RELIGIOUS ENCYCLOPEDIA
New England Theology
of the atonement to the character of God; Edward Dorr Griffin (q.v.) expatiated upon the provision made in it for all men, and developed more fully the nature of the divine government; Caleb Burge brought out the fact that the atonement is necessary that God should be " just to himself " by properly representing his character; and Nathaniel William Taylor (q.v.) restated the nature of God's moral government with unsurpassed fulness and clearness.
From the time of Edwards the doctrine of regeneration had excited continual attention. It was the doctrine of the most immediate practical importance. The doctrine of the will was fundamental to it; and hence, the subject of the
eration " w^' an<^ particularly Edwards' great work, was subjected to long study, and passed through a development of great interest to the thinker, and of fateful significance for the school itself. Edwards' treatise produced so tremendous an impression that for twelve years after its appearance no criticism of it was sent forth. Then James Dana published an Examination (Boston, 1770) which urged with persistent force the position that upon Edwards' basis the only efficient causation in the universe must be that of God. To this work Stephen West of Stockbridge replied in his Moral Agency (1772), in which he followed Edwards in the main, but was driven boldly to announce the position to which Dana had tried to drive the Edwardseans, that moral agency consists in exercises (i.e., acts of the will), which are the action of deity as the sole true efficient cause. He thus reversed the motion of Hopkins in the direction of a greater freedom than Edwards had given to man. Samuel West (q.v.) of New Bedford was stirred by this reduction of man to a mere machine, to send out his Essays (1795) which were remarkable for first proposing in New England the division of the mind into three fundamental faculties, which he styled the " perception, the propension, and the will," and taught that the mind, by divine communication, is a first cause in the same sense as God is himself. This revolutionary psychological proposal received no appropriate attention, for it was too far in advance of its times. West himself did not appreciate its importance nor give to it the weight which it ought to have received in the discussion. He attacked the main positions of Edwards, but each by itself, strongly maintaining that motives are not the causes of volitions, and denying the distinction between natural and moral ability. He shows how Stephen West's idea of efficient cause makes God the only living principle in the universe. But the main argument for freedom is consciousness, and in this the real strength of the book lies. " We feel ourselves free." This work was replied to by the younger Edwards in a Dissertation concerning Liberty and Necessity (1797). He comes stoutly to the defense of his father, though modifying the position of motives, making them occasions rather than causes of the action of the will. His favorite method of reply is to show that West really meant, and often said, just what Edwards said. Fundamentally it is rather a verbal than a material answer. He follows Stephen West in making God the cause of men's volitions, and
then banishes true efficient causation not only from the finite world but also from the universe, saying that God " is no more the efficient cause of his own volitions than of his own existence." Thus the tendency of New England theology was still to exalt the agency of God at the expense of that of man. Nathanael Emmons (q.v.) closed this branch of the development and expressed the dependence of man in the extremest forms. God creates our volitions. But in Emmons the other tendency, which was found in Bellamy and Hopkins, also reappears, and the freedom of man is asserted with the most unflinching disdain of apparent inconsistency. Men are as free as if God did not act in their volitions. If their volitions are created, they are created free. But at this point of paradox and contradiction there appeared a book which was finally to reverse the current and set the Edwardsean school upon the road to a doctrine of true freedom, Asa Burton's Essays on Some of the First Principles of Metaphysicks (Portland, 1824). This service was rendered by the proposal of the same threefold division of the faculties of the mind which West had vainly made, now so presented as to make its way to general accepts ance. The "taste," as Burton calls the sensibility, is entirely separated from the will, the two faculties being completely distinct; but for the sake of preserving the same certainty for which Edwards labored, and which was supposed to be necessary to the divine sovereignty, an " infallible connection " is declared to have been established by God between the taste and volition. The action of the taste is necessary. It is the " spring of action in all moral agents," and operates as the cause of volitions. Burton leaves man in the toils of Edwards' necessity. He has corrected one by one the minor errors of his predecessors — of Hopkins that freedom consists in voluntariness, of Emmons that the mind is a chain of exercises, and that volitions are created by God. He has distinguished between the kind of necessity with which the intellect operates, and that by which the will is determined. But he has not given a true freedom. This work was performed by Nathaniel William Taylor (q.v.), who had come under the influence of the Scotch school and seized upon the new division of the mind as giving a neutral point in humanity, not corrupted by original sin, to which the Gospel could appeal. He made man the efficient, though not the sole efficient, agent of his own actions. In possessing agency, man has a " power to the contrary," or capacity of alternate choice. Motives have influence but not causative power to produce volitions. But the certainty of future moral events is not relinquished, though left unexplained. Charles Grandison Finney and James Harris Fairchild (qq.v.), at Oberlin, cleared this position of some unnecessary complications. And Samuel Harris (q.v.), the Sir William Hamilton of the school, brought this development to its highest point by defining the will as the power of a person " to determine the end or objects to which he will direct his energy and the exertion of his energy with reference to the determined end or object." Man " has the power of self-direction, self-exertion, and self-restraint." He distinguishes between choice as self-direction and
New England Theology