THE NEW SCHAFF-HERZOG
13G
III. The Founders. — 1. Jonathan Ed-wards the Elder: By birth and early training belonging to the strictest circles of the old theology, and by nature and religious experience inclined to the heartiest acceptance of the great cen- 1. His Fun- tral doctrine of Calvinism, the sover-
damental eignty of God, Jonathan Edwards the
Position. Elder (q.v.) was essentially a defender of the old, with little sympathetic appreciation of the new thought which was struggling for expression. Much less was his work a new movement, beginning at a new point, and producing a theology which by its very radicalness was able to replace the old with something destined to mark one of the great advances of the human spirit. The times were not ripe for any such work. The principle of authority was still dominant in the Protestant world. The Deists had shaken it off from their own minds, but they had made no permanent impression upon their times. The new views had not succeeded in establishing themselves by such an interpretation of the Scriptures as should render it necessary for the theologian to admit that they were favored by revelation, much less that they were its evident meaning. Calvinism still seemed to have the Scriptures in its favor; and, upon the generally accepted principles of the day, to say this was to pronounce the doom of Arminianism. Edwards accordingly set himself, first for his own people, and then for the community at large, to the task of overcoming Arminianism, and he performed it by presenting the old theology afresh, but in such a form as he believed would carry the assent of his generation. He formed the distinct purpose of proving every proposition he advanced with so cogent logic that every consistent thinker should be compelled to accept it. His premises were Scriptural, but his method was purely rational, however it may seem now and then to clothe itself in the form of consecutive interpretation; and by this he introduced a new force into American theology. It was to prove at last more powerful than any other element of this theology. He began his work by preaching that series of sermons upon justification by faith which led to his first revival in 1734. It may be said that there is nothing new in these sermons. They present the old doctrine in the old formulas, but with the intensity of a man who had an independent grasp upon the thought he was urging. But there was something in the earnestness of the preacher, something in his exaltation of the work of Christ, which evoked action, and thus introduced a new element into the religious life of New England. It became natural to look for conversion as the result of preaching, and so the doctrine of the new birth was reintroduced into New England as a living idea, and soon became a controlling theological principle. By logical necessity the next step was the reerection of the fact of the new birth as the indispensable condition of church-membership,- the original peculiarity of the New England churches. Edwards took it, and it led to his dismissal from his parish.
In the retirement of Stockbridge the work went on. Driven now by a mental necessity, he went into a more fundamental refutation of Arminian-
ism. He attacked it in his most famous treatise, that upon the Freedom of the Will. The book is not
that of an investigator, or even that of
2. His an impartial judge. It is the work of
Doctrine an advocate. Edwards was firmly
of the Will, fixed upon the basis of the Calvinistic
doctrine of the divine sovereignty, which he viewed as a doctrine not only glorious but unspeakably sweet and precious. He perceived the necessity of philosophical determinism to that conception of the divine government which he had formed, and it was, therefore, determinism which he embraced and advocated. He believed the Arminian position to be thoroughly opposed to that sound philosophy which everybody accepted and which was already before the world in the works of John Locke. All that was necessary to banish it from the earth was elaborately to exhibit this fact. He did not condescend to notice Locke's own suggestion of a threefold division of the mind, whereby the will obtained a separation from the other faculties which seemed to suggest its independent operation. He reverted to the standard twofold division which had come down from Calvin, and, simply taking Locke's theory, as it was presented in the Essay concerning Human Understanding, without the addition of a single important element or even argument, he set it forth in contrast with Arminianism, and exposed Arminianism in the light of it, till for himself and the majority of his age there was no reply to be made. Indeed, grant him his postulate, and there is no answer. This postulate is that the law of causation reigns in the intellectual world as completely as it does in the natural. There can be no such thing as an uncaused event. Hence the will is moved by causes, and these are the motives which operate upon it. The will always is as the greatest apparent good. Freedom consists in the power to do what the will has chosen. There is no liberty of the will apart from this. The self-determination of the Arminians is an impossible hypothesis. A selfdetermined volition is an uncaused event, an impossibility, or it is caused by some previous action of the will. But if a previous action of the will determining it is necessary to constitute it free, then an action still previous is necessary to make that act free, or else it, being unfree, can not give rise to a free act, and so on ad infinitum. This is his reduction of his adversaries' position to absurdity, repeatedly employed in his work. The Arminians were more nearly correct upon the main point than Edwards was; and yet they had so mingled their real advance with errors of excess in the direction of other anthropological doctrines that they seemed as much to ignore the agency of God in man's religious life as the Calvinists ignored that of man. In spite of his main position, which would have reduced man to a mere machine, Edwards gave to him a real activity, and laid great emphasis upon the fact that moral agency consists in choosing. He also introduced a distinction between natural and moral ability, which, though fallacious, as he stated it, was seized upon by his successors and made the basis of effective preaching. But, faulty as was the book in these respects, it was a marvel of acuteness in dia-