the most important chapter in his history. The first marked movement in this period was, as we have seen, practical - a reäctionary life-movement against the chills of death, that were stiffening the faith and worship of the churches into lifeless forms and fossils. How extensive the defection had become Mr. Edwards did not know until he found himself, by divine Providence, engaged in arresting it. He knew that opening the door of the church to the world was the way to corrupt and debase it. But he was not aware, when all the churches in the county but two had thus opened their doors, that all the ministers in it but three had become correspondingly lax in doctrine, until he tried to restore the old principle that "the matter of a church are saints by calling." Up to this time his publications had been of a practical character. He now entered on the discussion of questions relating more directly

to fundamental doctrines. The age was beginning to drift from those great truths which had fed the life of the church in its seasons of greatest activity and purity. In France, monkish superstition was already goading the populace onward towards atheistic madness. A dead orthodoxy was opening the way in Germany for a deader rationalism. The evangelical faith in England was ebbing before the flood-tide of deism and naturalism, while in this country, the school of infidels, a little later called Jeffersonian, was concentrating its forces, and beginning "to let slip the dogs of war." The works of such men as Dr. Turnbull, and Dr. John Taylor, of England, thoroughly Pelagian in their principles, were extensively circulated.

Edwards saw the necessity for discussion-original, calm philosophical discussion. The faith was assailed from the side of reason. Not that infinite mind to which Fenelon exclaimed: "O Reason! Reason! art thou not he whom I seek?" No; but a mere rationalismus vulgus, an ethical allsufficiency of the human for itself. An original defence of the old faith from the divine philosophical side was needed, and Providence had prepared him for this new work.

"The honor of being the most effective defender of Christianity," says Dr. Chalmers, "we should ascribe to Jonathan Edwards." Sir James Mackintosh, by no means a partial witness, regarded his "power of subtle argument as, perhaps, unmatched, certainly unsurpassed, among men."

Mr. Edwards now entered on that series of polemical papers which distinguished him as the greatest thinker and most profound theologian of the age. It consists of the Treatises on the Will, on The End of God in the Creation of the World, on The Nature of True Virtue, and on Original Sin.

Before he left Northampton, he had projected a plan for these defensive treatises, and had been collecting materials for its execution. In 1748, he received from Rev. John Erskine, of Scotland, John Taylor's works "On Original Sin," and his 'Key to the Apostolic Writings," with a "Paraphrase on the Epistle to the Romans." In his letter of acknowledgment, he says: "I am exceedingly glad of those two books of Taylor's.

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I had before borrowed and read Taylor 'On Original Sin.' The other book, his 'Paraphrase,' etc., I had not heard of—if I had, I should not have been easy till I had seen it and been possessed of it. These books, if I should live, may probably be of great service to me.”

The intent and bearing of this defensive scheme are made evident by a letter to the same man, written in 1752, one year before the Treatise on the Will was produced. "I hope now, in a short time, to be at leisure to resume my design of writing something on the Arminian Controversy. I have no thought of going through with all parts of the controversy at once; but the subject which I intended, God willing, first to write something upon, was Free Will and Moral Agency, endeavoring with as much exactness as I am able, to consider the nature of that freedom of moral agents which makes them the subjects of moral government, moral precepts, counsels, calls, motives, persuasions, promises and threatenings, praise and blame, rewards and punishments, strictly examining the modern notions of those things, endeavoring to demonstrate their most palpable inconsistency and absurdity; endeavoring, also, to bring the late great objections and outcries against Calvinistic divinity, from these topics, to the test of the strictest reasoning; and particularly that great objection, in which the modern writers have so much gloried, so long triumphed, with so great a degree of insult towards the most excellent divines, and in effect, against the Gospel of Jesus Christ, namely, that the Calvinistic notions of God's moral government are contrary to the common-sense of mankind."

It is thus evident that Edwards did not come rashly to these later labors. He carefully surveyed the whole field. He made himself acquainted with the strongest points of the opposite side and grappled with its chief defenders. They had impeached the old Calvinistic divinity and appealed to the bar of reason and common-sense. He willingly followed them there, and then carried the appellants to the higher tribunal of the divine Word.

We are aware of the difficulty in securing an exact analysis and summary of these treatises. But without something of

this internal history we should fail to bring out fairly that in Edwards which has given his name to the period. The genuine Edwardean theology lies in these treatises.

The logical order would lead us to speak first of the End of God in the Creation of the World as the starting point, and then of the treatise on Original Sin, or the Fall of Man. Next, the Freedom of the Will, or man's condition in his abnormal state, and finally, the Nature of True Virtue in the regenerate.

But the chronological order will comport better with our object, which is rather historical than logical or theological. This brings us first to the Inquiry into the Freedom of the Will, which was produced, according to his biographer, in four months and a half. Whatever may be thought of the conclusions, it is by general admission a master-piece of close reasoning. It is often studied by the best thinkers as a mental discipline. The diverse Anti-Calvinists, the Pelagian, Semi-Pelagian, and Socinian schools have, for a hundred years directed their most powerful batteries against it. They have been debating and dissertating upon it. They have viewed it, reviewed it, and re-reviewed it, with a kind of success that ever leaves the same work to be repeated. A joint in the harness of the matchless chieftain, or a vulnerable spot in his heel, has been sedulously sought for, through which he could be made to "bite the dust," and is still sought for, but in vain. We freely allow that these reviews and dissertations have an important historical value. They have generally been the product of honest and earnest minds, which have brought to the great subject whatever light may have been elicited by the later studies in mental and moral science. Nicer discriminations, new shades of thought, and a more exact terminology have evolved more fully the main ideas of the author, and harmonized them more perfectly with the aggressive forces of the church catholic in its conflicts with error.

I. In this Inquiry, the will is defined as that by which the mind chooses any thing, or which is the same, that by which the soul either chooses or refuses. It includes the desires, in