Chapter 10 of 1155

leadership, family resentments may have begun to play a role. Dorothy Ashley

≤π∂ A House Divided

on the dangers of episcopacy. On the eve of the American Revolution, in 1771, when fears of an American bishop helped unite New Englanders against England, he ﬁnally published A Compleat View of Episcopacy. Throughout his career Chauncy was ready to ﬁght for a New England based on true religion and good order.∞∂ In 1742 orthodox as well as Arminian-leaning clergy might view the disorders of the awakening as a dangerous threat to the standing order. That was especially true in Connecticut where the ''Old Light'' label seems to have ﬁrst developed.

Edwards was stung by an ominous defection of one of his former allies from the Williams clan. Late in 1742 Jonathan Ashley, pastor at Deerﬁeld, made a dramatic attack on the revival. Ashley, who had married William Williams' daughter Dorothy, had been a faithful ally in the e√orts of the Williams family as long as the patriarch had lived. He had supported the clan in the Breck case and had presided over revivals in Deerﬁeld in both 1735 and 1741. Now with William Williams gone and Edwards taking on the mantel of leadership, family resentments may have begun to play a role. Dorothy Ashley was, after all, the sister of Israel Williams, and her husband was now emerging as part of the younger generation who were cool toward their cousin Edwards, or at least toward his style of religious leadership.

Ashley's public disavowal of the Edwardsean position caused a minor sensation. In November 1742 the Deerﬁeld minister was the guest preacher at Boston's Brattle Street Church, served by Benjamin Colman and William Cooper and a headquarters for the awakening in Boston. Whatever his hosts may have expected, the tone of his sermon was so o√ensive to some of the congregation that they walked out. Ashley preached that there was a close parallel between the notorious disorders in the New Testament church at Corinth and the present awakening. The church assemblies in both instances had become mad confusion as women as well as men spoke out whenever they felt moved by the Spirit. Insubordination was rife, wives judged their husbands, parishioners condemned the clergy, strife and lack of charity prevailed. The Pauline solution of I Corinthians 13 was that the highest gift of the Spirit was charity.∞∑

William Cooper was indignant that a critic of the revival should thus wrap himself in the cloak of charity. Cooper was further incensed that Ashley was so brash as to have his controversial sermon published. In response, Cooper published a letter on the front page of the Boston Gazette, and an ugly squabble among the clergy ensued in the newspapers during the winter of 1742–43.∞∏

A House Divided ≤π∑

By the time Edwards' Some Thoughts was o√ the Boston press in March 1743, his optimistic intimations that New England might have a glorious role to play in the approach of the millennium already looked dated. Not only were the clergy at each other's throats, James Davenport was back in New England, wilder than ever.

This time Davenport had shown up in New London, Connecticut, on the coast near Rhode Island. New London was one of several coastal towns where the awakening had led to a church separation. It was also a center for revivalist or New Light activities since a local evangelist, Timothy Allen, had organized the ''Shepherd's Tent'' as a revivalist school that was to rival Yale. About a dozen teenage boys studied there. On the Sabbath of March 6, Davenport led the separatist group, which numbered about a hundred mostly young people, in a ceremonial religious book burning to signal their purity from the corrupt New England establishment. The books included leading Puritan and Congregational works in divinity, such as those by John Flavel, Increase Mather, and Benjamin Colman. The next day, turning to the problem of idolatry, Davenport ordered his people to burn jewelry, wigs, cloaks, nightgowns, and any item of clothes that Davenport said they loved too much. According to a widely circulated story, Davenport, appearing physically ill and crazier than ever, threw his only pair of breeches on to the pile. A more moderate New Light intervened and raised the possibility that Davenport might be possessed by the devil.∞π

A few weeks later Edwards was on a preaching tour in Connecticut. On March 25, he wrote to Sarah from his sister Abigail Metcalf's home in Lebanon that his return would be delayed because a number of clergy had prevailed on him to go to New London to try to calm the storm. He had said he would not go unless some other ministers went with him, and they had now assembled a delegation including his cousin Solomon Williams, Joseph Meacham, and, probably most importantly, Benjamin Pomeroy, Davenport's sometimes associate.∞∫ By the time they arrived in New London, several others, including Joseph Bellamy and Samuel Buell, had joined the council. Edwards, who led the delegation, preached ''a Lecture Sermon . . . very suitable for the times to bear witness against the prevailing disorders and distractions . . . of enthusiasm.''∞Ω

This council of New Lights was a great success and a credit to Edwards' leadership in shaping a major branch of the party that defended the awakening's new practices while shunning its separatism and excesses. Most of the New London separatists went back to their original congregations.

≤π∏ A House Divided

Davenport was apparently chastened and began to listen to the continuing ministrations of his colleagues, especially Solomon Williams and Eleazar Wheelock (who had been preaching in Northampton when Edwards visited New London). The next year Edwards played a direct role in Davenport's rehabilitation. At that time Edwards assured Wheelock that ''Mr. Davenport is truly very much altered'' and further that ''I think he is now fully satisﬁed in his duty in making a public, humble, and suitable recantation and confession of his great errors.'' Two weeks later Davenport completed such a letter and gave it to Solomon Williams, who sent it to Thomas Prince for publication. It reads like pages out of Some Thoughts. ''Several of the appendages to this glorious work,'' confessed Davenport, ''are no essential parts thereof, but of a di√erent and contrary nature and tendency.'' He retracted his judging people unconverted, separatism, lay preaching, and listening to impulses or supposed messages from God. Now he believed that in his zeal for these errors and other nonessentials he had been led by a ''false Spirit,'' especially in the matter of the book and clothes burnings in New London.≤≠

Edwards shared many of the concerns of Chauncy and the Old Lights for good order, but he believed it could be maintained by simply teaching New Lights to follow the old rules of authority and deference. For instance, he deplored lay preaching, a common practice among those who caught the awakening spirit. When he heard that former Northampton resident Deacon Moses Lyman was ''exhorting a public congregation,'' he urged him to desist. Although lay preaching might seem to do good in the short run, God had ''appointed a certain particular order of men to that work and o≈ce.'' If everyone were allowed to preach the result would be chaos. Lyman might admonish privately, but not to public congregations or ''by set speech to counsel a room full of people, unless it be children, or those that are much your inferior.''≤∞

Early in 1743 Edwards met with a ministerial council in Westﬁeld, Massachusetts, to deal with the similar but more di≈cult case of Bathsheba Kingsley, an ardent New Light who was in dispute with her husband. Two years earlier Mrs. Kingsley had confessed before the Westﬁeld congregation that, in her zeal to witness in neighboring towns, she was guilty of ''stealing a horse [and] riding away on the Sabbath with[ou]t her husband's consent.'' Now she was back at it. According to the council, she spent almost all her time in her own and neighboring towns ''wandering about from house to house under a notion of doing Christ's work and delivering his messages.'' Frequently these messages involved denunciations of local ministers. The

A House Divided ≤ππ

council, for whom Edwards drafted the response, seemed intent on rehabilitation rather than punishment. They judged her as wanting in selfknowledge, humility, and in discernment of the workings of God's Spirit and not having her ''will subdued to God.'' They observed that she was of a ''weak vapory habit of body'' and that Satan had taken advantage of that weakness. (Though a ''vapory spirit'' suggested female ﬂightiness, the diagnosis resembled that of Davenport.) Her soul had been ''for some years . . . almost in a continual tumult, like the sea in a storm; being destitute of that peace and rest in God that many other Christians enjoy.'' Nonetheless, as in the case of Moses Lyman, they advised that she might continue to witness so long as it was proper to ''her station.'' In her case that meant in the home or when privately visiting neighbors. After much e√ort, the council persuaded her to agree to these limits and to due subordination to her husband. When she criticized him it ought not be with rough and severe language but ''privately in an humble submissive loving manner.'' They advised her husband, in turn, to ''treat her in patience and gentleness without hard words or blows.''≤≤

By spring 1743 it was too late to restrain the New Light movement by counseling proper deference. With Wheelocks and Kingsleys appearing all over the countryside, there were too many ﬁres to be put out one by one. Too many chain reactions had been set in motion. More lay preachers were condemning clergy, fostering separatist groups in which spiritual excitements were normative. Some of the radical separatist congregations would become Baptist, others would be separatist congregational. Even though most of the scores of separations took place in the subsequent years, there were already enough by 1743 to generate a major conservative reaction against the revival. Eventually about one-third of the churches of Connecticut and one-ﬁfth of those in Massachusetts su√ered schism.≤≥ Once schisms became common, accompanied as they always were by bitter accusations and recriminations, peaceful coexistence among the several parties became impossible.

In Connecticut the conservative reaction had the most bite. The antiitinerancy laws of May 1742 provided a weapon to restrain the more enthusiastic evangelists. Both Benjamin Pomeroy and Eleazar Wheelock lost tax support for their ministries and had to resort to voluntary contributions from their congregations. Samuel Finley (later the president of the College of New Jersey [Princeton]), a visiting Presbyterian, was arrested under the law as a vagrant when he tried to preach in New Haven. In May 1743 the Old Light legislature took a more extreme step to inhibit church separations: it repealed a 1708 statute that recognized the right to religious dissent. Dissenting groups

≤π∫ A House Divided

could still appeal to the Assembly for relief from having to support Connecticut's established churches, but they would have to prove that they truly were neither congregationalist nor presbyterian.

Cousin Elisha Williams, formerly Yale rector, now engaged in business and politics, became the principal New Light spokesman against these repressive laws. In 1744 he published a treatise against these statutes. Drawing on the Lockean and dissenting Commonwealth tradition in England, he o√ered one of the most important statements of the era on religious liberty.≤∂

Edwards too found the laws outrageous. In 1742 when he had written in Some Thoughts that civil governments should support the awakening, he was aiming a barb at Connecticut's Assembly for doing just the opposite. In 1743, although he was loathe to publicly endorse separatism, he nonetheless could not help sympathizing privately with a New Light separatist group in Milford, Connecticut, who were attempting to join a New York presbytery. ''It is manifest,'' Edwards wrote in December 1743 to the New York Presbyterians, ''that there [are] many in that government [Connecticut] under the most terrible oppression both from civil and ecclesiastical authority.'' In such situations, it is not required ''for these people to yield up themselves in matters of inﬁnite consequences into the hands of those who are . . . their embittered enemies . . . even to that degree of prejudice and spirit that appears to me a sort of madness.''≤∑

Shortly thereafter he wrote to his ﬁrst cousin Elnathan Whitman (their mothers were Stoddard sisters), pastor of Second Church of Hartford, from which some New Light parishioners had seceded. Edwards had been Whitman's tutor at Yale, and with as much restraint as he could muster, he lectured the younger man on liberty of conscience. Even if, as was likely, the seceders were ignorant common people whose complaints against Whitman were illfounded, Edwards argued, their scruples were likely honest and conscientious. In that case, it would be a violation of liberty of conscience to use the law to try to coerce them in matters concerning eternal salvation.≤∏ Edwards' social and ecclesiastical conservatism was here tempered by a long-standing principle of Puritan dissent.

While Old Light versus New Light di√erences were hardening into political parties that would deﬁne Connecticut politics until the Revolutionary era, in Massachusetts the most remarkable public break was between contending factions of the clergy. In May 1743 the anti-awakening clergy, which had been on the defensive until then, managed a small coup. Each year many of the Massachusetts clergy came to Boston in May for the opening of the

A House Divided ≤πΩ

colonial legislature. Customarily the clergy met in a ''General Convention of Congregational Ministers of Massachusetts'' to discuss and make advisory pronouncements on matters of current interest. Edwards was apparently at this May 1743 gathering.≤π

The Old Lights, ﬁnding themselves with a slight majority, threw the meeting into a turmoil by drafting a Testimony of the Pastors of the Churches in the Province of Massachusetts Bay condemning a number of the practices associated with the awakening, including reliance on ''impulses'' (which they compared to Antinomianism), uninvited itinerancy, lay preaching, separatism, censorious judging of who is ''unconverted,'' and enthusiastic disorders. Almost everyone agreed in renouncing these errors, but the friends of the awakening insisted that these condemnations be balanced by ones condemning Arminianism as well as Antinomianism and especially by praise for the legitimate blessings of the awakening. After heated debate and complicated attempts at redrafting, the Old Lights prevailed.

The New Lights, alarmed that a group of some forty pastors, about oneﬁfth of those in the whole province, were speaking as though for the whole, immediately organized a counterconvention. Meeting in July in conjunction with the Harvard commencement, this group was headed by the leading Bostonian friends of the awakening, Benjamin Colman, Thomas Prince, Joseph Sewall, William Cooper, Thomas Foxcroft, and Joshua Gee. Their Testimony and Advice e√usively praised the awakening as the greatest they had seen. They also condemned nearly the same sets of excesses as had the opponents of the awakening, but they essentially took the line that Edwards had so fully developed—that the excesses were peripheral. Sixty-eight of those present signed this testimony, and another forty-ﬁve added their names by letter. Edwards, who declined another lengthy journey, sent a letter of support signed by seven pro-awakening pastors from Hampshire County. Ominously, despite vigorous e√orts to solicit wide support, these seven represented a minority of the Hampshire clergy.≤∫

In Boston the acrimony among the clergy was ampliﬁed by the even less polite debates in the public press. On the pro-awakening side, in March 1743 Thomas Prince inaugurated Christian History, a weekly periodical edited by his son Tom, a recent Harvard graduate, containing news of the ongoing international revivals.≤Ω The ﬁfty-six-year-old Prince Sr. was the most learned Boston pastor, an expert in scientiﬁc matters and author of a history of New England, who was sometimes compared to the late Cotton Mather. Prince had become Edwards' closest friend in Boston, and the Edwards

≤∫≠ A House Divided

family enjoyed visiting in the Prince household. Like his other close relationships, Edwards' friendship with Prince was based on thorough dedication to a common cause. Edwards' Faithful Narrative had been a model of how publication could promote revival, and Edwards shared Prince's enthusiasm for Christian History.

Thomas Fleet, publisher of the Boston Evening Post, responded by ridiculing the proposed new publication. By its own admission, Christian History planned to publish only positive accounts of the revival. Fleet proposed as an alternative ''to publish the progress of enthusiasm in all ages and nations, with the confusions consequent upon it.'' Jonathan Ashley of Deerﬁeld, relishing the anti-revivalist role he had established in his debate with Cooper, joined the attack. Fleet made anti-revival communications a leading feature of his weekly paper. Both Ashley and Fleet accused Thomas Prince Sr. of disingenuousness in saying that young Tom Jr. was the editor, when they were sure Thomas Sr. controlled the publication. Fleet also published separately A Letter from a Gentleman in Scotland, To His Friend in New England, sneering at recent narratives of a ''great awakening'' in Scotland. Accounts of recent spectacular revivals said to have transformed whole Scottish towns were one of the inspirations for Christian History. When Tom Prince attempted to rebut Fleet, the publisher simply resorted to ridicule. The front page letter of the Evening Post for July 4, 1743 (the week of the Harvard Commencement when the New Lights were meeting) was addressed to ''Master Tommy.'' Referring to the younger Prince as ''little master'' and ''child,'' Fleet concluded that ''I look upon it as a wonderful thing that one who undertakes to be a writer of Christian History especially relating to Scotland, should be so totally ignorant of its a√airs.''≥≠

Less than twenty years earlier the Boston clerical establishment, led by the Mathers, had been able to suppress James Franklin's New England Courant, but that time must have seemed light-years away. Now the clergy were so much at each other's throats that laymen on both sides felt free to condemn their ministerial ''superiors.'' The publishers, happy to combine principles with proﬁts, thrived on the debates that the newspapers took into the streets and the taverns. No one any longer could presume to command general respect simply because of his ministerial o≈ce.

Chauncy's Seasonable Thoughts on the State of Religion in New England appeared in September in this acrimonious context. The volume listed more than ﬁve hundred subscribers, not only clergy but also prominent laymen. Perry Miller referred to it aptly as the New England ''social register,'' with

A House Divided ≤∫∞

Governor William Shirley heading the list.≥∞ Though Chauncy had been collecting materials during the previous fall and winter, he had put most of it together after Edwards' volume appeared in March. (In our day of highspeed technology it would have taken the publisher alone at least a year to produce such a theological volume.) Chauncy's title alluded to Edwards' own, and he attacked many of the Northampton pastor's points directly. He also ﬁlled most of the volume with quotations from his own collected observations or from respected authorities, so that his volume at 424 pages was even weightier than Edwards' at 378.≥≤

Since Edwards had already acknowledged most of the excesses of the awakening, Chauncy's argument did not depend, except for e√ect, so much on evidences he had collected as on what one saw as central and what as peripheral. Chauncy, who presented his case within an orthodox Calvinist framework, saw Scripture and reason as the normative guides for the New England way. The recent agitations, he argued, were a repetition of the antinomian controversy of the time of Anne Hutchinson. New England's order and unity had been hard won against persistent dangers of uncontrolled emotions.≥≥ He also compared the excesses of the awakening to other excesses throughout church history, such as the particularly notorious French Prophets who had arisen among Huguenots (another Reformed group) after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes and were known for especially bizarre hyperspiritual behavior. The disorders brought by the recent enthusiasm, far from being peripheral, said Chauncy, were essential distinguishing features of the current revivalism. Although God surely continued to work in New England and some people may have been truly converted, these excesses should be regarded like any other heresy. They were warnings and punishments from God against delusive practices that would lead people away from true faith.≥∂

Underlying the di√erences between Edwards and Chauncy on the awakening was a crucial philosophical issue. ''The plain truth is,'' wrote Chauncy, ''an enlightened mind, and not raised a√ections, ought always be the guide of those who call themselves men; and this, in the a√airs of religion, as well as other things.''≥∑ Chauncy's view of the human psyche, one of the common theories of the time adapted from ancient Greek philosophy, was that the a√ections were most essentially related to the passions of one's animal nature, which needed to be restrained by the higher faculty of reason.

Edwards explicitly attacked this low view of the a√ections in Seasonable Thoughts as based on ''philosophy'' rather than Scripture. ''Some make

≤∫≤ A House Divided

philosophy instead of the Holy Scriptures their rule of judging of this work,'' he chided, ''particularly the philosophical notions they entertain of the nature of the soul, its faculties and a√ections.'' To be consistent with the biblical viewpoint, he insisted, one had to recognize that ''the a√ections of the soul are not properly distinguished from the will, as though they were two faculties in the soul.'' By identifying religious a√ections with the will, Edwards was making them integral to a higher faculty. There were, of course, base passions, arising from one's animal nature, that misled and on which one could not rely. Yet surely the exalted a√ections arising from a true sensible knowledge of God should not be classed with such lower impulses. Only rigid philosophical categories that ignored biblical accounts of the a√ecting character of a change of heart would fail to make such a critical distinction.≥∏

Edwards applied these principles in a revealing statement on the nature of good preaching. Critics of the awakenings alleged that when people heard many sermons in one week they would not be able to remember much of what they had heard. Edwards countered, ''The main beneﬁt that is obtained by preaching is by impression made upon the mind in the time of it, and not by the e√ect that arises afterwards by a remembrance of what was delivered.''≥π

Preaching, in other words, must ﬁrst of all touch the a√ections.

As any perusal of Edwards' sermons will conﬁrm, Edwards' exaltation of the a√ections was never at the expense of reason. Even bodily e√ects, such as crying out or falling down, he said, were legitimate when ''excited by preaching the important truths of God's Word, urged and enforced by proper arguments and motives.''≥∫ He insisted that religious sentiments must be tested for their consistency with reason as well as with Scripture. In other contexts, Edwards had referred to reason as the ''noblest'' or ''highest'' faculty.≥Ω Although he repeatedly emphasized the distinction between mere speculative knowledge and the sensible or practical knowledge of the heart, he also consistently maintained, as he had put it in a 1739 sermon, that ''a speculative knowledge is also of inﬁnite importance in this respect, that without it we can have no spiritual or practical knowledge.''∂≠ Chauncy admired Edwards' intellect and in fact commented in Seasonable Thoughts that it was odd that Edwards questioned the priority of reason when he ''made use of more philosophy . . . than anyone that I know of.''∂∞

Chauncy was well aware, of course, that the underlying debate was an old and familiar one even in Puritan circles. Chauncy stood for the ''intellectualist'' and more Aristotelian (and Thomistic) tradition, which argued that the will should follow the best dictates of reason. Edwards was in the more

A House Divided ≤∫≥

Augustinian ''voluntarist'' camp that viewed the whole person as guided by a√ections of the will.∂≤ Both agreed that the spiritual person had to be strictly guided by Scripture and reason. But the voluntarist emphasized that the intellect, without true a√ections, was insu≈cient for true religion. The proper a√ections of the will must reign in tandem with intellectual truth. The intellectualist, by contrast, saw the a√ections as ﬁrst of all unruly emotions, which could serve the good only when brought into submission to properly informed reason. The distinctions were subtle but they could be of immense practical consequence in shaping one's style of religious expression.

Such ﬁne distinctions would be lost—at least for the time being—because events had put Edwards at such a disastrous disadvantage in this muchheralded cannonade exchange between the two great champions. The state of New England in the fall of 1743, when Chauncy's volume appeared, was vastly di√erent from its condition in the fall of 1742, when Edwards had completed his volume. Edwards' account with its glowing picture of bright lights of the Holy Spirit far outshining any peripheral excesses was already out of date. The general revival was rapidly diminishing while much of its remaining fervor was turning into censorious separatism. Chauncy's volume, in contrast, proved truly ''seasonable.'' Increasingly, the portrayal of the events as dangerous disorders typical of the recurrence of radical sectarianism gained plausibility. Within the New England clerical establishment a substantial New Light party remained, dedicated to defending and promoting continuing revival. Yet now they could never be more than a party.

Edwards not only recognized this calamity but also acknowledged that it had been brought on by the excesses of the friends of the revival, who thus opened the door for its enemies. In May 1743, at the time the breach among the Massachusetts clergy was becoming open, Edwards described the current state of New England in a letter to the Reverend James Robe of Kilsyth, Scotland. Revival ﬁres had been sweeping Scotland at almost the same time as the Great Awakening in New England, so the connection with their Scottish Presbyterian counterparts was becoming tremendously important to the New England proponents of revival. Robe's revivalist experience closely paralleled those of Edwards. He had recently published his own Faithful Narrative, describing an overwhelming revival in Kilsyth, much like the one in Northampton in 1734–35. Edwards, while rejoicing to hear continuing good news from Scotland, lamented, ''we have not such joyful news to send you; the clouds have lately thickened.'' New England was now sadly divided into two parties. ''This is,'' Edwards added, ''very much owing to imprudent

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management in the friends of the work, and a corrupt mixture which Satan has found means to introduce, and our manifold sinful errors, by which we have grieved and quenched the Spirit of God.''∂≥

That Edwards was, remarkably, blaming the radical New Lights rather than the Old Lights for the breakup of New England into censorious parties, reﬂected in part his experience in Northampton. Writing to Thomas Prince in December 1743, in a letter for publication in Christian History (and hence casting matters in as positive a light as he could), Edwards acknowledged that in 1742 the Northampton awakening had been corrupted by ''our people hearing, and some of them seeing the work in other places, where there was a greater visible commotion than here, and the outward appearances were more extraordinary.'' The Northamptonites ''were ready to think that the work in those places far excelled what was amongst us; and their eyes were dazzled with the high profession and great show that some made who came hither from other places.'' Edwards attributed the decline of the awakening to the corruptions introduced by these excesses. Some people were deluded by apparent raptures of joy and being bodily overcome, and they proved to have less the temperament of ''humble, amiable, eminent Christians'' than many who were not so overcome.∂∂

In his letter to Robe, he provided a concise summary of what he had learned from seeing two revivals come and go. Gentleness and genuinely selfrenouncing humility were far better evidences of true saintliness than were merely intense experiences. ''Many among us have been ready to think, that all high raptures are divine,'' Edwards explained, ''but experience plainly shows, that it is not the degree of rapture and ecstasy (although it should be to the third heavens), but the nature and kind that must determine us in their favor.'' Genuine raptures would be accompanied not by a ''noisy showy humility,'' but rather by ''deep humiliation, brokenness of heart, poverty of spirit, mourning for sin, solemnity of spirit, a trembling reverence towards God, tenderness of spirit, self-jealousy and fear, and great engagedness of heart, after holiness of life, and a readiness to esteem others better than themselves.''∂∑

Religious A√ections

Edwards had done his best to make these points to the Northamptonites. As the awakening was receding, defeated by its own excesses, he had preached a series of sermons on the proper place of religious a√ections in the Christian

A House Divided ≤∫∑

life.∂∏ During the next several years he revised and extensively expanded these into his Treatise on Religious A√ections, which ﬁnally appeared in 1746. This careful exposition was immediately reprinted in England and remains the most widely read and admired of his theological works.

If put in the context of Edwards' deeply sobered assessment of the awakening as he viewed it after it exploded into what he saw as delusive enthusiasm in 1742, it is clear that Religious A√ections was not just another volley in the exchange with Chauncy, as might be supposed. Rather, unlike his earlier two awakening works, which were ﬁrst of all designed to show critics that ecstatic phenomena did not prove anything one way or the other, A√ections was directed ﬁrst of all toward the misguided emphases of the extreme New Lights who had led many people into arrogant self-delusion. Far more damage has been done throughout church history, he emphasized in his preface, by the seeming friends of true religion than by its open enemies. Satan's most e√ective device was that while believers were fending o√ open opposition in front of them ''the devil comes behind 'em, and give a fatal stab unseen.'' Satan's essential stratagem in such sneak attacks was to counterfeit true religious experience and thus to fatally corrupt religious movements. Simulated religious experiences could seduce the unregenerate into one of the most pernicious forms of self-aggrandizement. ''By this means, he [Satan] brings in, even the friends of religion, insensibly to themselves, to do the work of enemies, by destroying religion, in a far more e√ectual manner, than open enemies can do.''∂π

Secondarily, though not incidentally, Edwards was also providing an answer to Chauncy. The opening section of the treatise was a concise defense of the proposition that ''True religion, in great part, consists in holy a√ections.'' Rather than thinking of the a√ections as primarily related to the inferior animal passions, as Chauncy did, ''the a√ections of the soul'' were really not distinct from the will which directed the whole person. The will, or one's inclinations or loves, might be called the ''heart'' of the whole person. Moreover, ''The Holy Scriptures do everywhere place religion very much in the a√ections; such as fear hope, love, hatred, desire, joy, sorrow, gratitude, compassion and zeal.''∂∫

Yet Edwards' ﬁrst concern remained with those who already shared his own premises of the centrality of religious a√ections. For them the crucial question was how to tell true religion from its Satanic counterfeits. Merely raised a√ections, as he had said in his earlier treatises, were not decisive evidence one way or the other. He reiterated the point here by expounding

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brieﬂy on twelve signs (essentially various displays of religious fervor) that were ''No Certain Signs that Religious A√ections Are Truly Gracious, or They Are Not.'' He followed these with a much longer section, the heart of the treatise, on twelve ''Distinguishing Signs of Truly Gracious and Holy A√ections.''

One might have supposed, from this systematic format, that Edwards was providing deﬁnitive tests for distinguishing true believers from self-deluded counterfeits. Instead, he took the greatest care to argue that such a project was impossible. Only God could judge the heart. All one ever encounters is the ''outward manifestations and appearances.''∂Ω Judging true a√ections was like trying to judge objects beyond our clear view. ''A ﬁxed star [a true believer] is easily distinguishable from a comet [an enthusiastic hypocrite] in a clear sky; but if we view them through a cloud, it may be impossible to see the di√erence.'' From his scientiﬁc thinking Edwards was always alert to the problems of perception (such as when we perceive the color green, we encounter only the power of a leaf to make us see green). Though he did not go into that di≈cult analogy in dealing with the issue of judging spiritual things, he did point out that not only is the object beyond our adequate vision, but also ''the prevalence of corruption . . . darkens the sight as to all spiritual objects, of which grace is one.'' ''Sin,'' he went on to explain, ''is like some distempers of the eyes, that make things to appear of di√erent colors from which properly belong to them, and like many other distempers, that put the mouth out of taste.''∑≠

Even individuals, then, could not rely simply on looking within to their own intense spiritual experiences, however luminous. As he had in A Divine and Supernatural Light, Edwards described the ''spiritual sense'' that he associated with his ''First Sign'' of genuine a√ections. This sense, which was a restoration of a love for divine things lost in the Fall, was not a new faculty, but ''a new foundation laid in the nature of the soul'' for the exercise of the existing faculties. Regeneration, in other words, changed the whole person by changing the love at the heart of the person's being. The resulting spiritual sense was wonderfully di√erent from anything previously experienced. So Edwards, in a celebrated allusion to Locke, compared the new sense to ''what some metaphysicians call a new simple idea.''∑∞ Despite all that, however, this direct empirical experience was not su≈cient proof that the experience was genuine.

Edwards' ''First Sign'' was not about individuals' experience (which has been a tendency in American evangelicalism ever since the awakening) but

A House Divided ≤∫π

rather about the divine origin of that experience. As he summarized the sign, it was not an empirical test but a tautology: ''A√ections that are truly spiritual and gracious, do arise from those inﬂuences and operations on the heart, which are spiritual, supernatural and divine.''∑≤ Genuine experiences of such divine work had certain features that could be identiﬁed. Yet, invaluable as such experiences were to the true believer, Edwards as the scientiﬁc observer warned that sin could warp the perceptions and Satan could produce counterfeits of these features. So one could never be sure on the basis of seemingly profound experience alone.

In mounting his all-out attack on radical New Lights who relied so readily on subjective feelings, Edwards was drawing on both his own youthful searchings and his disheartening experience of having been misled by some of his parishioners in Northampton. One of the poignant passages in Religious A√ections, if one realizes the degree of Edwards' disappointment with some of his most promising converts at the time he was writing, is one that begins: ''It has been a common thing in the church of God, for such bright professors, that are received as eminent saints, among the saints, to fall away and come to nothing.'' Edwards went on at length to describe these apparent saints who seemed to go through all the proper preparatory steps, who displayed all the proper depths of contrition and heights of joy, and who seemed to validate their faith with abundance of tears, love for Scripture, praise for God, love for others, and on and on. Finally he almost cried out: ''How great therefore may the resemblance be, as to all outward expressions and appearances, between an hypocrite and a true saint!''∑≥

The devil often prevailed against awakenings by manufacturing counterfeits, as he had in the apostolic times, during the Reformation, and in New England ''about an hundred years ago.'' Although Edwards avoided using the term ''Antinomian,'' as Chauncy and others derisively did, he clearly had in mind the controversy surrounding Anne Hutchinson. Radical New Lights, as Hutchinson before them, used heightened subjective experiences as a basis for establishing their own authority and then for judging others. ''I know of no directions or counsels which Christ ever delivered more plainly,'' Edwards responded, ''than the rules he has given us, to guide us in our judging of others' sincerity; viz. that we should judge the tree chieﬂy by the fruit; but yet this won't do; but other ways are found out, which are imagined to be more distinguishing and certain.''∑∂

Edwards' treatise was indeed a powerful defense of the primacy of religious a√ections, but the bulk of its argument was an attack on the authority

≤∫∫ A House Divided

of subjective experience alone. Since the overwhelming danger in any awakening was self-aggrandizing self-deception, Edwards looked for signs that would be checks against these Satan-inspired vices. Several of his twelve signs of genuine a√ections had to do with God being truly both the source and the object of the a√ections. Those signs that had a subjective dimension emphasized self-renunciation and gentleness, as in the signs he designated as ''evangelical humility,'' a ''lamblike, dovelike spirit,'' and ''tenderness of spirit.'' True a√ections would be manifest in a ''beautiful symmetry and proportion'' of virtues, as opposed to the imbalance often seen in the meteoric zeal of the hypocrites.

One can see autobiographical reﬂections in these signs of true a√ections. For instance, cultivating a ''lamblike, dovelike spirit'' and ''tenderness of spirit,'' were goals of his own spiritual discipline, especially di≈cult to achieve for someone in authority. He deplored a proud, censorious spirit and worked hard to suppress it in himself. Likewise, in his account of ''evangelical humility'' he explored the paradox of how the truly eminent saints would not think of themselves as eminent as compared with others. Drawing on his aesthetic understanding of the relation between good and evil, he observed that the greater one's sense of the glories and perfections of the divine, the greater one's own sense of deformity. Hence, while acknowledging that genuine saints might know that they have some true grace, he concluded his exposition of humility with a scathing condemnation of those who set their saintliness on a pedestal or assumed their own spiritual superiority. ''And this may be laid down as an infallible thing: that the person who is apt to think that he, as compared with others, is a very eminent saint . . . in whom this is a ﬁrst thought, that rises of itself, and naturally o√ers itself; he is certainly mistaken.''∑∑

The culmination of all the evidences of grace was the twelfth sign, that ''Gracious and holy a√ections have their exercise and fruit in Christian practice.'' Edwards gave by far the longest attention to this test. ''Religion consists much in holy a√ections;'' he repeated, ''but those exercises of a√ection which are most distinguishing of true religion, are these practical exercises.''∑∏ So the way to gauge the genuineness of one's faith was not to look at one's feelings, but at one's practice. Edwards spoke as an empirical scientist. ''As that is called experimental philosophy, which brings opinion and notions to the test of fact; so is that properly called experimental religion, which brings religious a√ections and intentions, to the like test.''∑π

Edwards was a man of Scripture and a man of rules. He could ﬁnd no Scriptural rules for infallibly identifying true religious a√ections, especially in

A House Divided ≤∫Ω

others, since only God knew the heart. Yet he found many biblical rules as to what true a√ections ought to look like and insisted that one could do no better than take these signs as one's guides. Mature true saints who examined themselves by these guidelines could attain a high degree of assurance, even though they would ﬁnd in themselves many imperfections and increasing knowledge of their own self-deceptions. Weaker or backslidden saints might never be able to be sure of their true estates but still would beneﬁt by holding up their experience to the biblical template.

Edwards concluded Religious A√ections by answering the objection that this emphasis on practice might seem like a new legalism. To the contrary, he said, it was all carefully premised on standard Calvinist doctrine that a genuine work of grace would lead to keeping God's commandments. Edwards was dedicated to the old New England way that celebrated grace and lived by law. He was not going to let revival enthusiasm displace that balance which was disciplined into the very marrow of his bones.

Especially he feared Satan's ability to subvert the awakening by appealing to human self-centeredness. The inﬂated human ego was the devil's playground, and in revival times his favorite ploy was to simulate evangelical experience. Edwards refused a blanket condemnation of the reliance on personal testimony that would become normative for evangelicalism, but he had already seen how Satan could use the contagiousness of revival enthusiasm as a means of exploiting human egotism. ''True saints,'' Edwards observed with typical God-centeredness, are ''inexpressibly pleased and delighted with . . . the things of God.'' Hypocrites, by contrast, revel in themselves. ''The hypocrite has his mind pleased and delighted, in the ﬁrst place, with his own privilege, and the happiness which he supposes he has attained, or shall obtain.''∑∫

The best answer to such superﬁciality was disciplined Christian action. The community of believers would be far better o√, Edwards wrote in his concluding sentences, if ''it would become fashionable for men to shew their Christianity, more by an amiable distinguished behavior, than by an abundant and excessive declaring their experiences.'' Christians would be far more e√ective in their witness if they, with ''becoming Christian humility and modesty,'' were ''lively in the service of God and our generation, than by the liveliness and forwardness of our tongues, and making a business of proclaiming on the house tops, with our mouths, the holy and eminent acts and exercises of our hearts.'' An awakening of such e√ects, he concluded, ''instead of hardening spectators, and exceedingly promoting inﬁdelity and atheism,

≤Ω≠ A House Divided

would above all things tend to convince men that there is a reality in religion, and greatly awaken them, and win them, by convincing their consciences of the importance and excellency of religion.''∑Ω

Although Edwards still championed the priceless blessings of the awakening and was thoroughly constructive in tone, he could well understand something of the objections of the Chauncys of the world. Even though his whole treatise was a refutation of Chauncy's premise of the priority of reason over the a√ections, Edwards was nearly as critical of the turn the awakening had taken as was the Boston pastor and often in nearly the same ways. New England was deeply divided and in religious shambles. The over-zealous purveyors of a spiritual religion who ignored biblical rules had not only given comfort to Old Light cynicism but also had unwittingly promoted atheism and inﬁdelity. The revival that Edwards longed for so intently had come, but many of its results were not what he had anticipated.

C H A P T E R ∞∫ kl

A Model Town No More

dwards dismissed from his congregation? At the beginning of 1744, after one of the most remarkable decades in the history of parish ministries, it would have been hard to imagine that by 1750 he would be gone. The admiring Samuel Hopkins, who in 1744 was still a frequent guest in the Edwards household, later wrote that ''Mr. Edwards was very happy in the esteem and love of his people for many years, and there was the greatest prospect of his living and dying so.'' In fact, claimed Hopkins, ''he was the last minister almost in New England that would have been pitched upon to be opposed and renounced by his people.''∞

Edwards himself was publicly optimistic, if guardedly so. Writing in December 1743 an account of the past few years of awakening in Northampton for Thomas Prince's Christian History, he put the best construction on things in hopes of edifying an international audience by the experience of his city on a hill. Although the revival ﬁres had cooled during the past year and he feared that ''a considerable number'' may ''have woefully deceived themselves,'' that was outbalanced by ''a great number'' among whom ''there are amiable appearances of eminent grace.'' So far as he knew, there were few instances among the professing Christians of ''scandalous sin.'' And the notorious party spirit that had plagued the town for the past thirty years had greatly diminished. The townspeople had recently settled a particularly troubling dispute that pitted the older ideals of common lands against newer emphases on private property. After ﬁfteen years of ﬁghting over the matter, they agreed to allow residents to cut much-needed wood on designated strips of private but unimproved land.≤ This arrangement was limited to ten years but evidenced just the sort of Christian spirit Edwards had hoped to cultivate by instituting the town covenant in 1742.≥

≤Ω≤ A Model Town No More

[To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.]

A twentieth-century artist's conception of late eighteenth-century Northampton, showing the 1737 meetinghouse and the town house of 1739

By March 1744 Edwards' hopes for the long-term e√ects of the awakening took a severe jolt. Writing to Reverend William McCulloch, a Scottish correspondent, he acknowledged he had been too optimistic in thinking that the awakenings might be the dawn of the days preceding the millennium. McCulloch had enjoyed one of the greatest of the Scottish revivals in his parish at Cambuslang, near Glasgow. Yet McCulloch was more cautious about the immediate future than Edwards had been. He agreed with Edwards that it was remarkable that Isaiah 59:19 predicted God's triumph in a ﬁnal worldwide awakening progressing from west to east, but he believed Edwards had failed to allude to ''some dreadful stroke or trial'' that must precede those ''glorious times.''∂ Edwards, always trying to be alert to the counterattacks of Satan, was ready to back away from the brighter hopes published in Some Thoughts. He now reported that the present state of New England was ''on many accounts very melancholy.''∑

In Northampton much that Edwards had built up in the past ﬁfteen years came crashing down in one small-town squabble. Around the time Edwards

A Model Town No More ≤Ω≥

wrote to McCulloch, he learned that a number of young men of his congregation, all aged twenty-one to twenty-nine, had been passing around books on popular medicine and midwifery, quoting from them to each other in a lewd joking manner and using the information in them to taunt young women about their menstruation. To make matters worse, the books had been used for salacious mirth for as much as ﬁve years. Three young men—Oliver Warner, an enterprising apprentice who had o√ered to show the principal book to others for ten shillings, and cousins Timothy and Simeon Root—

were the leading o√enders, but up to twenty of the mostly unmarried young men had been peripherally involved. All but three were church members.∏

Samuel Hopkins, who was in Northampton during at least part of the episode (it was in May that he escorted Jerusha to Boston), reported that the turning point in Edwards' standing in Northampton came as a result of a tactical error in his initial handling of the crisis. According to Hopkins, when Edwards learned of the lascivious behavior and gathered some preliminary evidence, he brought the matter to the church. After preaching on Hebrews 12:15–16, ''Looking diligently, lest any man fail of the grace of God, lest any root of bitterness springing up trouble you, and thereby many be deﬁled: lest there be any fornicator, or profane person . . . ,'' Edwards asked ''the brethren of the church'' to stay after the Sunday service to hear about the matter. They readily assented to choose a number of leading men of the community to assist the pastor in hearing the case. This was all standard procedure for a matter that had, at least, a semipublic character.

Edwards announced a time when the committee would meet at his house and, in a fateful mistake, read o√ a list of people ordered to report there. The list included some who were accused and some who were witnesses, but Edwards failed to disclose any such distinction. Some of the young people named were from, or related to, prominent families. According to Hopkins, before the townspeople reached their homes some leading citizens were condemning the procedure. By the time the committee met ''the town was suddenly all on a blaze.''π

The case was not simply one of an overzealous pastor trying to stamp out minor expressions of illicit sexuality when he learned that a few young men were making erotic use of books on sex and midwifery. Edwards abhorred sexual indulgence as especially distracting from the vastly higher beauty of spiritual things, but he knew that young people were always prone to private sexual sins and that, except perhaps at the height of revivals, there was always some loose social behavior among the town's youth. He could not have hoped

≤Ω∂ A Model Town No More

to suppress every private misdemeanor. Church discipline would normally be reserved for much graver sins, such as fornication, and even that was to be dealt with privately before becoming a matter of church discipline.∫ Edwards knew that lewd uses of sexual information from medical books was hardly the worst of what went on when the barn doors were closed. Yet he was convinced there were factors in this case—and he initially persuaded the leading men of the congregation—that made it more than a matter of ordinary sexual misdemeanors.

With the town in an uproar, Edwards presented a defense of his action. We still have his notes. (Ever frugal, Edwards wrote these notes on three pieces of fan paper, apparently scraps of the material Sarah and her daughters used for making fans.)Ω The pastor, people were saying, should not have taken the initiative in launching such an investigation. ''Shall the master of the ship,'' he retorted, ''not inquire when he fears the ship is running on the rocks.'' All societies, including churches, have the power of self-preservation. It was his duty to be the watchman who sounded the alarm. Even though no one else had ﬁled a formal complaint, if he himself saw a danger he could not responsibly ignore it.

Crucial to his case for bringing the matter to the church was that the o√ense was a public matter. Had it been private, he would have properly followed the biblical injunction of Matthew 18 and dealt with the matter privately, as some were now saying he should have done. He replied that the matter already had become one of some fame, and there was no way to determine the extent of the lascivious behavior without examining witnesses, which would inevitably make it all the more notorious.

Even by today's standards the behavior might have been a public concern. Men were taunting women about sexual matters. Joanna Clark testiﬁed, for instance, that about a year before, Oliver Warner had jeered at her and others, '' 'When does the moon change girls? Come, I'll look at your [face] and see whether there be a blue circle 'round your eyes.' '' This was the sort of lore that one could get from any one of a number of a well-known handbooks written by pseudo-Aristotles. One popular version, Aristotle's Compleat Master Piece in Three Parts: Displaying the Secrets of Nature in the Generation of Man, featured, as its subtitle suggested, information and lore about men's and women's anatomy and sexual functions, presented in a scientiﬁc tone but also designed to titillate with ''secret'' information.∞≠ Another book was a more straightforward midwife's manual, The Midwife Rightly Instructed, which Elizabeth Pomeroy, from a prominent Northampton family, testiﬁed she

A Model Town No More ≤Ω∑

found hidden—not by her mother—in the chimney of her house.∞∞ Mary Downing testiﬁed that two years earlier Oliver Warner and others had been reading from a book: ''They all did so. What they laughed and made sport of was about girls, things concerning girls that is unclean to speak of. They seemed to boast as if they knew about girls, knew what belonged to girls as well as girls themselves.'' Bathsheba Negro, a slave of Major Seth Pomeroy, added that those who were laughing at the book and at the girls were ''Ready to kiss them, and catch hold of the girls and shook 'em. Timothy Root in particular.'' Mary Downing further testiﬁed that as recently as two weeks previously another young man referred to ''a granny book'' and then laughed and ''talked exceeding uncleanly and lasciviously so that I never hear any fellow go so far.'' After he left all the young women there agreed that ''we never heard any such talk come out of any man's mouth whatsoever. It seemed to me to be almost as bad as tongue could express.''∞≤

By today's standards, this would be a case of sexual harassment. We might add that Edwards was, after all, the father of teenage daughters. So one might understand why he would be outraged by such recurring patterns of behavior. Judging from the witnesses, he had learned about the o√enses from a network of women with whom his daughters or other women in his household may have had connections. His action might be seen as taking the side of women who, once encouraged to speak, had real complaints.

To attempt to justify Edwards by our contemporary norms, however, would be at least partly anachronistic because he viewed things through such di√erent lenses. The taunting of the women was indeed a serious public concern.∞≥ Sensitivities from having lived most of his life in households surrounded by women may have increased Edwards' revulsion against breaking taboos about what men might say to women. Yet the foreground of his thought was very di√erent from most of today's standards. Not only did he approach the matter strictly in his role as pastor, keeping his personal feelings out of sight, he viewed the issues, as he did everything else, through the lens of Scripture. His main point to the Northamptonites was that the o√enses were ''scandalous.'' In the biblical sense ''scandal'' meant a stumbling block or that which injures one spiritually. He quoted numerous biblical texts that made this point, the clearest being Romans 14:13, ''that no man put a stumbling-block or an occasion to fall in his brother's way.'' Other verses, he pointed out, explicitly condemned sexual sins, such as looking on a woman's nakedness, even in imagination. Yet crucial to the matter being a public church concern was that the o√enders were communicating the practices to

≤Ω∏ A Model Town No More

others and hence causing them to stumble. Colossians 3:8, ''Put away all ﬁlthy communication out of your mouth,'' and other verses made the biblical demand unmistakable.∞∂

Edwards framed the question then not as a gender issue, but as contagious public speech that threatened souls. Young men had created a lascivious underground and were corrupting other young people. Most of those involved were church members who had been taking communion. Those who were promoting a profane culture among the young had created stumbling blocks that endangered the eternal destinies of their neighbors.∞∑

For Edwards, the most agonizing aspect of the discovery was that most of the young men involved were his spiritual children. He knew that the seductive culture they were promoting in the taverns and behind the barns was a powerful countermovement to the awakening. The reemergence of a profane and irreverent young people's culture could quickly subvert the successes of the internationally renowned revivals. Young people had been at the center of his success as a pastor. He had told the world the story in his celebrated Faithful Narrative. When he had inherited the ﬂock from his grandfather, many of the young people had been out of control—disrespectful in the meeting and accustomed to Sunday night frolics, loose speech, and other licentious behavior. His greatest triumph in the awakening of 1734–35 was in vastly reducing the public manifestations of such behavior—not by repressing it, but by organizing young people's religious meetings and by helping foster a contagious spiritual atmosphere so that for a time the young seemed to talk of almost nothing but spiritual matters.

Most of the young men involved with the lascivious use of the books had been in their early teens during that ﬁrst awakening and had joined the church since.∞∏ In the hiatus between the two awakenings Edwards felt the spiritual condition of Northampton had fallen low and saw some of the old practices returning. In a 1738 afternoon sermon on a communion Sunday, Edwards preached on how Joseph had ﬂed the seductions of Potiphar's wife. All experience with human nature, he argued, showed that certain practices led toward sin. Tavern-haunting accompanied by excessive drinking and card playing, for instance, had been shown throughout history to lead to much wickedness. Even more alarming was ''the custom in particular, of young people of di√erent sexes reclining together—however little is made of it, and however ready persons may be to laugh at it being condemned.'' Not only bundling, but late night frolicking and dancing were being revived. ''When the wise man says, 'there is a time to dance,' '' he observed wryly, ''that does

A Model Town No More ≤Ωπ

not prove that the dead of night is the time for it.'' Surely nighttime merrymaking led to the ''frequent breaking out of gross sins; fornication in particular.'' Young people who had just partaken of communion, yet were not ﬂeeing such irresistible temptations, were (as Scripture said) ''eating and drinking judgment to yourselves.''∞π

Always uncomfortable with the Stoddardean standards for church membership because they increased the probability that profane persons would desecrate the most holy worship of God, Edwards had long used communion services to warn against the terrible dangers of hypocrisy. Eating and drinking unworthily, he warned his congregation, was to partake of Christ's ﬂesh like bloodthirsty animals, to eat it in malice like murderers, ''guilty of the body and blood of the Lord.'' It was like coming into the presence of a great prince with garments purposefully deﬁled with excrement.∞∫ Because Edwards had a high view of Christ's holy spiritual presence, not just in the bread and the wine but in all of worship, the warnings extended to any irreverence toward the ''ordinances'' for proper worship. To pretend to praise Christ, while living lives that mocked him, with no intention of reform, was like joining those who taunted him at his cruciﬁxion and shouted ''Hail, King of the Jews.''∞Ω

The hypocrisy of profane persons at communion was especially reprehensible because the ceremony involved the most solemn renewal of the covenant on which Christ, in the sacrament, put his seal. ''What a horrible piece of mockery is it,'' Edwards cried in a typical passage, ''to engage and promise themselves explicitly at owning the covenant . . . when they actually . . . do live allowedly in things directly contrary: contrary to the gospel, contrary to the holy religion of Christ!'' These hypocrites ''go on in the indulgences of their ﬁlthy lusts and come away from them, and pretend, like saints, to commemorate Christ's death and to eat his ﬂesh and drink his blood and give up themselves to Christ, and then go from the table of God to their old courses again.''≤≠

In 1744 that was still the heart of the matter. In his notes for his defense he concluded with, ''Why I can't give these persons the ordinance of the Lord's Supper.'' In light of what was ahead in his relationship to his congregation, these words might be seen as the proverbial ﬁre bell ringing in the night. The scandalous counterspiritual culture he was combating was a matter for church concern because the church itself was being corrupted. Townspeople, who in good Stoddardean fashion made little distinction between the church and the town, saw the young men's behavior as just more of the usual misdemeanors that it would be unrealistic to try to suppress. Edwards saw it as critical to the

≤Ω∫ A Model Town No More

purity of the church and to the health of young parishioners, more and more of whom might be drinking damnation to themselves. Stoddardean practice did provide for barring persons of scandalous behavior from communion. Yet for Edwards, if the town was unwilling to bear the scrutiny that rule properly implied, then it might be time to rethink the whole system that so confused the line between church and town.

Edwards had already attempted to solve the problem through the solemn covenant just two years earlier. While the adults renounced all sorts of contentiousness and promised to live in Christian charity, the young, who had again been at the heart of an awakening, renounced the sins of youth. They had solemnly promised ''never to allow ourselves in any youthful diversions and pastimes'' that ''would sinfully tend to hinder the devoutest, and most engaged spirit in religion.'' Speciﬁcally, they swore ''that we will strictly avoid all freedoms and familiarities in company, so tending either to stir up or gratify a lust of lasciviousness.''≤∞ Now Edwards found that some young church members had all along been engaged in the very behavior they had so piously renounced. Although he was always upset about sexual sins, this case was vastly compounded by both covenant breaking and betrayal of the international awakening

Edwards had much invested in the larger issues. He had just published his account of the recent revival in Thomas Prince's Christian History where he featured this solemn covenant as a model for all the world to see. Edwards' narrative did note that ''some of the young people especially have shamefully lost their liveliness and vigor in religion and much of the seriousness and solemnity of their spirits.''≤≤ Now he gained a new glimpse at the depth of the subversive subculture of some of his young adult church members.

From his preliminary investigations Edwards recognized that the behavior was not only scandalously sexual in nature, but it involved the spread of a young people's underground that was consciously deﬁant of church authority. Several of the principal witnesses, who told of the most notorious instances of taunting young women, testiﬁed that the young men had been reading ''a book that they called the Bible in a laughing way.'' Timothy Root in particular called it ''the young folks' Bible.''≤≥ In a Calvinist community where there were few sacred objects and where the Bible was the highest authority, this was serious sacrilege.

Irreverence and disrespect of church authority soon became a much larger issue. During the initial church meeting when Edwards asked the congregation to stay after the regular service so that he could alert them to the situa-

A Model Town No More ≤ΩΩ

tion, Timothy and Simeon Root were seen whispering and laughing. Soon, perhaps emboldened by the complaints from prominent citizens about the procedure, their disrespect turned to open deﬁance. The accused and witnesses gathered to meet with the committee of the church at the Edwardses' home. The committee was a formidable group, including Colonel John Stoddard, Edwards, and four other leading men. While the committee deliberated and interviewed witnesses, everyone else was asked to wait, probably sitting on hard benches. It was a ﬁne spring day. When the committee-room door was open Simeon Root said loudly, ''What do we do here? We won't stay here all day long.'' Next the two Roots sent someone in to ask if they could go out for refreshment. He came back saying ''the committee was very much displeased.'' Timothy Root declared dramatically, ''I won't worship a wig.'' When others objected that some persons were due respect, Root kept repeating, ''I won't worship a wig.''

Making good on his deﬁance, Timothy Root and his cousin Simeon quietly walked out. They were next seen at the tavern with a ''company that called for a mug of ﬂip and drank it.'' Returning to the Edwardses' house, the rebels convinced the other young men to go outside as well. Timothy Root, in a wonderful example of how a Calvinist low view of human nature might make one a revolutionary, declared that the committee ''are nothing but men molded up of a little dirt.'' He added (in less Calvinistic terms), ''I don't care a turd'' and ''I don't care a fart'' for any of them. The revolution was limited, however, since the young men went only as far as the back of Edwards' lot where they played leapfrog and other games. Yet they had made their point of deﬁance. Timothy Root ﬁnally left the premises entirely, urging others to do the same. ''If they have any business with me,'' he loudly proclaimed, ''they may come to me; I ben't obliged to wait any longer on their arses, as I have done.''≤∂

Eventually the committee caught up with Root, but the case was not settled until June. In the meantime, the town was seething with resentments as debates dragged on. In the end, the committee required only the ringleaders to make public confessions. That may have reﬂected the town's resistance to making a public example of every o√ender, but it was also consistent with Edwards' point that it was the scandalous or stumbling-block character of the o√enses with which he was most concerned.

In the end, the confessions of Timothy and Simeon Root do not mention the sexual o√enses at all, even though these had been copiously documented in the testimony. Rather, their confessions concern solely their ''scandalously

≥≠≠ A Model Town No More

contemptuous behavior towards the authority of this church in their late proceeding in the a√air.''≤∑ Perhaps town pressures had forced Edwards and the committee to drop any public rebuke for the sexual misdemeanors. Edwards drew up a confession for Oliver Warner dealing solely with sexual behavior, probably with the intent that Warner be made a public example by having to read it before the church. In it Warner would acknowledge ''very unclean and lascivious expressions,'' speciﬁcally referring only to the testimony of Joanna Clark and Bathsheba Negro (who had reported his taunting remarks). That language was ''unbecoming of a Christian, and of a very scandalous nature.'' Edwards noted that the confessions of the Roots were ''owned June 1744,'' but there is no such notation for Warner. So possibly Edwards drew up the sample confession as the strongest case of a public sexual o√ense, but it was never implemented. We cannot be sure.≤∏

This episode is now usually called ''the bad book case,'' but that is misleading. That designation ﬁts a stock story of book censorship. Popular nineteenth-century interpreters speculated that Edwards was trying to suppress such novels as Pamela (which turns out to be the one novel we now know the Edwardses owned).≤π The alternative, '' 'young folks' Bible' case'' is somewhat better. It suggests that the o√ense was more in what was said publicly than in what was read privately. It also highlights the issues of sacrilege, hypocrisy, and ''scandal'' that were so crucial to Edwards' consternation over this lascivious public speech.

One way to read the incident is as one of changing sexual mores and gender relationships. Puritans had long sought to regulate sexual activities and suppress loose sexual speech. The conﬂicts in Northampton in the 1740s were in essence not so di√erent from those in English towns that were under Puritan rule in the 1610s and 1620s.≤∫ Any program of sexual repression would involve perennial conﬂict with the tavern and youth culture. The di√erence was that in a town like Northampton, which had always had authoritarian ministerial leadership, sexual speech apparently had long been suppressed in the public domain.

The most striking feature of the ''young folks' Bible'' ﬁasco was that the o√enders were not fourteen-year-old boys, but young men in their twenties acting like fourteen-year-old boys. Their degree of titillation over basic information about female physiology suggests a remarkable level of sexual immaturity. That such subjects could be the source of perennial mirth suggests, in turn, a notable suppression of above-ground sources for that information.

The origins of the extraordinary awakening of 1734–35 were probably

A Model Town No More ≥≠∞

related to an unusually large cohort of unmarried young people. Without new lands, young men and women were postponing marriage and continuing to live with their parents.≤Ω Young adults with this ill-deﬁned status may have been particularly susceptible to revival. In any case, when the fervor of awakenings wore o√, young men, who had lived through years of public restraint, were easily amused by the simplest sexual innuendo. Adding to the tensions of their situation, sexual mores and gender relationships were changing in the British world—as they always are. Historian Ava Chamberlain has pointed out that during the 1740s, in addition to the ''young folks' Bible'' case, Edwards dealt with three contested paternity cases. In each the young men disputed Edwards' and the church's judgments and were additionally charged with contempt for authority or for evading their responsibility and punishment. Chamberlain interprets these as indicating a breakdown of the older communal ideal and the assertion of greater sexual freedom for men than was allowed for women.≥≠

If we consider the suppression of public sexual speech for young men in awakened Northampton in the context of the growing assertions in British culture of male rights to sexual freedom, we can imagine the sort of resentments that had been building. Even when Edwards and the awakening seemed to be largely succeeding, the pressures on unmarried young men were immense—all the more so because they were aware of very di√erent standards elsewhere. Once the awakening collapsed, the resulting resentments came out in the open with little to restrain them. Edwards was attributing momentous importance to behavior that looked trivial, even if childish and distasteful, to many other inhabitants of the town. The more he made of it, the more he lost support. Hopkins remarks that as a result of this incident Edwards ''greatly lost his inﬂuence,'' especially among the young people, and that ''this seemed in a great measure to put an end to Mr. Edwards' usefulness at Northampton.''≥∞ Edwards himself later referred to it as that ''which gave so great o√ense, and by which I became so obnoxious.''≥≤

Resentments against the Edwardses now came out in other ways.≥≥ As in many New England towns, tensions had been building regarding the pastor's salary, a tax matter decided at yearly town meetings. In 1744 that issue was smoldering below the surface when the ''young folks' Bible'' scandal broke into ﬂames.≥∂ Underlying the salary disputes was inﬂation. Edwards' salary, while relatively generous, was not keeping up with the combination of rising prices and a growing family. Also, since money was scarce, payments were often slow. In March 1744 Sarah, who managed the family ﬁnances, asked the

≥≠≤ A Model Town No More

town for past-due salary, stating that ''Mr. Edwards in under such obligations that he can't possibly do without it.''≥∑

By November, with relations between the pastor and the town now damaged by the young folks' controversy, all the pettiness of a small town emerged over the salary issue. Sarah and their daughters felt the brunt of the criticism, so much so that Edwards wrote a formal rejoinder complaining that while the town had generously voted him an addition of ﬁfty pounds in the spring, there had been ''many jealousies expressed of me and my family, as though we were lavish.'' Among some townspeople ''much fault was found . . . with our manner of spending, with the clothes that we wore and the like.'' Because he believed there were some errors in matters of fact, Edwards proposed to provide a strict accounting of some of the matters in question, especially that which had ''been laid up for my children.''≥∏

One clue that the family did occasionally display some aristocratic pretensions is a surviving bill, which Edwards used for sermon notes in March 1743, for £11 (about a week's salary) for ''a gold locket and chain'' for ''Mrs. Edwards.''≥π Another is a silver patch box, designed for holding felt ''beauty marks,'' later found on the Edwards' property in Stockbridge. On the other hand, at the time of Jonathan's death in 1758, the inventory of his estate did not reveal many luxury items. The family owned a set of eighteen knives and forks, a nicety of the gentry in a generation that was still undergoing the transition toward modern eating habits. They also owned a couple of teapots, for the enjoyment of a new delicacy of the day, and twelve china tea cups and plates. They had a dozen wine glasses, a small amount of other china, and many pewter dishes.≥∫ Still, even a few displays of fashion in Northampton were su≈cient to generate backbiting.

The ever-resourceful Timothy Root managed to combine the two controversies for his purposes. When the investigating committee asked him about his remark ''I won't worship a wig,'' Root replied that his only concern had been that some of the witnesses would not be at their best because they would be ''terriﬁed with the ﬁne clothes of some of the committee.'' He did not mean ''any disdain or contempt.'' Colonel Stoddard, presumably dressed in his best court clothes and wig, was certainly formidable, as apparently so were some others of the committee. Edwards dressed plainly, except for a wig, but Root, knowing that the question of expensive clothes was a sore point, made the most of it.

Edwards was so frustrated with begging the town for money each year and then enduring resentments if increases were granted that he proposed

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[To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.]

Sarah Edwards' silver patch box

that his salary be ﬁxed except for an adjustment for inﬂation. Even this, he had to reassure, was not ''leading you into any snare.'' The facts were that he had a large and ever-growing family to bring up. Moreover, their house was virtually a hotel, bearing the expense of increasing numbers of visitors. ''By the increase of my family's acquaintance . . . my house will probably become still more a place of resort, as it has been more and more so for many years past.''≥Ω Despite the seeming merits of so resolving the dispute, the argument went on for four more years. The town continued to give him salary increases, even surpassing the rate of inﬂation, but every year was a battle and Edwards did not think his income kept pace with his ever-increasing expenses.∂≠

Edwards' increasing tensions with his parishioners had a broader economic and spiritual dimension. He was trying to shepherd a people who were undergoing a ''transition from yeoman society to agrarian capitalism.''∂∞ The capitalist market revolution was only in its ﬂedgling stages in growing Northampton, but Edwards was not among its friends. Unlike some of his British contemporaries who had more optimistic views of the self-regulating market, Edwards deplored free enterprise as bringing out the worst in human nature. He had long condemned the self-interested avarice that permeated the society and pointedly identiﬁed inﬂation and price ﬂuctuations as moral issues.

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'' 'Tis certainly no good rule,'' he declared, ''that men may buy as cheap and sell as dear as they can.'' Rather than condoning a free economy, Edwards believed that the magistrates should regulate prices so that commodities sold at their intrinsic worth. The calamitous price ﬂuctuations, he declared, were the result of ''a greedy sp[irit]'' in those who would ''advance their private interests on the great loss and damage of the public society.''∂≤

Edwards' view of the just society was not far from that of Massachusetts' ﬁrst governor, John Winthrop, in the Model of Christian Charity, preached on shipboard in 1630. God had ordained hierarchical orders that should be governed as commonwealth, bound together by the law of love. In the Northampton covenant of 1742 Edwards had the townspeople promise to live under the rule of fair business practice and charity. In 1743, after a four-year campaign, Edwards convinced his congregation to institute a collection for the poor at every Sabbath service.∂≥ In an era before insurance, that was a vital public service. Samuel Hopkins maintained that Edwards had ''uncommon regard'' for ''liberality, and charity to the poor and distressed.'' Edwards spoke often of the need for every congregation to keep up ''a public stock'' for its poor and, said Hopkins, he backed up his public advice with private action. Much of his almsgiving was in secret. Hopkins knew of one case ﬁrsthand. Edwards had heard of a man, neither acquaintance nor kin, who was in great distress due to an illness and asked Hopkins to deliver ''a considerable sum'' to him, but to tell no one. Hopkins was sure there were many such instances that would be ''unknown till the resurrection.''∂∂ The townspeople, however, were by the 1740s disposed to see Edwards as himself grasping in his salary demands. He, in turn, saw many of them as not only avaricious but as unwilling to recognize a fundamental principle of the model society: that those in authority should receive their due.

For Edwards the return of the town's contentiousness signaled a deeper and more distressing problem. Many communicant church members were not showing proper evidence of a regenerate life. The ''young folks' Bible'' controversy and the townspeople's indi√erence to its seriousness may have been the last straw that broke his patience and settled his mind on this issue that had long been gnawing at him. During 1745, when he was writing Religious A√ections, it was much on his mind as he described the signs that should distinguish true believers from hypocrites. Many of his contentious Northamptonite parishioners seemed ominously lacking in some of those evidences, such as having ''the lamblike, dovelike spirit and temper of Jesus Christ'' or displaying the twelfth and most essential sign of ''Christian prac-

A Model Town No More ≥≠∑

tice.'' He included in Religious A√ections some oblique references to his change in view, remarking, for instance, that ''there ought to be good reason, from the circumstances of the profession [of faith] to think that the professor don't make such a profession out of a mere customary compliance with a prescribed form . . . as confessions of faith are often subscribed.''∂∑ Yet, for the time being, recognizing the potential explosion in the town if he announced his departure from his revered grandfather Stoddard's practice, he revealed the full implications of his thought only to Sarah and some intimate friends.∂∏

C H A P T E R ∞Ω kl

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ne reason for Edwards to keep to himself about his momentous change of mind regarding church membership in 1744–45 was that New England was at war, both literally and ﬁguratively. The literal war was King George's War, or the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–48), which became a major New England concern when France joined in the hostilities against England in spring 1744. Colonel John Stoddard was the chief military commander in western Massachusetts, and in 1745 the townspeople and Edwards would be united by both a dramatic o√ensive against the French and a defense against the Indians. Through the lens of Edwards' understanding of biblical prophesies, these hostilities were signiﬁcant primarily as they ﬁt into the larger picture of God's plans for the spread of the Gospel in the latter days. In the meantime Edwards was deeply embroiled in a bitter, if ﬁgurative, intercolonial war.

The Old Light versus New Light hostilities, which were already intense by the end of 1743, reached a fever pitch with the news, in 1744, that Whiteﬁeld would be returning to New England in the fall. To many, the spread of separatism threatened to bring alarming social disruptions. Anti-revivalists, strengthened by such fears, had already gained the advantage in elite circles. Now they were proclaiming that Whiteﬁeld was a dangerous fanatic. ''Many ministers,'' Edwards recounted in a public letter the next year, ''were more alarmed at his coming, than they would have been by the arrival of a ﬂeet from France, and they began soon to preach and write against him, to warn people to beware of him, as a most dangerous person.'' Edwards, an avid reader of Boston newspapers, had seen how in the Boston Evening Post and in pamphlets Whiteﬁeld's opponents had kept up a merciless barrage of ridicule, satire, and dire warnings. Edwards, given to hyperbole in historical com-

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parisons, wrote: ''I question whether history a√ords any instance paralleled with this, as so much pains taken in writing to blacken a man's character, and render him odious.''∞

Edwards himself was in the middle of one of the less edifying exchanges. During the Harvard commencement season of July 1744, Rector Thomas Clap of Yale told many people that he had it on the word of Edwards himself that Whiteﬁeld was engaged in a plot to overthrow the standing order of New England. Clap was a thoroughly conservative Old Light, a strict defender of Puritan orthodoxy, as contrasted with Chauncy, a progressive Old Light or protoliberal anti-revivalist. Clap was also, if his principal biographer and generations of Yale students are to be believed, a di≈cult authoritarian personality. As Louis Leonard Tucker, the biographer, put it, he ruled Yale College for twenty-ﬁve years in the spirit of Louis XIV, ''Le collège, c'est moi!''≤

Clap had been furious with Edwards since September 1741, when Edwards had undercut Clap and the trustees at the Yale commencement by defending all but the extremes of revival enthusiasm in The Distinguishing Marks. Clap and Edwards, who were the same age and not entirely unlike in temperament, had been allied champions of orthodoxy in the Breck case. Clap had even cautiously encouraged Whiteﬁeld and the awakening at the college until, with the visit of Gilbert Tennent, he saw it turning students toward enthusiasm and separatism. During the school year after Edwards' visit, Clap's iron-hand e√orts to suppress these tendencies brought such strong student reaction that in the spring he was forced to suspend classes and send the students home. Clap was also a principal in convincing the Connecticut legislature to attempt to suppress the New Light movement by legal ﬁat.≥

In May 1743 Clap and Edwards happened to meet on the road to Boston, where both were headed for the annual election week activities (the occasion when an Old Light majority made the ﬁrst ministerial declaration against the awakening). Edwards' oldest daughter Sarah was riding on the same horse with her father (Sarah senior was conﬁned at home, having just given birth to a new daughter, Eunice, their eighth child). Clap rode together with the Edwardses for hours, arguing with Jonathan about the events of the time and their di√erences. Others were in the larger company of pilgrims, including of all people Robert Breck, which perhaps helped throw Edwards and Clap together.

Over a year later, in July 1744, when all the talk in Boston was of Whiteﬁeld's return, Clap told numerous people that Edwards had said that Whiteﬁeld ''told me he designed to turn the generality of ministers in the country

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out of their places, and bring over ministers from England, Scotland, and Ireland, and place them in their room.''∂ Now Edwards was furious. Clap's report put Whiteﬁeld at the center of a conspiracy against the ministerial establishment of New England and, if true, would ruin the itinerant's reputation. Edwards (who was still trying to get over the ''young folks' Bible'' ﬁasco of the spring) wrote to Clap to set the record straight. After an exchange of several letters, Clap not only would not give in, but went into print, using the letters to vindicate his claim. Edwards replied and each followed with a second pamphlet-letter.

The exchange over who said what was hardly edifying. Edwards pointed out that if he had heard from Whiteﬁeld such an astonishing plot as Clap reported, he would hardly have chosen Clap as the person in whom to conﬁde such information. Edwards did acknowledge that he had heard from Whiteﬁeld of a desire to bring some clergy from England (certainly not from Ireland where there was no revival) to support the e√orts of the Tennents in the Middle Colonies. He also had a few criticisms of Whiteﬁeld, but he did not recall having discussed Whiteﬁeld at all with Clap. Ever the logician, Edwards in one of his private letters nonetheless tried to settle the issue by distinguishing between what it was conceivable he had said, but possibly forgotten, and what was inconceivable.

Seizing on what Edwards admitted knowing and on some small differences between what Edwards had said was conceivable and what Clap claimed, Clap insisted that his story was correct in substance and upbraided Edwards for being so exasperated over so little. Clap concluded his second published letter by accusing Edwards of treating him in an ''unchristian manner,'' but he also declared sanctimoniously that ''Scripture and my own inclination forbid me to render evil for evil'' and o√ered to ''freely forgive'' him.∑ Edwards had presented Clap's accusations as evidence of the lengths to which people would go to discredit Whiteﬁeld. Not entirely in his lamblike mode in the face of what he was sure were false accusations damaging to the Gospel cause, Edwards concluded the exchange by citing Clap's o√ered absolution and praying that in the future, when his temper has cooled, Clap might ''be enabled to look on your own conduct with real seriousness, as in the sight of God.''∏ Each of the combatants in this ministerial duel of honor was so arrayed with logic and rhetoric that neither could dent the other's armor, and by the time the last futile shot rumbled o√ the press in summer 1745, Whiteﬁeld and other events had settled the original issue.

Whiteﬁeld arrived in New England in fall 1744. Since his last triumphant

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visit he had enjoyed another spectacular success during the ''great awakening'' in Scotland which broke loose in 1742. Edwards had played a role in the Scottish revivals as well. The awakenings in several towns, especially in James Robe's parish of Kilsyth and William McCulloch's in Cambuslang, preceded Whiteﬁeld's visits and were inspired in part by Edwards' Faithful Narrative. These awakenings closely paralleled the New England events of 1741 and 1742 in many ecstatic physical manifestations. The Scottish leaders eagerly welcomed Edwards' Distinguishing Marks and soon became his most faithful correspondents and strongest supporters. Edwards was quickly becoming more highly honored in Scotland than he was in his own country.π Whiteﬁeld's Scottish triumph placed the grand itinerant and Edwards even more closely in the same international evangelical circle.

Whiteﬁeld's alliance with these Scottish leaders was especially signiﬁcant to the American controversy because they were established Presbyterian clergy. In 1741 Whiteﬁeld's initial Scottish contacts had been largely with a seceder group, the Associate Presbytery. These separatists had made secession from the established church a test of their faith and soon attacked Whiteﬁeld because of his Anglican ordination and willingness to work with those who were less than pure. After that Whiteﬁeld viewed separatism with a jaundiced eye and in America could point to his break with the seceders as evidence that he harbored no revolutionary scheme.∫

Almost as soon as Whiteﬁeld arrived in Boston in late November the core group of his former supporters—Colman, Prince, Sewall, and Foxcroft—met with him to learn his true intentions. The accusations of Clap and others had done their work, so these former supporters quizzed Whiteﬁeld closely. They asked about his published condemnations of New England clergy and colleges and especially about his views of separatism. When they were soon assured that Whiteﬁeld was not part of any conspiracy, they immediately opened their pulpits to him.Ω

The resumption of Whiteﬁeld's daily ministry in Boston only increased the barrage of publications from his attackers. Most notable was The Testimony of the President, Professors, Tutors, and Hebrew Instructor of Harvard College, against George Whiteﬁeld, issued late in 1744. Whiteﬁeld replied to this and a number of the other severe condemnations with displays of humility far di√erent from his judgmental tone of 1741. He acknowledged that he had been too much guided by ''impressions'' and that he had been too quick to make censorious judgments and especially unwise in publishing them. He speciﬁcally rejected Clap's accusations. He never contemplated any scheme to

≥∞≠ Colonial Wars

replace the New England clergy, and he had no intention of being part of a party that turned people against their ministers. While Whiteﬁeld's detractors still considered him an uncharitable enthusiast and a dangerous deluder of the people, his contrite replies helped him to regain much of his former support.∞≠

New England's other war provided an additional opportunity for the evangelist to win more popular acclaim and to establish himself in the region's lore. To counter the French threat to the British colony of Nova Scotia and so to New England ﬁsheries, commerce, and coasts, colonial leaders devised an audacious plan to try to capture the formidable French fortress at Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island just north of Nova Scotia. William Pepperrell, a pious admirer of Whiteﬁeld, was chosen to lead the expedition. Pepperrell and his wife (later both correspondents of Edwards) consulted with Whiteﬁeld before accepting the command and had him preach to the troops before they embarked. Another friend of Whiteﬁeld had asked the evangelist to provide the motto for the ﬂag for the expedition. Knowledge of Whiteﬁeld's participation, he said, would be an important recruiting tool. Whiteﬁeld, after a brief show of reluctance, provided the motto, ''Nil desperandum Christo duce'' (No need to fear with Christ as our leader).∞∞

In mid-July 1745 Whiteﬁeld and his wife (the widow he had married rather unromantically in 1741) visited the Edwardses in Northampton for nearly a week. The two wars gave them much to talk about. Whiteﬁeld noted the parallel between warfare and evangelism. When the expedition to Louisbourg was in its early stages, he observed, many letters came back saying the fortress was greater than they supposed and the situation was desperate. ''I smiled, and told my friends,'' Whiteﬁeld recounted, ''that I believed now we should have Louisbourg; for all having confessed their helplessness, God would now reveal His arm and make our extremity His opportunity.''∞≤

Spiritually, New England no longer confessed its helplessness, so even though Whiteﬁeld preached to many eager crowds, there was no new awakening. In Edwards' view, the fault was not Whiteﬁeld's. He found the thirtyyear-old itinerant more ''solid and judicious'' than ﬁve years earlier and was all the more convinced that the continuing savage attacks on him were deeply unjust. Whiteﬁeld's latest ministries in New England, he believed, had been helpful, but their impact was limited by alarms sounded by his detractors.∞≥

Just about the time of the Whiteﬁeld's visit, Northampton was celebrating the news of New England's spectacular triumph at Louisbourg. About twenty of Edwards' parishioners had been part of the expedition that had laid

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siege to and captured the French fortress. Major Seth Pomeroy, from one of Northampton's ﬁrst families, led the local regiment, and Joseph Hawley III (Yale 1742), who was considering the ministry, had been the general's chaplain. No one was more enthusiastic than Edwards. When the troops returned, he sought to learn every detail about the victory. He was especially buoyed by what Major Pomeroy described as ''a variety of remarkable providences in favour of our great design.''∞∂ Once again, as he had been during the awakenings, Edwards was convinced he had found ﬁrm evidence of God's working in history. In his established role as a scientiﬁc correspondent regarding God's works in history, he sent a lengthy account of the siege as part of a letter for publication in Scotland in James Robe's Christian Monthly History.

Edwards' epistle makes clear that he saw God's providence in New England's military triumph and in the international awakenings as part of a single pattern. He began with a strong endorsement of the Concert of Prayer, a campaign for coordinating international prayer for the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, proposed by his Scottish counterparts. He acknowledged that spiritually ''the day is so dark here in New England,'' yet he rejoiced in the awakenings in Scotland and he could report hopeful signs elsewhere in America. The ministries of the Tennents and their associates had spread to Virginia, and in New Jersey Presbyterian leaders were responding to the scarcity of ministers by proposing to establish their own college (eventually settled in Princeton). Especially notable were the successes of the missionary e√orts of David Brainerd among the Indians, another cause close to Edwards' heart. Having just mentioned Brainerd, Edwards made a remarkable transition in his narrative to the military campaign. ''While I am speaking of the late wonderful works of God in America,'' he wrote, ''I cannot pass over one, which, though it be of a di√erent kind from those already mentioned; yet is that wherein the Most High has made his hand manifest, in a most apparent and marvelous manner, and may be reckoned among the evidences of its being a day of great things, and of the wonderful works of God in this part of the world.''∞∑

In Edwards' scheme of things a remarkable victory over the French was a ﬁtting sequel to the awakenings if one were tracking the pattern of God's work in history. For years Edwards had been recording news of Catholic setbacks in his notebooks. Now he had what he considered irrefutable evidence of God's providential interventions in political a√airs. Perhaps they were seeing the predawn glimmers of millennial days after all. With his usual thoroughness, he made the most of the evidence.

≥∞≤ Colonial Wars

The people of New England, despite their lamentable divisions over the awakening, had united in ''an extraordinary spirit of prayer'' greater than for any public a√air that Edward could remember. Edwards had often warned his people that their sins could keep God from listening to their prayers. During the ''young folks' Bible'' scandal in 1744 he had preached a fast day sermon on Psalm 66:18, ''If I regard iniquity in my heart, the Lord will not hear me.''∞∏ In June of the same year, for the fast day called in response to the outbreak of war with France, he had preached on Israel's defeat at Ai because of one unrepentant sinner, expounding the doctrine, ''Sin above all things weakens a people at war.''∞π By contrast, in his sermon of April 1745 on the fast day called to support the dangerous expedition against Cape Breton, Edwards put more emphasis on the positive. Nations might justly be called to ﬁght wars for many reasons and ordinary citizens must serve when called unless ''it be notoriously manifest that the war is unjust.'' Truly repentant prayers of the people, he emphasized, were crucial to success. New England had been so blessed in the past and many examples from Old Testament Israel proved that God would hear such prayers.∞∫

The belief of New Englanders that total dependence on God was the key to capturing the great fortress at Louisbourg opened them to ridicule from those who believed the expedition foolhardy. Benjamin Franklin mocked New England's piety. Writing to his brother John in May, the Philadelphian wondered whether it was realistic for an army of amateurs to capture such a fortress. ''Some seem to think forts are as easy taken as snu√,'' he quipped. ''You have a fast and prayer day,'' he continued, ''in which I compute ﬁve hundred thousand petitions were o√ered up to the same e√ect in New England.'' In addition, if every family in New England had prayed for victory twice a day since January 25 (when the General Court had narrowly approved the military plan), that would amount to ''forty-ﬁve millions of prayers; which set against the prayers of a few priests in the garrison, to the Virgin Mary, give a vast balance in your favor.'' Franklin concluded, ''If you do not succeed, I fear I shall have but an indi√erent opinion of Presbyterian prayers in such cases, as long as I live. Indeed, in attacking strong towns I should have more dependence on works, than on faith.''∞Ω

Edwards' account of the victory was a small treatise on evidences for answered prayer and providence, as though to respond directly to sco√ers such as Franklin. Had New Englanders been better informed of the strength of the fortress, observed the theologian, they would never have undertaken the venture. More remarkably, the French at Cape Breton had not learned of

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New England's design, despite its wide publicity and it being known in Albany, where Indians friendly to the French frequently visited. The winter was uncommonly mild to allow preparations. Repeatedly the weather favored the New England cause. Even a delay by bad weather prevented arrival before the ice had melted. An English man-of-war, on its way to help protect the New England coast, intercepted a ﬁshing boat and learned that the New England forces were on their way north. The commodore took a skilled pilot (a draft dodger) from the boat, changed his own course to Cape Breton, and sent orders that resulted in three other men-of-war aiding the siege. The invasion was such a surprise that the French immediately abandoned their grand battery of cannons to a smaller force. The ﬂeeing French spiked their cannons, but not e√ectively. Although they took their gunpowder, they left the cannon balls, which were more essential. When the New Englanders' one large mortar broke, it turned out that another had just been sent from Boston. Once, when an immovable rock kept the English from completing a trench, a French cannon bomb fell on the exact spot and blew the rock out of the way. After weeks of seemingly futile siege, the British force decided they would have to assault the walls of the main fortress. Had they attempted it, they would have had no chance; the walls were twice as high as they believed, the lower twelve feet being hidden by a trench. Wonderfully, just before this proposed assault, the French surrendered. By these and many other marvelous ways ''God gave into our hands'' the greatest French fortress in the New World and the principal staging ground for French harassment of New England shipping and trade. Edwards' account was exaggerated and selective, yet the overall success of the daring expedition was so extraordinary that everything ﬁt as ''a dispensation of providence, the most remarkable in its kind, that has been in many ages, and a great evidence of God's being one that hears prayer.''≤≠

Edwards was far from alone in his providentialist patriotism. Charles Chauncy in a sermon celebrating the victory recounted a similar ''train of providences.'' Invoking the standard New England analogy to Old Testament Israel, Chauncy declared, ''I scarce know of a conquest, since the days of Joshua and the Judges, wherein the ﬁnger of God is more visible.''≤∞ Thomas Prince, who through Christian History had become Edwards' closest associate in Boston, was just as extravagant. He also recited a list of providences and urged New Englanders to rejoice in increased safety for their shores and their commerce. ''But let our joy rise higher, that hereby a great support of Antichristian power is taken away and the visible Kingdom of Christ is enlarged.''

≥∞∂ Colonial Wars

Much like Edwards, Prince tied the defeat of the Roman Antichrist to the promised spread of the Gospel to all lands. Closing with a rhetorical ﬂourish, Prince suggested that when the southern gates of Louisbourg were lifted to let in the victorious colonists, ''the King of Glory went in with them . . . the Lord Mighty in Battle.'' He prayed that ''this happy conquest be the dawning earnest of our divine redeemer's carrying on his triumphs through the Northern Regions; 'till he extends his empire . . . from the river of Canada to the ends of America.'' Then God's name would truly be praised ''from the uttermost parts of the earth.''≤≤

Before New Englanders could fully absorb the heady meaning of God's blessings, sobering new evidence came from abroad of God's warnings of judgment on their British nation. In July 1745 Prince Charles Edward Stuart entered Scotland and raised an army. The grandson of England's last Catholic king, James II, ''the Young Pretender'' proposed to place his father ''the Old Pretender'' on his rightful throne. By September ''Bonnie Prince Charlie,'' supported by a largely Highland Catholic army, had captured Edinburgh and by December threatened London. Failing to gain popular English support, he retreated, was defeated, and in the spring was forced back to France.

Edwards followed these events closely. He sent condolences for the sufferings of his Scottish friends and reminded them that God mingled his mercy with severity. ''Great shakings and commotions have commonly preceded glorious changes in the state of the church.''≤≥ Particularly, he saw the setbacks of the papal Antichristian powers as the prophesied ''drying up the River Euphrates.'' Later he reported another manifestation of God's hand in hastening the destruction of the Antichrist. In fall 1746 a French ﬂeet was sent to recapture Louisbourg and harass New England but turned back because of terrible storms and the death of its commander. Providences such as that and the defeat of the Pretender were clear signals to the Protestant British peoples that God was remarkably sparing them, despite their great wickedness in squandering the blessings of the Reformation.≤∂

In itself, Edwards' biblicist anti-Catholicism was not out of step with the sentiments of much of the British Protestant world. Particularly since the accession of the Hanoverian Protestant monarchs in 1714, British nationalism had become ﬁrmly wedded to the Protestant cause. English and Scottish preachers routinely compared their nation to Israel. When George II succeeded to the Protestant throne in 1727, George Frederick Handel furnished a coronation anthem that speciﬁcally elicited the parallel to Zadok the priest

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and Nathan the prophet anointing Solomon. Anti-Catholicism was routinely part of British Whig politics.

In New England, Edwards' political views were thoroughly conventional. Eighteenth-century New Englanders had shed their Puritan outsider image and identiﬁed themselves with the Protestant and British cause. Religious and political interests could be equated because Great Britain under the Hanoverians was the strongest champion of international Protestantism.≤∑

Old Light and New Light equally shared such views. Charles Chauncy, in a sermon on the rebellion of the Pretender, referred to ''the way popish princes, bigotted to the religion of Anti-Christ,'' and to ''the interest of Rome and Hell.'' He reminded New Englanders of the ''popish and despotic principles'' that had oppressed them in the 1680s under James II.≤∏ Thomas Foxcroft, one of Edwards closest New Light allies, on New Year's Day 1747, reminded his Boston congregation that ''Never to be forgotten is that glorious year 1714, signalis'd as a year of the right hand of the most high, by the happy and most seasonable accession of the illustrious House of hanover to the British throne.''≤π

What separated the otherwise conventional religious-political views of Edwards, the New Lights, and their international circle of Reformed evangelicals from those of their British and New England Protestant contemporaries was the way they combined their hopes for the political advance of international Protestantism with millennial expectations for a worldwide awakening. The marriage of these two ideals was not entirely comfortable. Evangelicals were ardent nationalists, at least when the national cause could be seen as antipapist. Yet they also saw the Protestant nations as terribly corrupt. God had chosen them to be the guardians of true religion, new Israels in the modern era; yet they had forsaken him. To whom much was given much would be required. Their wickedness was therefore far more reprehensible than that of nations who never knew true religion. Repentance and awakening were their only hope. Yet as with Old Testament Israel, God was not giving up on them.

In broader historical perspective, exclusivist-conversionist Christianity and inclusivist Protestant nationalism, however unequally yoked, had a future together. During the next centuries they would beget a revolutionary world missionary movement. By the beginning of the twenty-ﬁrst century, although the movement would not be nearly as universal nor as Reformed as Edwards and his visionary friends imagined, it would, as they did anticipate,

≥∞∏ Colonial Wars

bring more people to Christian conversion experiences than in all previous history combined.

Dependent as they were on Protestant civil power for their own safety, and as heirs to a long era when it was hard to imagine evangelical advance without political conquest, they believed that God would use his own nations, however imperfect, for his Gospel purposes. After all, God had blessed the whole world through ancient Israel, a nation that had been far from perfect. Preaching on the August 1746 thanksgiving day for the ''victory over the rebels,'' Edwards reminded the Northamptonites of the disparity between their Protestant British nation's status as blessed by God and its deplorable spiritual condition. ''Sometimes God is pleased,'' he observed, ''to go out of his usual way. Sometimes [he] bestows temporal mercies on a very wicked people.'' This was particularly true in the Gospel age, which was an age of mercy, during which God often withheld his terrible judgments so that people could heed his providential warnings and have time to repent.≤∫

Northampton was receiving many warnings. Beginning in the summer of 1745 the town was struck with ''a sore sickness and mortality.'' In the four years from 1745 through 1748, more than one-tenth of the town's population died, or about thirty-ﬁve people per year, or almost three funerals per month—a devastating toll for a town of perhaps twelve or thirteen hundred.≤Ω Such a∆iction, which the pastor assured them was God's hand warning them to repent, further undercut the town's sagging spirits.

At the same time, the town faced renewed threat of Indian attacks. At ﬁrst the theaters of this war had been rather distant from Northampton. Still, the town was deeply involved. Colonel Stoddard, working from his home base, had been in charge of building a new line of forts near the New York border to the west. He also made Northampton the headquarters for a planned, but never consummated, invasion of Canada, which was to follow up the Louisbourg victory. Major Seth Pomeroy, the local hero of Louisbourg, was in charge of raising troops for this always popular American enterprise.≥≠

By August 1746, about the time the town was celebrating the defeat of the Young Pretender, Massachusetts had been set on the defensive. In the spring Stoddard, exasperated by the di≈culties of defending a long wilderness frontier, had written to Connecticut's Governor Wolcott, ''I have as many messengers with evil tidings as Job had, though I have not so much patience.''≥∞

On August 19 French and Indians captured one of the new forts, Fort Massachusetts, about thirty miles northwest of Northampton. Small bands of

Colonial Wars ≥∞π

Indians had been harassing settlements all along the frontier and now had broken through the outer line of defenses. At Deerﬁeld, horrible memories of a generation earlier were revived when Indians killed and scalped several men from two families who were out harvesting hay. On August 25 a small group of Indians threatened Southampton, the newer second precinct of Northampton, eight miles to its southwest, ransacking the houses of two families who had ﬂed. Northampton went into a high alert.≥≤

We get a momentary view of the Edwards family in this tense circumstance. Edwards often took a late summer trip, and in 1746 he traveled to East Hampton, Long Island, to preach the ordination sermon for Samuel Buell, the young evangelist who had brought the last Northampton awakening to its height. Whether for fear of the Indians, for social reasons, or for their spiritual ediﬁcation, Edwards took two of his daughters, Sarah and Esther, aged eighteen and fourteen, with him and left them there. The Edwards girls traveled frequently and often made extended visits with friends or family. In early November Jonathan wrote to Esther (who did have special fears of Indians),≥≥ describing Northampton in wartime. Northampton was well fortiﬁed, but it was also a military headquarters that might be target for attack. During the fall, a couple of soldiers were billeted at the Edwardses' home. ''Our house is now forted in,'' Edwards reported, ''and a watch is kept here every night in the fort.'' Yet the French and Indian army had not done any real destruction in the vicinity after taking Fort Massachusetts. Edwards believed it had probably moved toward Nova Scotia to meet the French ﬂeet, which God had since so wonderfully confounded. After reminding her of God's presence everywhere, Edwards o√ered Esther some consolation that may have been only partially reassuring: ''Your circumstances at East Hampton are on some accounts much more comfortable than [those] of your sisters at home, for you lie down and arise and have none to make you afraid. Here we have been in much fear of an army suddenly rushing in upon the town in the night to destroy it.''≥∂

Despite the fortiﬁcations and the soldiers, life's ordinary concerns continued. In October Edwards had written to his friend and protégé Joseph Bellamy, pastor at Bethlehem, Connecticut, on an uncharacteristically practical matter (at least in the surviving correspondence). Edwards wanted to purchase twenty sheep if Bellamy could ﬁnd some at a good price to purchase. Perhaps the Indian threats had driven up the costs of local wool.≥∑ Usually Sarah seems to have managed household a√airs, and wool was essential for spinning and family clothes. Perhaps because he had other reasons to contact

≥∞∫ Colonial Wars

Bellamy, Edwards took over the negotiation. In a second letter, sent in January, he mentioned intriguingly, ''it might be perhaps expedient, on some accounts, for the present, not to let it be known who the sheep are for.''≥∏

This same letter shows that Edwards, as we might expect, had much weightier matters on his mind. Bellamy had asked him to ﬁnd him some of the classic Reformed works on divinity. Edwards mentioned Francis Turretin, the seventeenth-century Swiss systematizer of Reformed dogma, as excellent on the ﬁve points of Calvinism and polemical divinity. Even better, he said, was the Dutch theologian, Peter van Mastricht of the late seventeenth century. ''But take Mastricht,'' Edwards advised, ''for divinity in general, doctrine, practice, and controversy; or as an universal system of divinity; and it is much better than Turretin or any other book in the world, excepting the Bible, in my opinion.'' In the meantime, Edwards said he was reading deeply in the Arminian controversy and writing on it in his notebooks. ''I have got so deep into this controversy, that I am not willing to dismiss it, till I know the utmost of their matters.''≥π

Indian threats continued through the next two years as the war dragged on. In both 1747 and 1748 Indian bands again got as close as Southampton, and each time they killed a resident. On the second occasion, in spring 1748, the attack caused such a panic that the settlers abandoned Southampton, most of them crowding into Northampton for the summer. Fear of Indians, frustrations from trying to counter guerrilla attacks, casualties among the men who had gone to war, overcrowding from refugees and billeted soldiers, and the continued high natural death rate all depressed Northampton's morale.≥∫ The o≈cial end of the war, primarily a European a√air, in the peace of Aix-laChapelle, October 18, 1748, was hardly a cause for rejoicing either. England had done the unthinkable. To the colonists' chagrin she traded away the great trophy of the war that Providence had so unmistakably given into the hands of New England. Louisbourg went back to the French. New England was once again judged for her pride, though it probably did not please many to have the minister say so.

Edwards viewed these hard times in the much larger perspective of God's long-term redemptive plan. Promotion of the Concert of Prayer was his principal public contribution to aiding the primary international cause, of which the war was only a tiny part. Closer to home, these years of constant talk of Indian threats and military campaigns only increased his missionary zeal. Always close to his uncle John Stoddard, Edwards kept well informed on military matters and doubtless kept the pious Stoddard appraised of the

Colonial Wars ≥∞Ω

larger spiritual picture. We do not know exactly how much the uncle and nephew collaborated, but Stoddard had long been a chief negotiator with the Indians and in the current conﬂict was active in conciliating some of the tribes in nearby New York. In one small glimpse that we have, Stoddard appears as a champion of fair dealings. ''The Indians,'' he wrote to Governor Shirley, in May 1747, ''are of such a humor that if we deal justly and kindly by them, they will put their lives into our hands, but if we deal deceitfully with them, that will soon raise an abhorrence of us.''≥Ω Such sage advice, which the British could have used more of, reﬂected years of experience and military interests. Yet it also reﬂected the larger concern for Indian missions that the colonel shared with his nephew. Stoddard had helped found the Stockbridge mission near the New York border and likely had been there during his e√orts to gain intelligence on the mood of the local Indians. A few weeks after his letter to Governor Shirley, he was vividly reminded of their ultimate goal in Indian a√airs: late in May, David Brainerd arrived at the Edwardses' home.

C H A P T E R ≤≠ kl

''Thy Will Be Done''

f Sarah Edwards, renowned as the model wife and caring hostess, ever felt entirely overwhelmed, the arrival of David Brainerd on Thursday May 28, 1747, may have been one of those times. Just three weeks earlier she had given birth to an eighth daughter, Elizabeth. In addition were two boys, Timothy, nearly nine, and Jonathan Jr., who had just turned two. Remarkably, all ten children had thus far survived. By contrast, in John Stoddard's household, with which the family must have had constant interchange, only ﬁve of the ten children survived to adulthood.∞

When Brainerd arrived, gaunt with tuberculosis, the Edwardses already had another gravely ill New Light on their hands. Eleazar Wheelock was staying with them, and Edwards had written Bellamy that the young evangelist might never preach again.≤ Wheelock did recover (and lived to found both a charity school for Indians and Dartmouth College). The Edwardses were surrounded by illness and other troubles. Northampton had become terribly unhealthy during the war years. The cool attitude of much of the town toward its pastor did not make matters any easier for the family. The war itself added to the tensions. The town was still fortiﬁed, although soldiers probably were no longer billeted in the Edwardses' home. Colonel Stoddard was still hoping to mount an invasion of Canada, but most of the time he was occupied with the frustrating task of overseeing the defense of a sometimes indefensible frontier.

Despite these burdens, the Edwards family was still ﬂourishing at near its peak, and we can try to get some sense of what the household was like. The home was a substantial two-story, eighteenth-century frame structure heated by a large central ﬁreplace and chimney, to which most of the separate rooms would be adjacent. The hearth was the center of home life. The interior of the

''Thy Will Be Done'' ≥≤∞

home probably was not plastered, and the furnishings were modest. Included were the standard carding machines and spinning wheels for the typical home industries of the day. The Edwardses had a garden plot and also the rights to some nearby acreage that they tilled or used for grazing sheep, pigs, and cattle. An African woman slave, who probably had her own children, helped with the household duties.≥

The ﬁrst impression a visitor would have upon arriving at the Edwards home was that there were a lot of children. The second impression would be that they were very well disciplined. Jonathan aided Sarah in disciplining the children from an early age. ''When they ﬁrst discovered any considerable degree of will and stubbornness,'' wrote Samuel Hopkins, ''he would attend to them till he had thoroughly subdued them and brought them to submit.'' Edwards did this ''with the greatest calmness, and commonly without striking a blow.'' Soon he ''e√ectually established his parental authority, and produced a cheerful obedience ever after.''

Care for his children's souls was, of course, his preeminent concern. In morning devotions he quizzed them on Scripture with questions appropriate to their ages. On Saturday evening, the beginning of the Sabbath, he taught them the Westminster Shorter Catechism, making sure they understood as well as memorized the answers.∂ ''As innocent as children seem to be to us,'' he had recently written in defense of teaching them of hell ﬁre and eternal damnation, ''yet if they are out of Christ, they are not so in God's sight, but are young vipers, and are inﬁnitely more hateful than young vipers.'' At the judgment day unregenerate children would hardly thank their parents for sentimental tenderness that protected them from knowing the true dangers of their estate.∑ Always looking for opportunities to awaken the young to their condition, he had, for instance, taken the children of the town to view the remains of the Lyman house ﬁre that claimed two girls' lives.∏

By far the greater burden of childrearing fell to Sarah. According to Samuel Hopkins, ''she had an excellent way of governing her children: she knew how to make them regard and obey her cheerfully, without loud angry words, or heavy blows.'' Hopkins reported that it was her manner to reprove her children ''in a few words, without heat or noise, with all calmness and gentleness of mind.'' Usually she had only to speak once and would be ''cheerfully obeyed.'' ''Quarreling and contention,'' the admiring Hopkins claimed, ''as it frequently takes place among children, was not known among them.''

Sarah began the discipline of her children when they were very young in order to suppress their self-will. ''She carefully observed the ﬁrst appearances

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[To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.]

The Edwards parsonage at Northampton, from a nineteenth-century drawing

of resentment and ill will towards any, in her young children,'' said Hopkins, ''and did not connive at it and promote it, as many who have the care of children do, but was careful to shew her displeasure at it, and suppress it to her utmost.''π Subduing the will was both a necessary step in preparation for grace and a key to domestic tranquility.

The older Edwards daughters must have aided Sarah in the childrearing, but this did not keep them from long visits away from home. Sarah Jr., known as ''Sally'' (who may have been outshone by her next three brilliant sisters, Jerusha, Esther, and Mary), seems to have spent considerable time in New Haven, where she was in 1744 and in the fall of 1747.∫ Jerusha and Esther were also sometimes included in visits to Boston and may have spent some extended time there. Esther became a close friend of Sarah Prince, daughter of

''Thy Will Be Done'' ≥≤≥

Thomas Prince Sr. Although Colonel John Stoddard's daughters were said to have been educated in Boston (as were Jonathan's sisters), there is no evidence of such formal schooling for the Edwards girls, although they appear to have been well schooled at home.

Sarah Sr., as mother to this large family, overseer of operations for farming, cooking, clothing, washing, cleaning, admonishing, and much of the educating, was the embodiment of the Puritan ideal of industry. If she truly was, as Samuel Hopkins implies, ''a deputy husband'' or the de facto manager of the house and farm as well as the mother of eleven children, her accomplishments were monumental.Ω On one occasion, when she was out of town in 1748, Jonathan was soon near his wits' end. The two eldest daughters, he wrote, were both ''beat out and having the headache'' and were sleeping in. Children of almost every other age, from the one-year-old up, needed to be taken care of. ''We have been without you,'' Jonathan lamented, ''almost as long as we know how to be.''∞≠

In addition to caring for her own family and household, Sarah operated what amounted to a small inn to accommodate travelers (most often unannounced) and various young boarders who came to learn from her husband. As her attentiveness to young Samuel Hopkins when he came ﬁrst into their home as a student illustrates, she concerned herself with the welfare of her guests. Hopkins later wrote: ''She would spare no pains to make them welcome, and provide for their convenience and comfort. And she was peculiarly kind to strangers who came to her house.''∞∞

So while Sarah may have rejoiced spiritually at the visit of David Brainerd, renowned for his self-sacriﬁce, her saintliness may have been tested by now having two gravely ill young preachers as part of the household. Sarah was, after all, prone to inner turmoil and low spirits. Fortunately, Eleazar Wheelock soon recovered, and she had daughters, especially Jerusha, to serve as nurse for Brainerd. Just turned seventeen, Jerusha was the most like her parents in spiritual intensity. In a household where the highest goal was to subordinate one's will to God's, selﬂess sacriﬁce was the supreme virtue. David Brainerd was already legendary for his willingness to endure any hardship in his e√orts to bring the Gospel to the Indians. Jerusha, in turn, was ready to give herself to caring for this physically wrecked embodiment of her spiritual ideals.

Edwards and his circle were keenly aware that one of the great weaknesses of the international Reformed movement was its failure to sustain e√ective missions to the Indians. Edwards' brother-in-law, Samuel Hopkins the elder,

≥≤∂ ''Thy Will Be Done''

his cousin Stephen Williams, and his uncle John Stoddard had pioneered the reestablishment of a New England mission at Stockbridge a decade earlier. The current war only intensiﬁed the sense of urgency for extending such e√orts. Winning the hearts of Indians would have incalculable strategic advantage. At the same time the international awakening reinforced concerns for their souls. Evangelical societies in Scotland and England were eager to support missionaries, but the candidates were few.

David Brainerd was a man driven to serve. After an intense conversion experience in 1739, he entered Yale College, at age twenty-one, to prepare for the ministry. His new convert's zeal soon ﬂared among the ﬂames of the awakening as Whiteﬁeld, Tennent, and Davenport created sensations in New Haven in 1741. Rector Clap's legislation against student condemnations of the faculty's spiritual authority in September 1741, the week of Edwards' commencement address, may have been directed at Brainerd. The next winter a freshman, passing his room, overheard Brainerd say that Tutor Chauncey Whittelsey ''has no more grace than this chair.'' The freshman reported the remark to a lady of the town, who told President Clap. The imperious Clap, perhaps waiting for his chance, launched an investigation and sought a public confession. Brainerd took exception to having to make a public confession for a private remark. Clap had him expelled for this, for attending one New Light meeting without permission, and for an alleged remark that he thought Clap might ''expect to drop down dead'' for ﬁning students who went to hear Gilbert Tennent preach.∞≤

Excluded from Yale, Brainerd went to study with a local pastor. In the meantime, he worked to get himself reinstated, but even after the intervention of some of Yale's most respected graduates, including Jonathan Dickinson and Aaron Burr, Clap would not budge. In summer 1742 Brainerd was preaching, without proper licensing, with Joseph Bellamy in Bethlehem, Connecticut. Dickinson and Burr then secured for him an appointment as missionary to the Indians under the auspices of the Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge, a position he undertook in spring 1743. For about a year he worked in the Mahican village of Kaunameek about twenty miles from Stockbridge under the guidance of Stockbridge missionary John Sergeant.

The attempt to get Brainerd reinstated at Yale had in the meantime become a cause célèbre. Brainerd's ﬁnal e√ort was to try to graduate with his class in September 1743 on the basis of his private study. Edwards, in New Haven for the commencement, met Brainerd for the ﬁrst time, counseled him

''Thy Will Be Done'' ≥≤∑

on this matter, and may have helped him write a contrite confession. Although Yale was now willing to admit him for an additional year of study, it was not ready to grant him a degree, despite the fact, according to Edwards, that he would have stood ﬁrst in his class.∞≥

By this time Brainerd was committed to his missionary work. Despite little success in Kaunameek, he turned down a conventional pastorate in spring 1744 and traveled to the Delaware and Susquehanna rivers in search of Delaware Indians to convert. Already ill, he endured extraordinary hardships but had little to show for it. Finally, in fall 1745, after many discouragements, his world-renouncing e√orts began to have visible results. An awakening broke out in the Delaware Indian village at Crossweeksung, south of Trenton, New Jersey. But by fall 1746 Brainerd was too ill to continue his work. In desperation, he set out for his native New England, believing he had ''little hope of recovery, unless by much riding.'' He also thought it his ''duty'' to ''divert myself among my friends whom I had not now seen for a long time.''∞∂

He got only as far as the home of his principal sponsor, Jonathan Dickinson in Elizabeth, New Jersey, where he collapsed. He spent the winter there recovering. In April he felt well enough to resume his therapeutic ride to New England, and in late May he arrived at Stephen Williams' home in Longmeadow, where he stayed ﬁve days before riding to Northampton.

When Brainerd arrived, Jonathan found him not as deathly ill or ''broken in his understanding'' as he had heard. He was impressed that Brainerd had ridden the twenty-ﬁve miles from Longmeadow in one day. The young man also appeared ''cheerful and free from melancholy.'' When Dr. Mather examined him, he ''gave him over,'' but the town's other physician, Dr. Pynchon, held out hope, as did Edwards. As usual, Edwards was most impressed by spiritual intensity. He found Brainerd's prayers in the family stunning. Even his prayers returning thanks for food were awe inspiring. Brainerd and the Edwards found much in common in their millennial hopes. ''In his prayers, he insisted much on the prosperity of Zion, the advancement of Christ's kingdom in the world, and the ﬂourishing and propagation of religion among the Indians.''∞∑

The doctors, then as now ready to prescribe what has already worked, decided that horseback riding was good for Brainerd; so after two weeks in Northampton he set o√ for Boston, accompanied by Jerusha ''to be helpful to him in his weak and low state.'' The trip, usually two and a half days, took four. As usual for the Edwardses, they spent one night at the Reverend Ebenezer Parkman's in Westborough. Less than a week after arriving in

≥≤∏ ''Thy Will Be Done''

Boston, Brainerd once again fell gravely ill. Jerusha wrote to her father that the doctors said that either he might die any day or he might have another respite for a few months. By late July he had gained the respite and set out with Jerusha and his younger brother Israel, a Yale student, on a slow trip back to Northampton.∞∏

Again at the Edwardses, the invalid was well enough to go out for brief daily horseback rides and may have still hoped to return to New Jersey.∞π By early September he was too weak to leave the house. Jerusha, although not especially well herself, cared for him all this time as she had since May. He was still strong enough to continue entries and editing on his diary and to speak with Jerusha, her father, and other family members on serious spiritual matters.

On Sunday, October 4, he was near death. When Jerusha entered the room, as Jonathan recorded it, ''he looked on her very pleasantly and said, 'Dear Jerusha, are you willing to part with me? I am quite willing to part with you: I am willing to part with all my friends: I am willing to part with my dear brother John; although I love him the best of any creature living: I have committed him and all my friends to God, and can leave them with God. Though, if I thought I should not see you and be happy with you in another world, I could not bear to part with you. But we shall spend an happy eternity together!' '' Three days later, his younger brother John arrived. David loved John ''best of any creature living'' in part because he was his coworker and successor in his all-important mission work with Indians in New Jersey. Jerusha, who was ''of much the same spirit with Mr. Brainerd,'' would understand such kingdom priorities. Two days later David Brainerd died, attended by those closest to him.

Edwards made a point that the funeral would be simple, not with the ''pomp and show'' that Brainerd had feared would have attended it had he died in Boston.∞∫ Edwards preached on ''True Saints, When Absent from the Body, are Present with the Lord'' in a passionate exultation of the Christcentered wonders of the heavenly state. The saints, he emphasized—perhaps particularly with Jerusha's grief in mind—were not in a sort of limbo waiting for the Lord's return, but rather were immediately ''with Christ.'' That meant they were in perfect union with Christ. In Christ all darkness of sin was ''abolished before the full blaze of the sun's meridian light.'' Yet this was no blind state of ecstasy. Those who on earth were betrothed to Christ were in heaven married to him and conversed with him as an intimate friend in most perfect mutual love. So ''the souls of departed saints with Christ in heaven,

''Thy Will Be Done'' ≥≤π

shall have Christ as it were unbosomed unto them, manifesting those inﬁnite riches of love toward them, that have been there from eternity.'' These souls, far better than when they had bodies, ''shall eat and drink abundantly, and swim in the ocean of love.'' Edwards lavished his hearers with biblical images. As the spouse of Christ they were ''the king's daughter'' and so shared with Christ the ''ine√able delights'' of the glory of the Father. Yet while ''eternally swallowed up on the inﬁnitely bright, and inﬁnitely mild and sweet beams of divine light,'' they would still follow with keen interest and joy the advance of the Christ's kingdom on earth. They would be eagerly looking forward to the day when they would return with Christ to help judge the world and reign forever with him. David Brainerd could endure his su√erings and impending death with profound tranquility because he so clearly saw reality in this cosmic context. Such a God-centered perspective enabled him to act as one who ''had indeed sold all for Christ'' and even in death had maintained his preeminent concern for the kingdom arising ''from a pure disinterested love to Christ and desire of his glory.''∞Ω

''Like a Flower That Is Cut Down''

In spite of all his e√orts to embrace heavenly loves so fully that even the dearest earthly a√ections paled in comparison, Edwards was not entirely prepared for the sequel four months later. On February 14, a Sabbath, his beloved Jerusha died of an acute fever. She was, he conﬁded to a correspondent in Scotland, ''generally esteemed the ﬂower of the family.''≤≠ Her illness had been less than a week, so there was little time to prepare for the agony—

even though he had for a lifetime been preparing for such.

The next Sabbath the grief-stricken Edwards preached Jerusha's eulogy sermon on the poignant theme from Job, ''Youth is like a ﬂower that is cut down.'' He had preached the doctrinal part of the sermon before a youth meeting regarding the death of a young man in 1741 near the beginning of the post-Whiteﬁeld awakening. The haunting theme was too appropriate to pass up, and the added portions were the most personal of any of Edwards' sermons. The lost beauty of the ﬂower cut down was a ''ﬁt emblem of a young person in the bloom of life, with amiable, pleasant, and promising qualiﬁcations, not only with a blooming body but mind also; with desirable natural and moral endowments.'' Jerusha was a model of one ''remarkably weaned'' from the world, ''very indi√erent about all things whatsoever of a worldly nature, setting her heart'' on another world. She ''declared in words, showed

≥≤∫ ''Thy Will Be Done''

in deeds, [that she was] ever more ready to deny herself, earnestly inquiring in every a√air which way she could most glorify God.''

Edwards assured the congregation that he was not there to boast of his daughter's saintliness, or of himself, but to use her death for the good of others. Her death had come without warning. ''In the very ﬂower of youth, [she] was the sabbath before last here at meeting without any sensible signs of approaching death.'' Everyone could see her empty place and take warning. This admonition from God did not stand alone. For three years now it had been a ''doleful time among us . . . with regard to the state of religion,'' and God was repeatedly sending warnings in the deaths of ''many young people.'' Yet the behavior of many of those who remained was worse than ever.

Edwards acknowledged the cordial expressions of condolences that Jerusha's death had brought from the townspeople, but he was determined to turn their sentiments to eternal good. So many other young people seemed thoroughly unprepared as they dedicated themselves, not to the company of saints, but to gatherings for mirth and frivolity that only cultivated their sensual natures. Worse was their frolicking ''and that shameful lascivious custom of handling women's breasts, and the di√erent sexes lying in beds together.'' What if such young people were suddenly taken?

The ashen Edwards turned the congregation's attention to his own transparent grief. Even though the one who ''died in the bloom of her youth [was] my own dear child,'' he knew the comfort of a parent who could see every evidence that she had set her love on Christ. What horror it would be to a parent if the evidence were to the contrary? What comfort would it be to the parent to reﬂect that ''This my departed child was an eminent frolicker, much of a gallant, a jolly companion''? Although this providence, Edwards concluded, is ''in itself so bitter and a∆ictive to me,'' it would be a great comfort to him if it would become ''the beginning of a general awakening and reformation among you, the young people of my ﬂock.''≤∞

Edwards had Jerusha's wilted body buried next to Brainerd's. On his deathbed David had told Jerusha that he would not have been able to bear parting with her if he had not been sure that they would spend eternity together. Edwards was conﬁdent that their souls were already blissfully united in Christ, yet in what seems for him an unusual display of earthly sentiment, he placed her remains next to Brainerd's, awaiting the bodily resurrection. Eight months later, referring to Jerusha's passing, Edwards confessed that he was still ''the subject of an a∆ictive dispensation of late.'' God was teaching him, he believed, ''how to sympathize with the a∆icted.''≤≤

''Thy Will Be Done'' ≥≤Ω

[To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.]

The graves of David Brainerd and Jerusha Edwards

The story of David and Jerusha is one of the history's fabled spiritual love tales and has led to much speculation. Edwards' account of Brainerd's parting speech to her suggests that they cared deeply for each other, even if their deepest loves were for things spiritual. Legend has it that they were betrothed, but there is no real evidence for that. Some have even suggested that Brainerd traveled to Northampton in order to see Jerusha, but there is no indication that they previously had met.≤≥

Jonathan himself loved Brainerd. Immediately after the young man's death, he set aside some of his own cherished projects to edit Brainerd's diaries, which he would eventually publish as An Account of the Life of David Brainerd. As late as summer 1747, he had written to John Erskine, a Scottish correspondent, that he intended to write ''something particularly and largely on the Arminian controversy,'' beginning with ''a discourse concerning the Freedom of the Will, and Moral Agency.'' Providence, he wrote the next year had ''unexpectedly laid in my way, and seemed to render unavoidable'' the higher priority of publishing the Life of Brainerd.≤∂ The death of Jerusha, who may have been helping with the project, only increased his zeal to see it completed.

Completing the Life of Brainerd was of such paramount importance—so

≥≥≠ ''Thy Will Be Done''

momentous as to postpone his long-planned tour de force against the Arminian menace—because Edwards was convinced that his chief priority was the international awakening. He had just completed his work promoting the transatlantic Concert of Prayer for revival, and he saw the memorial to Brainerd as a providentially sanctioned sequel. In his work, as in his life, piety preceded intellect.

Secondarily, but not incidentally, the Life of Brainerd was pivotal in the intra-Reformed contests to win North America. Within just the past few years, the Reformed churches (Presbyterians and Congregationalists) had become badly divided between Old Lights and New Lights. In New England, both Harvard and Yale were ﬁrmly under Old Light control. In response, transplanted New Englanders in New Jersey, allied with New Light (''New Side'') Presbyterians of the Tennent circle, had just founded their own college there.

Brainerd stood near the center of the college controversy. His expulsion from Yale became a test case that symbolized the whole controversy. Who had the power to educate and hence to control ordination? The spat between Yale's Rector Thomas Clap and Edwards grew out of Clap's fears that Whiteﬁeld and his cohorts would destroy the near-monopoly that Yale and Harvard had on the supply of clergy. Clap also saw to it that Connecticut banned ordinations of those, such as Brainerd, who had not graduated from Yale, Harvard, or a European university. In 1744 New Light Presbyterians ordained Brainerd in New Jersey.

The leading ﬁgure among these New Jersey Presbyterians was Jonathan Dickinson, at whose home Brainerd nearly died in the winter of 1746–47. Dickinson, not quite sixty, had been born in Hatﬁeld, Massachusetts, and so provided a major tie between New Jersey–New York Presbyterianism and Stoddard country. During the winter of Brainerd's visit Dickinson was organizing the new College of New Jersey, of which he was chosen the ﬁrst president. The college at his home in Elizabeth opened its doors for its ﬁrst students in May 1747, a few days after Brainerd set out for New England. When in October 1747 Dickinson died suddenly, the college was moved to the care of the Reverend Aaron Burr of Newark, a young Edwards protégé, who became its next president.≤∑ Burr was later said to have remarked that ''if it had not been for the treatment received by Mr. Brainerd at Yale, New Jersey College would never have been erected.''≤∏

After reading through Brainerd's diaries, Edwards wrote to John Brainerd to ﬁll in some details, especially those concerning the expulsion from Yale.

''Thy Will Be Done'' ≥≥∞

Edwards wanted to be sure that his was an ''exact and certain account of that a√air, that the Rector may have no cause, nor ﬁnd any room to complain of the least misrepresentation in any respect.''≤π In summarizing the episode (Edwards had honored Brainerd's wish, left via Jerusha, that the diaries for his Yale years be destroyed), Edwards acknowledged Brainerd's ''intemperate imprudent zeal.'' Edwards' only attempt at defending him was to write that he had then been ''not only young in years, but very young in religion and experience.'' The crucial point, one that Edwards repeatedly stressed, was that Brainerd had thoroughly repented of these youthful excesses. Thus while Edwards granted the justice of the Yale o≈cials in disciplining Brainerd, he implied that Clap and company were at fault in 1743 for not fully restoring one who was such a model of repentance.≤∫ Indeed, in Edwards' account Brainerd had become a paragon of mature, balanced, restrained, nonjudgmental, antiseparatist, intensely spiritual, self-abasing, orthodox Christianity.

Edwards had, of course, a purpose far larger than the college controversies in portraying Brainerd as the exemplary New Light. The missionary, in Edwards' account, had all the traits of the model Christian. The Life of Brainerd, seen in this larger framework, is Religious A√ections in the form of a spiritual biography.

It might also be seen as in part a spiritual autobiography. Although the substance of the volume is edited diaries, it is often di≈cult to distinguish between author and editor. From a portion of the earliest diary, for which we have the original, we can tell that Edwards, while mostly following Brainerd's words, also took some broad liberties, as editors of the time typically did. Sometimes he merely left out words or phrases because of considerations of length or because they repeated other material or because of imprecise theology. He also tended to moderate and depersonalize some of Brainerd's accounts of his religious experience and to sti√en Brainerd's language—for example, he changed Brainerd's regret at ''frolicking'' to ''frolicking (as it is called).'' At other times he altered Brainerd's meaning to ﬁt his own agenda. For instance, he left out an entry in which Brainerd rejoiced at a report of Whiteﬁeld's success, an element of possible controversy that Edwards wanted to avoid.≤Ω We cannot tell, of course, how much of real substance Edwards left out. The reason Brained ordered his Yale diaries destroyed was doubtless because they contained criticisms of people, and we know Edwards excised such passages in what remained, omitting entirely, for instance, a painful faceto-face attempt for restoration at Yale in July 1743 that had left Brainerd bitter. The Brainerd that Edwards wished remembered exempliﬁed (closely

≥≥≤ ''Thy Will Be Done''

paraphrasing the ''Eighth Sign'' of Religious A√ections) ''the lamb-like, dovelike spirit of Jesus Christ! How full of love, meekness, quietness, forgiveness, and mercy!''≥≠

Because Edwards' goal was to present an exemplary spiritual biography, some things were best omitted or corrected. The exemplary narrative of spiritual experience was a well-established Puritan form and ﬁt in with the wider campaign to use the press to promote awakening. Christian History and its counterparts abroad were regularly publishing edifying accounts of the revivals, and Boston presses still reprinted Puritan spiritual narratives. Brainerd himself, during his illness in Boston and Northampton, wrote a preface for the Meditations and Spiritual Experiences of Mr. Thomas Shepard, the much-revered Puritan divine, published by Thomas Prince in 1747.≥∞

Compared to modern biographies, what is most striking about Edwards' Life of Brainerd is that it centers on the missionary's internal spiritual life and uses the externals of his missionary travels only as sca√olding on which that real story is built. Edwards was much more interested in the sacriﬁce involved in Brainerd's mission than in its success. In fact, willingness to persevere even when he had nothing to show for it was what made Brainerd's story so admirable. The missionary had already published the part of his Journal dealing with his one external success in New Jersey. While Edwards strongly recommended that readers purchase this published Journal, as ''the most pleasant part of the whole story,'' he saw at least as much ediﬁcation in the spiritual struggles of a su√ering saint.

Brainerd was temperamentally a lot like Edwards, given to periods of melancholy and spiritual deadness as well as to intense spiritual ecstasies. Edwards acknowledged that ''gloominess of mind,'' or ''dark thoughts'' that were the result of ''the disease of melancholy,'' could be of a ''very hurtful nature.'' Early in his spiritual life, Brainerd had attributed such episodes to ''spiritual desertion.'' Later he had learned, as he had discussed most judiciously with Edwards, to recognize his recurrent illness not as spiritual desertion but occasion for true humiliation and godly sorrow. Here we have a valuable clue to how Edwards himself had learned to deal with his own times of gloomy melancholy.

Edwards acknowledged editing out or summarizing some of the darkest reﬂections recorded in Brainerd's diary. Especially during his lonesome, dangerous, and often fruitless travels on the Susquehanna, the missionary experienced lengthy times in the slough of despondency. Yet for Edwards, renounc-

''Thy Will Be Done'' ≥≥≥

ing comforts of the world and even being brought to the point, like Christ on the cross, of feeling forsaken by God, was evidence of sainthood.≥≤

At the height of his success in Crossweeksung in May 1746, Brainerd expressed the world-renouncing Christlike qualities that Edwards so admired. He was, according to Edwards' rendition of his diary, greatly tempted to settle in the village. ''But now,'' Brainerd wrote, ''these thoughts seemed to be wholly dashed to pieces; not by necessity, but of choice: for it appeared to me that God's dealings towards me had ﬁtted me for a life of solitariness and hardship; it appeared to me I had nothing to lose, nothing to do with earth, and consequently nothing to lose by a total renunciation of it: And it appeared just right that I should be destitute of house and home, and many comforts of life which I rejoiced to see others of God's people enjoy.''≥≥

Edwards' and Brainerd's emphasis on such readiness to renounce the world for the kingdom helps account for the immense impact of The Life of David Brainerd, Edwards' most popular work and one of the most inﬂuential missionary accounts of all time. John Wesley published an abridgment that went into many printings. During the awakenings of the ﬁrst half of the nineteenth century The Life of Brainerd, republished in various editions, became one of the most popular of American literary works, both at home and abroad. Brainerd's example gave concrete meaning to the inﬂuential evangelical ideal of ''disinterested benevolence.'' Many missionaries carried The Life of Brainerd with them. Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography, the story of the selfmade man, eventually became paradigmatic of the American ideal, but at least before the Civil War, Edwards' Brainerd, the self-renouncing man, offered a major alternative.≥∂

Had Edwards built his account around what would have been a relatively modest missionary success story (Brainerd counted fewer than a hundred converts), his Brainerd would never had such lasting e√ect. Edwards was deeply concerned for practical matter of the spread of Indian missions and rejoiced that Brainerd's last stay in Boston had inspired the founding of a new mission society there.≥∑ Yet the heart of the matter was his example of worldsacriﬁcing piety for a cause of inﬁnite worth.

''The Advancement of Christ's Kingdom on Earth''

''This morning,'' David Brainerd wrote in his diary on Lord's Day, August 23, 1747, ''I was considerably refreshed with the thought, yea, the hope and

≥≥∂ ''Thy Will Be Done''

expectation of the enlargement of Christ's kingdom; and I could not but hope the time was at hand when Babylon the great would 'fall and rise no more.' ''≥∏

When Brainerd visited the Edwards home, it is important to remember, Northampton was in the midst of a war and the house was fortiﬁed. Hostile Indians were rumored to be close at hand. Only four days after Brainerd's diary entry, a band of Indians scalped and killed Elisha Clark, a well-known local farmer, who had been threshing in his barn in Southampton.≥π Despite such painful inversions of his hopes, Brainerd could rejoice with the Edwardses in the long-term prospects.

Brainerd's self-sacriﬁcing missionary zeal and Edwards' wider activism must be understood in the context of their earthly optimism. Edwards' theology was not simply philosophical reﬂections growing out of his contemplations of God and a heavenly eternity. Rather, since it was always refracted through Scripture, it was grounded in a breathtaking historical perspective that provided incentive for unﬂagging evangelical action.

While Brainerd was in Northampton, Edwards was completing yet another book on awakening, one that must have provided subjects for many hours of their prayers and conversations. The book, An Humble Attempt to Promote an Explicit Agreement and Visible Union of God's People thro' the World, in Extraordinary Prayer, for the Revival of Religion, and the Advancement of Christ's Kingdom on Earth, Pursuant to Scripture Promise and Prophecies Concerning the Last Time, completed by September 1747, had two focal points, as its complicated title suggested. First it was a plea for the international Concert of Prayer. Yet most of the exposition was on the second point, the prospects for the coming millennial kingdom on earth.

Prayer societies, while not new, were essential parts of the evangelical awakenings. Edwards had organized meetings for prayer and praise for various groups and districts of Northampton since before the revival of 1734–35. The Scottish awakenings were similarly sustained by weekly prayer meetings. In 1744 Scottish leaders, including Edwards' correspondent John McLaurin, organized two years of concerted prayer at designated times for international revival. Edwards eagerly promised to help. By this time New England's great awakening (unlike its Scottish counterpart) was in shambles and prayer seemed the only hope. ''It is apparent that we can't help ourselves,'' Edwards wrote to a Scottish correspondent in November 1745, ''and have nowhere else to go, but to God.''≥∫ In An Humble Attempt Edwards was arguing for a Scottish proposal to formalize and extend the Concert of Prayer, involving international agreements to regularly scheduled extraordinary prayers for

''Thy Will Be Done'' ≥≥∑

awakenings, either in societies or privately, on Saturday evenings or Sabbath mornings and on quarterly days of prayer. Edwards did everything he could to encourage the Concert among prayer societies in Northampton, but the town was in its spiritual doldrums and little came of it.

Edwards' case in An Humble Attempt for instituting the Concert of Prayer was built largely around his hopes for the millennium, a subject on which he had been wanting to write. The connection between the two themes was not artiﬁcial. After all, at the center of the prototypical Christian prayer was ''thy kingdom come; thy will be done in earth as it is in heaven.''≥Ω Edwards, with his usual thoroughness, assembled all the Scriptural data depicting what it would mean for Christ's kingdom to come and his will to be done on earth.

The biblical pictures of the coming kingdom were awe inspiring. Edwards allowed that the millennium might mean either a thousand years or ''a very long time'' and was critical of those authorities who attempted to set exact dates (although he himself had earlier speculated that it would begin around a.d. 2000). During the long era that would follow, almost everyone would truly follow Christ. As a result, wars would cease, nations would dwell together as brethren, ''the wolf should dwell with the lamb.'' There would be ''vast increase of knowledge,'' and ''all heresies and false doctrines shall be exploded.'' In short, the triumph of Christ's kingdom ''is an event unspeakably happy and glorious.''∂≠

This amazing future had a remarkable theological implication. During the millennium humans would live in harmony with nature as well as with each other. With the resulting combination of ''great health and peace,'' Edwards pointed out, the population would accelerate phenomenally. Even if it doubled only every one hundred years, the world population after a millennium would be a thousand times greater than at the beginning. If it doubled every ﬁfty years (less than the growth rate for New England), the population would increase a millionfold. Virtually everyone in the millennium, furthermore, would be regenerate. Jesus' prophesy that ''I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me'' (John 12:32) referred to such a time. So since the overwhelming majority of all humans that ever lived would live during the millennium and virtually all of those would be redeemed, the percentage of humans damned would be tiny.∂∞

Edwards did not spell out the point, but he was indirectly commenting on an issue that greatly bothered him and many of his contemporaries. If, as he argued, God was essentially love, how could the Lord condemn some to an eternity of su√ering in hell? Edwards' millennial logic did not resolve the

≥≥∏ ''Thy Will Be Done''

fundamental issue, which he addressed in other venues. Still, if God damned far fewer than one person in a thousand God's overall governance of the universe looked far more benevolent than if only a select few people would be saved. A decade later Edwards' close ally, Joseph Bellamy, published a sermon including a chart that used the same statistics to show that the ratio of saved to lost would be more than 17,000 to 1. In a related sermon Bellamy argued that if, as Jesus taught, there is more joy in heaven over one sinner found than in ninety-nine never lost, and that if only two-thirds of all humans were saved, the surplus of joy in the universe created by the permission of evil would be many million times increased.∂≤ Edwards, who surely later talked long and hard with Bellamy on these points, was in An Humble Attempt not addressing the problem of evil. For now he was demonstrating that it was certainly worth much praying to hasten the day when this painful era of rebellion would be succeeded by the reign of righteousness.

The inspiring brightness of this coming Christ-centered utopia contrasted sharply with the dark hues of the present. Especially in New England, religion had hit a low. Fierce contentions divided churches. People held ministers in contempt. Church discipline was lax. Wild delusions inspired by the devil prevailed among enthusiasts. Others despised all vital piety. Vice and immorality of all kinds were ''unusually prevailing.'' In the homelands things were worse. This was all the more ironic because ''It is an age, as is supposed, of great light, freedom of thought, and discovery of truth in matters of religion, and detection of the weakness and bigotry of our ancestors.'' Yet the so-called advances of this supposed ''age of great light'' were undermining morals. On another front, the forces of Rome were increasing their attacks on Protestantism. France had renewed persecutions of Huguenots, and there were recent e√orts ''to restore a popish government in Great Britain, the chief bulwark of the Protestant cause.''∂≥

Despite such machinations of the devil, God was moving history toward the millennium. This was where Edwards marshaled his evidences of God's recent intervention, such as in the defeat of the Pretender, the recent remarkable preservation of New England from the French ﬂeet, and the ''almost miraculous'' capture of the Louisbourg fortress on Cape Breton. The latter, he believed, was the closest parallel in ''these latter ages'' to God's wonderful interventions in biblical times. Even small signs might signal a turning point in history. Although it ''may seem trivial,'' he pointed out, the capture of Cape Breton deprived popish countries of much of their ﬁsh, ''their superstition forbidding them to eat any ﬂesh for near a third part of the year.''∂∂ The world

''Thy Will Be Done'' ≥≥π

prospects were bright enough, he insisted, that there was good reason to believe that God might be ordaining the Concert of Prayer as part of a dramatic turn for the better.

Some of Edwards' usual supporters thought he was too optimistic. As usual a group of ﬁve evangelical Boston clergy, including Thomas Prince, furnished a preface; but their endorsement was tepid. Readers, they said, might best judge for themselves regarding ''the author's ingenious observations on the prophecies.'' Particularly they questioned his interpretation of the ''slaying of the witnesses'' of Revelation 11. They believed, as did the prevailing interpreters in their circle, that a great persecution was yet to come, whereas the hopeful Edwards said it referred to past su√erings of the saints in the Reformation era. Edwards believed that pessimistic views of the immediate future could dampen zeal for the Concert of Prayer and was attempting to show that there was no necessary reason that the recent awakenings might not still turn out to be early signs of the coming of the kingdom.∂∑

As with much of Edwards' work, the best immediate reception for An Humble Attempt was in Scotland; yet, as was also generally true, his views—or variations much like them—eventually became a force in nineteenth-century America. Down to the Civil War, millennial optimism became the dominant American Protestant doctrine. Although Edwards is not usually thought of as a progenitor of the American party of hope, one can easily see continuities between An Humble Attempt and reforming millennial optimism as late as ''The Battle Hymn of the Republic'' or even into the progressive era.∂∏

In his own day Edwards might have been seen, even by some in his own party, as grasping at straws. Increasingly he became preoccupied with gauging the prospects for the kingdom. Almost immediately after David Brainerd's funeral, he began a new section of his notebook on the ''Apocalypse,'' entitled ''An Account of Events Probably Fulﬁlling the Sixth Vial on the River Euphrates, the News of which was Received since October 16, 1747.'' Part of his argument in the just-completed Humble Attempt was that the rise of the Antichrist (the papacy), from which 1,260 years were to be calculated to its overthrow, need not be one date (such as a.d. 756) but could refer to a series of events. Hence God's work in overthrowing the papacy would also be a series of events already in process and need not be delayed. So even if the millennium itself were not at hand, the dramatic events leading to the coming of that kingdom might be.∂π Particularly, if this calculation was correct, it would mean they were currently living in the time of the pouring out of the sixth (of seven) vials of God's wrath, which was to dry up the great river Euphrates

≥≥∫ ''Thy Will Be Done''

(Rev. 16:12). That, he believed, could be interpreted as the drying up of the ''incomes and supplies'' of Babylon, i.e., the Roman papacy.∂∫

Edwards accordingly transferred into a notebook detailed reports mostly from Boston newspapers that had to do with defeats of Catholic forces, which might be interpreted as drying up the wealth that supplied Babylon (or Rome). Whenever the British captured French ships—a staple of the early entries—Edwards copied down the number of men and guns captured. No friend of learning for its own sake, Edwards included as one of the ﬁrst evidences of God's work a report from Vienna of a Jesuit library ''one of the best-chosen and most curious in Europe'' that was struck by lightning and burned.∂Ω

The counterpart of God's destruction of the Antichrist was the spread of the Gospel, which Edwards argued could likewise be about to advance dramatically. Accordingly, in spring 1748 Edwards added another section to the ''Apocalypse'' notebook where he listed newspaper accounts of ''Events of an Hopeful Aspect on the State of Religion.''∑≠ In his much discussed comments in Some Thoughts Concerning the Revival of Religion (1742), he had suggested that the American awakenings might be glimmers of light that presaged the millennial dawn. Now he said nothing about the priority of America and suggested rather that the lights were going out all over New England. Yet the larger international horizon still revealed numerous glimmers, of which Brainerd's sacriﬁcial work was just one. That gave reason for hope and prayer even in the darkest hours before dawn.

In reckoning the progress toward Christ's kingdom, Edwards did not draw any sharp line between the spiritual and the political. The work of David Brainerd, the Concert of Prayer, and the war with the French and their Indian allies were all of one piece. The spread of the Gospel was the preeminent goal, but he never doubted that one precondition was Protestant military success against ''papal'' regimes. Protestant countries indeed needed to be reclaimed for true Calvinist piety, but in the meantime God used nominally Protestant British gunboats and profane British soldiers to thwart outright anti-Christian papist designs.

Edwards accordingly searched for political signs to put on the positive side of the ledger, evidencing the advance of the Gospel. He wrote to his Scottish correspondents, with whom he was now exchanging long letters on prophetic interpretations, for conﬁrmation of reports that some minor members of the English government had turned to orthodox Christianity.∑∞ He also rejoiced that another of his Scottish brethren had referred to the current

''Thy Will Be Done'' ≥≥Ω

archbishop of Canterbury as ''orthodox'' and at reports that Whiteﬁeld had confounded sco≈ng sophisticates by winning respect in high places, ''even in Caesar's household'' as it were.∑≤

Nearer to home, he hoped for the happy convergence of political and evangelical interests. Aside from Colonel Stoddard's local inﬂuence, Massachusetts' government was cool to awakening, and Connecticut was in the hands of Old Lights. But prospects had become brighter to the south. In 1747 New Jersey dissenters successfully prevailed on the British government to appoint their old friend Jonathan Belcher governor of New Jersey. Belcher's appointment consolidated the growing power of New Englanders such as Dickinson and Burr. The new governor would also be a friend to the ﬂedgling College of New Jersey.∑≥

Edwards was delighted at this new political prospect and wrote to Belcher requesting that he might dedicate his Life of Brainerd to the governor. Belcher apparently declined the honor (it might have been impolitic so openly to ally himself with a controversial New Light), but he assured Edwards at some length that he might ''be sure of me as a friend and father to the missionaries this way, and of all my weight and encouragement for spreading the everlasting gospel of God our Savior.''∑∂

Edwards also sent some advice to the governor concerning the conduct of the tiny College of New Jersey, which in the fall of 1747 was shaken by the sudden death of its ﬁrst president, Jonathan Dickinson, and for which the governor was proposing a new charter. Belcher may have urged Edwards to accept the presidency.∑∑ In any case he was e√usive in assuring Edwards that he had adopted the college ''for a daughter'' and would do everything to keep it true to the Gospel. ''The accounts I receive,'' said the governor, in unreconstructed Whiteﬁeldian tones that he knew would please Edwards, ''give me too much reason to fear Arminianism, Arianism and even Socinianism, in destruction to the doctrines of free grace, are daily propagated in New England Colleges. How horribly and how wickedly are these poisonous notions rooting out those noble pious principles on which our excellent ancestors founded those seminaries!'' The governor further praised Edwards' book promoting the Concert of Prayer and promised to help John Brainerd and two new missionaries to the Indians, Elihu Spencer (an Edwards protégé) and Job Strong from Northampton, in every way he could.∑∏

The New Light party had remnants of political strength only on the fringes of the British Empire, in parts of Scotland, and in aging magistrates in America, such as John Stoddard and Jonathan Belcher, both in their late

≥∂≠ ''Thy Will Be Done''

sixties. Yet in Edwards' view their cause had bright hope because they were conforming to God's plan. All the pieces of their comprehensive program ﬁt together: awakening, for which they needed the Concert of Prayer; education, for which they needed the new College of New Jersey; missions, for which they needed more David Brainerds; and political inﬂuence, which would depend on awakened leaders. Despite some bleak immediate conditions, Edwards was convinced there was much reason to hope for those who would depend on God, pray, and serve.

C H A P T E R ≤∞ kl ''I Am Born to Be a Man of Strife''

hey have never maintained him in any measure,'' Sally complained of the town's treatment of her father in the winter of 1747–48, just before Jerusha died. ''These things,'' she went on, after summarizing recent salary disputes, ''I am sensible have done much toward making my father willing to leave his [people] if convenient opportunity present.'' Sally was writing with striking frankness to her missionary friend Elihu Spencer, one of the men Edwards had recommended to Governor Belcher for work with John Brainerd in New Jersey. Spencer, like David Brainerd, had visited the Edwardses' home in summer 1747. Apparently there was more than one romance that summer. Sally justiﬁed the candor of her letter by observing, ''I have felt the greatest freedom to one whom I esteem so cordial a friend.'' She also mentioned that Jerusha was recently in much better health than she had been when Spencer visited, though ''this day was taken very much out of order but we hope it will prove but a short term''—suggesting the letter may have been written the day Jerusha fell into her ﬁnal illness. In any case, we know that just before that calamity Edwards' relation to Northampton was still in a dismal state.∞

Sally's letter reminds us that while he was doing everything else, Edwards was constantly involved in a crowded, thriving, and often demanding home life. Sally reported that he had furnished the town with an account of the family's essential expenses and that these were several hundred pounds more than the town thought it could a√ord. The letter also reveals that by this time the largely female Edwards household was constantly dealing with suitors for the teenage daughters. From as early as when Samuel Hopkins seemed to have had his eye on Jerusha, ardent young admirers of Jonathan who visited the intensely spiritual Edwards home romanticized the potentialities of the

≥∂≤ ''Born to Be a Man of Strife''

daughters. We have one well-documented case that suggests some of the passions and intrigues that must have often attended daily life in such a prominent home.

In fall 1748, sixteen-year-old Esther, later described as ''of great beauty,''≤

attracted a fervent admirer. Joseph Emerson, a young Massachusetts pastor, returning from the Yale commencement met Jonathan on the road. Edwards invited him to travel with him and to come to Northampton. They spent the Sabbath with Timothy and Esther Edwards in East Windsor, where Edwards preached in the morning and Emerson in the afternoon. The next night they stayed with Edwards' sister Esther Edwards Hopkins and her husband, Samuel Hopkins (the elder) of Springﬁeld. Arriving in Northampton Tuesday evening, Emerson was immediately impressed by what he described in his private diary as ''the most agreeable family I was ever acquainted with.'' Doubtless this estimate had something to do with meeting the third very impressive Esther Edwards he had encountered in as many days, but that pleasure was enhanced by ''much of the presence of God here.'' Elihu Spencer was also there, but apparently his major interests were not in Sally. He was about to leave as missionary to the Indians of the powerful ''six nations.'' ''The most wonderful instance of self denial I ever met with,'' wrote Emerson.

Although he stayed only one full day in the Edwards home, Emerson was hopelessly smitten. By the end of the next week he was writing letters both to Jonathan and to Esther, ''a very desirable person, to whom I purpose by divine leave to make my addresses.'' A month later he set out for Northampton ''to treat for marriage.'' After four days in the Edwards home, Emerson left despondently the next Monday. ''I could not obtain from the young lady the least encouragement to come again,'' he wrote in his diary, ''the chief objection she makes is her youth, which I hope will be removed in time.''

Still holding out a glimmer of hope, Emerson resolved to try again the next spring. In the meantime he was agonizingly distracted by thoughts of Esther, noting in his diary observations like ''so discomposed I could not study,'' or ''I read a little but spent the chief part of the day meditating on my troubles,'' or ''I write two letters to Northampton one to dear Mrs. [Miss] Esther Edwards, who I ﬁnd ingrosseth too many of my thoughts.'' Finally in March 1749 he heard back, not from Esther, but from Sally, ''who entirely discourages me from taking a journey again there to visit her sister, who is so near my heart.'' Devastatingly disappointed, he concluded: ''The Lord teach me to proﬁt. May I be resigned.''≥

''Born to Be a Man of Strife'' ≥∂≥

The Patron

By this time Jonathan may have been praying much the same, although he had not yet given up his desperate suit to win back the hearts of his people in Northampton. Many of the townspeople were feuding with him as only former lovers in a long-term relationship could. There had been a brief respite in spring 1748, perhaps because the death of Jerusha in February brought a temporary wave of sympathy for the Edwardses. In any case, the next month, after years of refusing Edwards' persistent requests to stabilize his salary, the town meeting voted ''by a great majority'' to a generous inﬂation-proof settlement, which made him one of the highest paid pastors in the region.∂

Then another blow—once again the death of a patriarch—shook the foundations of Edwards' relationship to the town. On June 19, 1748, Colonel John Stoddard died unexpectedly in Boston. Edwards' world was built on patriarchy, and the major turning points of his life were precipitated by the deaths of his patrons. In the political realm it would be di≈cult to overestimate the importance of his uncle John Stoddard to Edwards. Probably no eighteenth-century clergyman in America sustained a closer relationship to so powerful a regional magistrate. Edwards' view of history and the millennium projected such close cooperation of Reformed churches and pious magistrates on a large scale. In Northampton John Stoddard was his perennial benefactor. Most recently, ''Squire Stoddard'' had been the head of the committee that recommended Edwards' stabilized salary. Magistrate and pastor, uncle and nephew, stood shoulder to shoulder as God's representatives for preserving the old order and promoting true religion.

At sixty-six, Colonel Stoddard had been heavily burdened as commanding o≈cer overseeing the western operations during the continuing war. In late May 1748 he made his usual journey to Boston to serve as Northampton's representative to the General Court. The court appointed him to undertake another trip to Albany to pursue once again the arduous task of negotiating with the Iroquois. Before he could leave Boston, he su√ered a stroke and died a few days later.∑

One clue as to the closeness between the Edwardses and the Stoddards was that when the colonel su√ered his stroke, it was Sarah Edwards who cared for him. Possibly she was already in Boston and stayed on.∏ The two households had long been intertwined. Until 1736 Edwards' grandmother, Esther Warham Mather Stoddard, had lived in Stoddard's home and Edwards' sister

≥∂∂ ''Born to Be a Man of Strife''

Mary had cared for her. Colonel Stoddard's wife, Prudence Chester Stoddard, was near in age to the Edwardses, and the Stoddard children each had Edwards cousins their own age.

Edwards valued Stoddard as a ﬁrm champion of theological orthodoxy. In the Breck case Stoddard had stretched his authority as the most powerful judge of the region in turning the defense of orthodoxy into a legal issue. During the controversies over the Great Awakening of 1741–42, Stoddard had written a treatise (now lost) defending much the same view as his nephew's. Jonathan found him ''no inconsiderable divine,'' as able as the best divines he knew to give advice in cases of conscience, and able to ''discourse of experimental religion'' as one ''intimately and feelingly acquainted with these things.''

Edwards' eulogy for Stoddard, preached in Northampton the Sabbath after the squire's death and soon published, spared nothing in praise of his patron. Stoddard was among the very wisest of politicians; the best judges of people and of circumstances; the shrewdest and most foresighted of counselors; the most reliable of friends; the most honest, the most public-spirited, and the most knowledgeable of the a√airs of New England, Canada, and of all the Indian nations. He had truly cared for his people like a father for his children. ''Perhaps never was there a man that appeared in New England,'' Edwards declared, ''to whom the denomination great man did more properly belong.''

Never given to excessive tact, Edwards could not resist the opportunity to contrast his uncle's virtues with the vices of the many of the men who had surrounded the magistrate, some of whom were in the audience. Hampshire County's leaders, including some of his Williams cousins, might swell with pride as Edwards lauded the fallen patriarch, but the awakener also turned that admiration into a challenge: ''How far [was Stoddard] from any sly and clandestine management to ﬁll his pockets with what was fraudulently withheld, or violently squeezed, for the laborer, soldier, or inferior o≈cer. How far was he from taking advantage from his commission or authority.'' ''How far was he from secretly taking bribes.'' By contrast were men of ''a narrow private spirit'' who used ''little tricks'' to gain a few pounds and were ''not ashamed to grind the faces of the poor, and screw their neighbors.'' So Edwards went on, describing practices that had become notorious during the war.π The Williams family, some of whom were scrupulous and some of whom were not, controlled the wartime commissary business and related patronage in Hampshire County. It was no coincidence, for instance, that the major staging areas

''Born to Be a Man of Strife'' ≥∂∑

for the regiment headed by a brother-in-law were three centers of Williams inﬂuence: Deerﬁeld, Hatﬁeld, and Stockbridge.∫

Edwards' relationship with the surviving Hampshire elite was precarious since the heir-apparent to much of Stoddard's power was cousin Israel Williams. The young ''river god'' was married to Sarah Chester, sister to Prudence Chester Stoddard, but he had long snubbed the Edwardses on his frequent visits to the Stoddards. Israel had sided with Jonathan Ashley of Deerﬁeld (married to Israel's sister) in openly breaking with Edwards over the awakening, and Edwards suspected his religious principles. John Stoddard, he pointed out to his captive audience, was not only a friend of the revival but of the ''religious principles and doctrines of the ﬁrst fathers of New England, usually called the doctrines of grace and he had a great detestation of the opposite errors of fashionable divinity.''

While he was at it, Edwards used Stoddard's virtues to take a swipe at some more widespread vices. ''Who,'' he asked, ''ever saw him irreverently and indecently lolling, and laying down his head to sleep, or gazing about the meeting house in time of divine worship?'' And Stoddard was ''an enemy of vain or profane conversation,'' said Edwards, alluding to the sore point of his alliance with his uncle in attempting to suppress vice in the ''young folks' Bible'' case. Stoddard's death was another ''testimony of the divine displeasure, added to all the other dark clouds God has lately brought upon us, and his awful frowns upon us.'' One of the frowns was the alarming death rate—in 1748 alone the toll was forty-three, over 3 percent of Northampton's population.Ω

The Revolution

Edwards could hardly have picked a worse time to launch his conservative revolution. The dispirited town had lost its leading citizen—the last great Stoddard—and Edwards had lost his strongest ally. Almost immediately the pastor began a campaign that seemed to betray Stoddard's name and memory. With John Stoddard out of the way, or so it seemed to Edwards' opponents, he attempted a coup that would abolish Solomon Stoddard's practices concerning church membership and the sacraments.

His ﬁrst step, or misstep, was to propose an antidemocratic revision of the congregation's government. In a four-part sermon preached in June 1748 Edwards argued that: '' 'Tis the mind of God that not a mixed multitude but only select persons of distinguishing ability and integrity are ﬁt for the

≥∂∏ ''Born to Be a Man of Strife''

business of judging causes.'' Edwards had inherited from Solomon Stoddard the practice of having cases of church discipline brought before the entire congregation of male communicants. The purpose of discipline, Edwards pointed out, was to ''heal the wounds'' of the church, but long experience had proven that the customary practice did just the opposite. It was the occasion of ''many great wounds [and] contention, quarreling with the minister, quarreling with one another.'' Often the dissensions resulting from the cure were worse than the original disease and lasted ''till death puts an end'' to them.

Edwards proposed having a council of elders, such as was the practice in Holland, Geneva, Scotland, the Presbyterian churches of the Middle Colonies, and almost all Calvinistic churches. He assured his church that he did not want to revert to the older New England and Northampton practice of having just one or two lay elders with powers equal to the minister, including powers to ordain ministers. Rather he believed it more consistent with Scripture to have a representative judicial board that would aid the minister in governing the church.

Edwards' principal arguments came from Scripture, but he also pointed out that in civil government and the military it was common sense that the multitudes should not judge every case or enter equally into every decision. In a revealing line of thought, he argued that men could not use ''the rights of human nature'' as ''ground of the power of judgment in a church.'' Such claims—increasingly popular among eighteenth-century men—would prove too much. If human nature were the ground of such rights, then women would have the same rights because ''they have the human nature entire, all its faculties if the human nature only be the ground of the claim.'' Many women in Christian churches,'' he went on, ''are much more capable than some of the men.'' For instance, ''it will be found di≈cult to say what there is in nature that shows that a wise woman ought not to have as much power in the church as a male servant that hasn't a tenth part of the understanding.'' Scripture must be the preeminent guide, even when if it seems to go against the dictates of nature.∞≠

Edwards' reasons for proposing this governmental revision, which predictably did not go anywhere, are not clear,∞∞ but within a few months he was proposing the far more radical surgery of repudiating his grandfather Stoddard's views on the terms of admission to communion. People immediately raised the issue of the timing, so soon after John Stoddard's death. Edwards responded that he just had been waiting for the right occasion. As it happened, no one had joined the congregation for several years—a commentary

''Born to Be a Man of Strife'' ≥∂π

in itself. He was waiting for someone to seek membership who showed su≈cient signs of piety to meet his new stricter standards. Edwards was not demanding step-by-step conversion narratives, as his father still required, but he did want something more than the rather formal assent that had satisﬁed his grandfather Stoddard. He was asking for a ''credible profession''—which he would judge—of a heartfelt faith and dedication to serve God.∞≤

Finally, in December 1748, not long after the news of the war's end had arrived, an apparently pious young man about to be married sought church membership. This was just the sort of case Edwards wanted because he did not want to mark the institution of his new standards with the exclusion of an applicant, which would make the move look petty and personal. In addition to examining the young man on the usual Stoddardean standards of orthodoxy, moral sincerity, and lack of scandal, Edwards gave the young man some samples of brief professions of heartfelt faith that he might a≈rm and told him he might draw up something similar in his own words. The applicant said that he thought he could a≈rm such a statement and would consider the matter. As soon as word got out as to what was afoot, the lid blew o√ the town. The young man, not wanting to be a party to the unpopular innovation, returned and told Edwards he did not want to join the church under the new conditions.

The following February Edwards explained his views to the committee of the church and asked if he might preach on the subject. The animosity against his views was so strong that the great majority of the committee refused to let him preach about the matter. As an alternative, they allowed, he was free to publish his views. He immediately set himself to writing a treatise.

Soon after, a young woman came to him to join the church, willing to a≈rm a profession according to Edwards' standards. In April 1749, Edwards brought her application to the committee and asked that she be accepted under these terms. He assured them that he would not use the case as a precedent. Dramatically underscoring that point—and how tense things had gotten—he o√ered them a signed statement promising to resign if they still rejected his views after reading the treatise he was preparing. Despite this conditional promise of resignation, the committee rejected the young woman's application for membership by a vote of ﬁfteen to three.∞≥ The controversy would drag on for more than another year, but the townspeople had made up their minds.

Their outrage was fueled not only by their long-standing resentments and vehement disagreements with what Edwards was proposing, but also by their

≥∂∫ ''Born to Be a Man of Strife''

belief that he was being devious, even duplicitous. Why had he waited until he had attained a ﬁxed salary to announce his new views? Why had he not disclosed them while Colonel Stoddard was living? Was it that he knew that Solomon Stoddard's son, who had so long protected him, would be the most formidable opponent of a repudiation of his father's heritage?

Edwards answered that he had long had scruples about his grandfather's view and that a number of years ago, around the time he wrote Religious A√ections, he had settled on his current conviction. Knowing how di≈cult it would be for the townspeople to accept a repudiation of the revered Solomon Stoddard's policies, he had decided that it would be best to gradually let his opinion be known so as to let them get used to the idea. He had publicly (though obscurely) alluded to his position in Religious A√ections and had discussed his views openly with friends and with a number of townspeople. He had intended to fully discuss his views with Colonel Stoddard, who he knew would oppose him, but had been waiting for the occasion of a suitable applicant for church membership.∞∂

In the poisoned atmosphere, many of the people were not convinced. Rather than engage the real issues, they complained to each other about how Edwards had not been open and honest with them. Eventually, as the contentions dragged on, Edwards secured a number of depositions from people conﬁrming that he had indeed spoken openly of his views before his salary was settled or Stoddard's death. These testimonies provide some rare glimpses of Edwards in conversation.

The most vivid was a conversation with Sarah, probably early in 1746, when they were out riding together because she was ill and was riding for her health. As Sarah recounted it, Jonathan took the opportunity to tell her at length of his qualms about the Stoddardean practice of admitting to membership those who make ''no credible profession of Godliness.'' He had already told her that he had inserted the passage in the forthcoming Religious A√ections revealing his position, but when she asked him if he might write more on the subject, he replied that he was reluctant to publicly oppose his grandfather and was still not absolutely sure of his opinion.

Soon afterwards, Sarah continued, he became sure and on a number of occasions expressed his determination not to admit anyone without a credible heartfelt profession. Still, he felt that until the occasion arose, it would be best to let the word get out gradually. During the next two years, she testiﬁed, Edwards openly expressed his view to various well-known persons, such as Samuel Buell, John Brainerd, and Aaron Burr. When townspeople were also

''Born to Be a Man of Strife'' ≥∂Ω

present or came in on the conversation, he made no e√ort to conceal his opinions. To Burr he suggested that his parishioners might well throw him out and bring his family to poverty. Burr replied that then he had might as well immediately accept the presidency of the College of New Jersey.

Before Colonel Stoddard died, Sarah had heard open talk of Edwards' views in New Haven and Hartford, and she herself had talked of it with one of the prominent townsmen, Elisha Pomeroy, on the road to Boston before Colonel Stoddard's death. Though Sarah surely highlighted the facts to Edwards' advantage, other witnesses corroborated that he had not entirely hidden his views from the townspeople.∞∑ In an especially memorable conversation from early 1747 recalled by John Searle, a former Northampton resident, the pastor had spoken of his previous controversies and of what he knew lay ahead. Then he said with great emotion, ''It seems I am born to be a man of strife.'' To Sarah he lamented that the prospect ahead appeared to him ''like a bottomless ocean.''∞∏

That Edwards was willing to sail the foundering ship of his pastorate into the teeth of the storm, knowing well that he and his family were likely to go down, tells us much about his character. First, he was irremediably a man of principle. Once he arrived at a conclusion, he was not ready to give in. Like many eighteenth-century people, he believed that through observation and logic one should be able to settle almost any question. His own logical powers increased his sense that he could settle an issue by argument. Even after he had faced the force of his people's animosities, he still remained hopeful that he might convince them if only they would read his treatise.∞π Edwards' reverence for Scripture enhanced his sense of the authority of whatever beliefs he derived from it. His conviction that the life or death of eternal souls was at stake made him willing to risk his own welfare.

That he was willing to risk comfort and status for high principle does not mean he was without fault. For one thing, his brittle, unsociable personality contributed to the breakdown of the once-warm relationship with the townspeople. Try as he might to temper his natural propensities by cultivating Christian virtues of gentleness, charity, and avoiding evil-speaking, he still seemed aloof. He was not able to build up the reserve of personal goodwill that more pastoral ministers enjoyed. Edwards was keenly aware of these failings, and as the disaster developed he suggested a number of times that he might not be suited for anything but writing.∞∫

Added to that, Edwards was not a keen judge of the full range of human behavior. The point has to be stated carefully because he was a master at

≥∑≠ ''Born to Be a Man of Strife''

judging the deceitfulness of the human heart and at analyzing religious affections. Yet the very intensity with which he viewed such things, always through the lenses of Scripture and strictly Reformed tradition, kept him from ordinary shrewdness about what was possible. Although he was a Calvinist in theology, he was a perfectionist by nature. He asked more than could be hoped for from a people, applying to a town the disciplined standards he held for himself. The Northampton covenant of 1742 was probably the clearest instance of overreaching. It was like asking the whole town to live according to his personal resolutions writ large. Or it was like asking a town of the 1740s to become like a Puritan village of the 1640s. When the town reverted to its eighteenth-century ways, after making promises it could not keep, both sides were disheartened and embittered.

Edwards was impaled on the horns of a dilemma inherited from his tradition. Puritanism and its Reformed-pietist successors constantly vacillated between whether they were rebuilding Christendom by making towns and eventually nations into virtually Christian societies, or whether they were advocating a pure, called-out church. Edwards had strong commitments to both ideals. Heir to the Puritan establishment and part of a powerful ruling clan, he was jealous of the privileges of ministerial prestige in town and province. He looked forward to a worldwide Reformed Christendom as the millennium approached.

Yet he was also a luminary among the international awakeners whose insistence on conversionism could—like earlier Puritanism—be disruptive of the standing order. The awakeners worked on the premise that many church members, including many clergy, were unconverted. The implication seemed to be that true churches should be made up of true believers only. Edwards had spoken out against New Lights who were quick to judge others' spiritual states and had emphasized how di≈cult it was to identify who was truly converted. Yet scores of New Light congregations in New England had separated from what they considered to be the impurities of the established churches of their towns.∞Ω Some had become Baptists, applying the logic of converts-only purity to both sacraments. It is easy to see why Edwards' opponents would accuse him of moving toward separatism.

Edwards wanted rather to resolve the old conundrum without resorting to separatism.≤≠ He would show how to maintain both the purity of the church and the establishment. As in so much of his thought, he seemed determined to demonstrate how the Puritan tradition he had grown up with could work in eighteenth-century settings. Not that he followed his pre-

''Born to Be a Man of Strife'' ≥∑∞

decessors in any exact ways. Rather, based on his own reexamination of Scripture, he reformulated their essential ideals on what he regarded as a ﬁrmer foundation.≤∞

The great problem was how to reconcile the Old and New Testaments. According to Puritan teaching, the church, being the ''new Israel,'' was successor to the covenant with the Old Testament nation. This point was crucial for infant baptism because the main justiﬁcation for children receiving the New Testament sign and seal of the covenant was that God had included children in the promises of the covenant to Israel, ratiﬁed by the sign of circumcision.

Solomon Stoddard had attempted to resolve this dilemma by highlighting the Old Testament model. Developing his views at a time when it was becoming clear that Puritans could no longer be assured of control over colonial governments, he emphasized the side of the heritage that said there should be a national (or territorial) church. Anyone who was upright and would a≈rm Christian principles should be a full member of the church. Conversion could come later. That was what the church ordinances, the Lord's Supper as well as Gospel preaching, were designed to promote.≤≤

Combined with the half-way covenant, this policy meant that almost every child—as in the old European establishments—would be a baptized member of the church. Most adults would become communicants, even if some stayed away because of moral failings, scruples, or mere indi√erence. Clergy would thus retain moral authority over almost the whole community.≤≥ The nation would be, like Israel of old, standing before God as a people who observed his ordinances.≤∂

Yet the e√ect of Stoddardeanism was that church and town were more or less coextensive. The Stoddard family (and their clerical and magisterial allies and kin in neighboring towns) could preside over something like an Old Testament tribe. The New Testament agenda of fostering conversions remained a leading goal, but it was pursued in this Old Testament framework.

Edwards, while wanting to balance the two testaments, can be understood as insisting that the New Testament should have priority if one was attempting to ﬁnd the model for the church. Whereas God did indeed show favor to the whole nation of Israel, even though not all its people were regenerate—as he still might favor whole nations even though they were very imperfectly Protestant—God did so ''according to the ﬂesh.'' The church, by contrast, was constituted by the Holy Spirit. That meant that its truly full members were those whose hearts were changed by regeneration. True, no

≥∑≤ ''Born to Be a Man of Strife''

one but God could reliably judge the heart, yet those admitted as visible full members should at the least be able to produce the outward signs of regeneration, including a heartfelt profession.≤∑

Convinced that he had found the true middle way between the separatists' attempt at a pure church and the more open practices of birthright membership, Edwards would brook no contradictions to his view once he went public. Writing almost nonstop during early spring of 1748, he produced the treatise An Humble Inquiry into the Rules of the Word of God, Concerning . . . Full Communion in the Visible Christian Church, which he hoped would persuade the townspeople.

He had, he wrote, once held his grandfather's views and had ''conformed to his practice,'' yet he had never been comfortable with them. Now, after years of wrestling, he was willing to undertake the unseemly task of opposing such a venerable ancestor. Stoddard himself, he emphasized at the outset, had said, ''It may possibly be a fault to depart from the ways of our fathers: but it may also be a virtue, and an eminent act of obedience, to depart from them in some things.''≤∏

Looked at one way, Jonathan's problem was that he was Timothy Edwards' son more than he was Solomon Stoddard's grandson. Timothy, who had never approved of Stoddardeanism, was still a force in his life, and the son regularly visited his aged but still active parents. Jonathan had always been ready to depart from his father ''in some things,'' but it had never been easy. Not willing to give up an argument, in Religious A√ections he had settled to his own satisfaction the dispute with his parents regarding exact preparatory steps as evidences of conversion. Once he had removed that obstacle—which had been such a sore point with him personally—he could focus on the essence of the question that separated his father from his grandfather. His father's demand that prospective members recount the proper steps of a conversion experience was indeed too much to ask, yet his grandfather had gone too far to the other extreme. Jonathan's solution of asking for a heartfelt profession yet following no set formula preserved the essential virtue of his father's view while avoiding its excess.

A High View of the Sacraments—Low Church Style

Whatever its psychological roots, Jonathan's insistence that professions of faith must show evidence of being heartfelt grew out of the core of his theology. True religion, he had long held, must involve the a√ections. The

''Born to Be a Man of Strife'' ≥∑≥

will must be radically transformed from its natural self-love to love to God. The great divide among people was between those whose hearts were enraptured by this love and beauty and those whose self-indulgent hearts rejected it. Whatever their relatively good intentions, persons who could not show heartfelt evidence of regeneration must be judged to be on the wrong side of this divide.≤π

In order to appreciate his change of mind one must imagine the grandeur of Edwards' vision of the ''divine and supernatural light''—enough to send him into ine√able bliss—in contrast to his disappointments with the town. Having once thought that most of his parishioners shared the life-changing encounter with blazing beauty, it was all the harder for him to see them day after day preoccupied with petty jealousies, avarice, and lusts, and to endure their sullen expressions and bored irreverence as they went through the forms of weekly worship. If Edwards' attitude toward the town seemed like that of a betrayed husband, it was because that was just the sort of issue he thought was at stake. Edwards viewed the Lord's Supper as most essentially a sign and a seal ''renewing and conﬁrming of the covenant.'' It was, he said, ''at least as a woman's taking a ring of the bridegroom in her marriage is a profession and seal of her taking him for her husband.'' To make such vows lightly and to break them repeatedly would be terrible crimes. No wonder I Corinthians 11 described it as to eat and drink judgment to oneself.≤∫

The emphasis on the covenant or solemn promise in his argument on the Lord's Supper is illuminating. In expounding the gravity of the sacrament he explained that ''the established signs in the Lord's Supper are fully equivalent to words.''≤Ω He then proceeded to the analogy of the ring to the wedding promises. Edwards indeed had a high view of sacrament, but he understood it in a thoroughly low church framework. His universe was ﬁlled with signs and types. Everything pointed to the real presence of Christ. Every part of the worship service, including most solemnly the Supper, was designed to elicit a sense of that ine√able spiritual presence. Yet—biblicist Protestant that he was—he saw words as the most essential symbols guiding hearts to God's communication of the love of Christ. Words provided the key to all the other rich symbols with which one was surrounded. God's revelation in Scripture was an elaborate promise to humankind, an o√er of marriage. Christ would take his people as a spouse. The sacramental signs conﬁrmed the promise that Christ had sealed with his own blood.

Even if words were the keys to all the symbols of the divine mysteries, the symbols themselves pointed to the reality of Christ in communion. ''There is

≥∑∂ ''Born to Be a Man of Strife''

a presence of Christ,'' Edwards proclaimed in a communion sermon, ''by special manifestation of himself and tokens of his presence whereby Christ may be said to be present with Christians and not all others.'' So beneﬁcial was the communion as a symbol eliciting a sense of Christ's communal presence with believers that Edwards agreed with his Scottish correspondents who were advocating weekly communion.≥≠

Since Christ was truly present in communion with his people, it was a mockery for those who betrayed him to renew their vows, as though in a marriage to which they had never been faithful. It was like those who witnessed Christ's cruciﬁxion, he told his people in communion sermon in 1745 near the time he began intimating his new views. Those who gathered around the dying Christ were either his ''disciples'' or ''his murderers.'' So with communion, there were only two possibilities. People could partake the ''body and blood'' either ''as friends and disciples,'' or ''as blood thirsty cannibals.'' The solemn covenant ceremony would seal either ''communion with Christ'' or ''damnation.''≥∞

This radical view of the Lord's Supper, the townspeople soon found out to their bewilderment, was not all—Edwards was extending his either-or logic to the rite of baptism. He was repudiating the half-way covenant. The hypocritical betrayers of Christ, he reasoned, did not deserve to have their children baptized. So he was proposing, much to the consternation of the Northamptonites, that parents seeking baptism for their children would have to be full professing members. When this news broke, the uproar in the town became, if possible, more heated. ''I am not sure,'' the disheartened Edwards wrote to his Boston friend and literary agent, the Reverend Thomas Foxcroft, in May 1749, ''but that my people, in length of time and with great di≈culty, might be brought to yield the point as to the qualiﬁcations for the Lord's Supper, though that is very uncertain. But with respect to the other sacrament [baptism], there is scarce any hope of it. And this will be very likely to overthrow me, not only with regard to my usefulness in the work of the ministry here, but everywhere.''≥≤

We can well understand why such proposed restrictions on baptism would infuriate the townspeople even more. Edwards was not only repudiating the revered Stoddard, he was rejecting the long-standing practice of most of Christendom, the prerogative of upright Christian citizens to have their children baptized. Even many New Lights, such as the New Jersey Presbyterians, did not go that far—that may be why he feared he was ending his ministerial usefulness ''everywhere.''

''Born to Be a Man of Strife'' ≥∑∑

In Northampton, one of the practices he was attacking was the custom that when young people married at least one would become a communicant member so that their children might be baptized. Not only was Edwards ending that practice, but in addition he was proposing to remove the half-way covenant (which provided a way for the children of baptized noncommunicants to be baptized) as a backup to accomplish the same thing. Although infant baptism was not as much a matter of course in New England as in Anglican England, it was by now regarded virtually as a right. For a respectable family to have unbaptized children or grandchildren would be a stigma.

Edwards believed that attitude savored of ''stupidity.'' How was it, he asked, that parents could be so upset that their children lacked the ''honorable badge of Christianity'' when they seemed blithely unconcerned that in reality they were ''children of the devil, and condemned to eternal burnings''? What was the sign without the substance? It was like parents of a child dreadfully swollen from a snake bite being indignant that the child's clothes were dirty. By withholding baptism he hoped to jolt parents into being ﬁrst concerned about what was truly important.≥≥

Edwards treated his own children by just that standard. He always kept their eternal destinies in the forefront, even if it went against natural sentiments. In late July 1749, in the midst of the Northampton controversy, he wrote to his ﬁfteen-year-old daughter, Mary, who was visiting in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Edwards began by saying that it was ''natural for a parent to be concerned for a child at so great distance'' since she might well die before they even heard she was ill. ''But,'' he immediately added, ''my greatest concern is for your soul's good.'' Mary, who had been only eight at the time of the last awakening, was not yet considered to be in a state of grace. So, her loving father exhorted her, ''if the next news we should hear of you should be of your death (though that would be very melancholy),'' yet it would be a greater comfort to hear that there were ''great grounds to hope that you died in the Lord'' than to have been with her and to know she died out of grace. Midsummer, he went on to remind her, had been in recent years a great ''dying time'' in Northampton, and already one family had lost their only remaining son. Only after these sobering warnings did he turn to some instructions for Mary's coming trip to Boston and news that the family was tolerably healthy despite the ongoing controversy.≥∂

Mary, who lived to be the matriarch of one of America's most distinguished evangelical families, had a sense of humor, even if her father suppressed his. She later told the story of Edwards' visit to Portsmouth that

≥∑∏ ''Born to Be a Man of Strife''

spring. Mary had preceded him there, where he was to preach the sermon for the ordination of one of his protégés, Job Strong. Drought conditions had slowed Edwards' journey, so he had not arrived when the service was to begin. The aging Reverend Joseph Moody of York, ''perfectly unique in his manners'' agreed to take over. During the prayer before the sermon, Edwards arrived. ''Being remarkably still in all his movements,'' he ascended the pulpit while the unaware Moody continued praying. Perhaps still stalling for time, Moody extravagantly and at great length told God and the congregation of Edwards' many virtues, ﬁnally concluding with a prayer for Mary, whom he pointed out was in an unconverted state. When Moody ﬁnished and turned around, he was startled to see Edwards directly behind him. ''Brother Edwards,'' he declared, ''we are all of us much rejoiced to see you here to-day, and nobody, probably as much as myself; but I wish that you might have got in a little sooner, or a little later.'' ''I didn't intend to ﬂatter you to your face,'' he blustered on, ''but there's one thing I'll tell you: They say that your wife is a going to heaven, by a shorter road than yourself.'' Edwards, never quick on his feet, had no comeback. He simply bowed, read his text, and preached on what was much on his mind, that ministers must be imitators of Christ. That meant not only having gentle Christ-like virtues, but also seeking ﬁrst the salvation and happiness of eternal souls.≥∑

C H A P T E R ≤≤ kl

The Crucible

he tumult is vastly greater than when you were here,'' Edwards wrote to his friend Joseph Bellamy in December 1749, ''and is rising higher and higher continually.'' The personable Bellamy had tried to intercede in Northampton in the late spring and even had believed that some of the key townspeople could be brought around once Edwards' book came out.∞

Now, Edwards told him, their opponents had roused such resentments against Bellamy that ''you are spoken of by 'em with great indignation and contempt.'' Since Bellamy's visit townspeople and church committees had held countless meetings. Few people had read Edwards' book and few intended to. Further, they would not allow Edwards to hold a public debate on the subject nor to preach on it. Rather, they were seeking simply to neutralize the book by getting someone, preferably Edwards' most distinguished cousin, former Yale rector Elisha Williams, to write a reply. Not only had they not allowed any new members to join the church, they had now resorted to the extreme measure of suspending the sacraments.≤

During the next months matters only got worse as the town and church majority pushed relentlessly for Edwards' removal. Time-consuming wrangles regarding procedural matters kept fanning the ﬂames of controversy. Church government in Massachusetts had evolved in such a haphazard way that it seldom was entirely clear who had charge over what. By the time Edwards was writing to Bellamy, the ''Precinct'' (town) meeting had already asked the governing committee of the church to explore a separation. Edwards had objected that the town should not be doing church business, but since the same leaders were involved, he did not have much prospect of sympathy in either venue.

Leading the e√ort to oust him were the eighty-year-old town patriarch

≥∑∫ The Crucible

Deacon Ebenezer Pomeroy and his son Major Seth Pomeroy, the local hero of Louisbourg. The Pomeroys had built a monopoly in the blacksmith trade. Joining them was Edwards' cousin, the ambitious young Joseph Hawley III, a lawyer and son of the man whose suicide had put a damper on the 1735 awakening.

Young Hawley's defection was a blow. A few years earlier Edwards had spoken highly of his cousin Hawley as a ''worthy pious'' man when the young man had been serving as chaplain to the army at Louisbourg.≥ Edwards had probably acted as something of a guardian and mentor to the boy, who had been only eleven at the time of his father's death. Young Joseph had duly gone o√ to Yale ('42) and returned to study theology with his distinguished older cousin.∂ Now Hawley and Edwards had a falling out on two counts. First, as with much of the recent resentment in the town against Edwards, there was an underlying dispute about changing mores regarding sexual liberties for males. Joseph Hawley had taken the side of his younger brother, Lieutenant Elisha Hawley, in a paternity case brought by Martha Root, who claimed the soldier was the father of her twins (one surviving). Edwards had refused to accede to the plan of the two families, who were from di√ering social classes, for a cash settlement. The pastor argued that, based on Old Testament law, the couple should marry. '' 'Tis utterly unﬁt,'' he insisted, that ''men should think to put away at their pleasure, those whom they have seen cause for their pleasure, thus to unite themselves to.'' The case, which began in 1747, dragged into the summer of 1749, when an ad hoc council of local clergy ruled against Edwards, saying that Hawley needed only to confess to the sin of fornication. Two years later Elisha Hawley married a Pomeroy.∑

Joseph Hawley's break with Edwards was also theological. By the time he returned from his military chaplaincy late in 1748, the young man was openly proclaiming, much to his former mentor's chagrin, some fashionable liberal or Arminian views. As he wrote to his brother Elisha early in 1749, he believed that true religion consisted ''in that which the unprejudiced reason and sense of all mankind says is right.'' Edwards said he was ''very open and bold'' in expressing his new beliefs. Perhaps related to his change in theology, Hawley had given up any plans for the ministry and had settled in Northampton as a lawyer.∏

Edwards did have a couple of prominent allies, including Dr. Samuel Mather and, most notably, Colonel Timothy Dwight, one of the leading merchants and gentry of the region. Although Dwight was a man of ''a rough way of talking,'' he was pious, public spirited, and a rival to Israel Williams as

The Crucible ≥∑Ω

a successor to John Stoddard's power.π Edwards' supporters, however, were a small minority.

In order for a church to sever its relationship with a pastor it needed the approval of an ad hoc committee of neighboring churches. Through the winter and spring of 1749–50 much of the ever-increasing turmoil centered on how to constitute that committee. The two parties were to be given an equal say in naming which churches should send delegates, but Edwards insisted that he did not have a chance at a fair hearing unless he were allowed to go outside of Hampshire County in selecting at least some of the churches. As his critics noticed, he was now taking the opposite position from the one he had defended ﬁfteen years earlier in the Robert Breck case. Yet he felt he had no choice because almost the whole Hampshire Association was against him. Breck and his friends were still there, and the Williams clan and other Stoddardeans controlled most of the rest of the churches.

Edwards was painfully exasperated that he could not get the townspeople even to listen to his views. Finally in February he took matters into his own hands and announced a series of ﬁve Thursday lectures on the topic. Predictably, few of his congregation attended, although people from neighboring communities ﬁlled up the audience. Edwards scheduled the ﬁrst lecture for February 15, the day the county courts were meeting in the town. His cousin Israel Williams was particularly furious at this maneuver and at the Court of Common Pleas for adjourning to hear the lectures. The Court of General Session of the Peace, on which Colonel Williams himself sat, refused to adjourn, and Williams made several vehement speeches against his cousin, calling him a ''tyrant'' who was ''unsu√erable'' in ''lording it over [his] people.''∫

Such revolutionary language alarmed even some of Edwards' opponents among the Hampshire clergy. Unbridled zeal of laypeople to overthrow a ministerial tyrant, they feared, would set a bad precedent. Chester Williams of nearby Hadley, Sarah Edwards' sometimes nemesis, who was now leading ministerial e√orts to oust Edwards, sounded the alert to his fellow Hampshire Association clergy. ''Unless we do concert some measures,'' he warned, ''we are in danger of being overrun, and Northampton will proceed to extreme measures, being conducted by some gentlemen not over-tender of ministers of the churches.''Ω

The clergy managed to keep the revolutionary sentiments in Northampton under their oversight, perhaps because most of the local clergy were on the side of the aroused townspeople. They had reason to fear because the people of many New England towns in 1750 were in a rebellious mood.

≥∏≠ The Crucible

Revolution against ecclesiastical and civil tyrants was part of their heritage. In Boston, the liberal clergyman Jonathan Mayhew had just preached, on January 30, 1750, A Discourse Concerning Unlimited Submission, commemorating the execution of Charles I (now often taken as an early statement of American revolutionary ideology). Few at the time would have connected Mayhew's sentiments with unrest against the clergy in the hinterlands. Yet the recent rash of New Light schisms was also a legacy from the Puritans. Laymen as well as clergy such as Mayhew were talking more and more about their ''rights.'' At the beginning of 1750 there was no predicting in what direction revolutionary sentiments would carry.∞≠

Throughout the spring the Northampton agitation swelled from crisis to crisis and from one to another emergency meeting of town, church, local clergy, or countless caucuses. Yet, in spite of the overheated rhetoric and procedural muddles that were as irritating as the New England roads during a spring thaw, everyone seemed determined to play by some sort of rules. At length, as a concession to Edwards or to his adamancy, he was allowed to go outside the county for two of the ﬁve churches that he was allowed to choose to send representatives to a ten-church council. Unfortunately for him, one of the out-of-county churches, Cold Spring, was almost as much at odds with its pastor, Edward Billing (whom they would oust two years later), as Northampton was at odds with Edwards. Billing, a good friend of Edwards, sat on the council anyway, but the church refused to send an additional lay delegate as each church was invited to do.

That meant that when the crucial council ﬁnally met in Northampton from June 19 to 22, Edwards was one vote short in a party-line division. The minority argued for slowing down the process so as to be able to seek reconciliation. The vocal townspeople would hear nothing of delay. Only immediate separation would do.

Leading the charge to deliver the Northamptonite coup de grace was Joseph Hawley, who had insinuated himself as the church's chief spokesman before the council. Hawley, volatile but persuasive, would countenance no delay or mediation. The vast majority of the congregation was behind him. When the council asked the church to express its views on whether to continue the pastoral relationship, only 23 of the 230 male members voted on Edwards' side. Some others stayed away and Edwards felt he probably had additional support among some women who could not vote and did not dare speak out, but still the opposition was overwhelming. The church council,

The Crucible ≥∏∞

which included some of his long-standing antagonists, such as Robert Breck and Jonathan Ashley, voted for his immediate dismissal.∞∞

The council, however, did exonerate Edwards personally from widely circulated accusations of his lack of sincerity and integrity in the matter. They concluded that he was ''uprightly following the dictates of his own conscience'' and commended him for his ''christian spirit and temper.'' He was, they declared, ''eminently qualiﬁed for the work of the Gospel ministry'' in any church that shared his views.∞≤

Edwards' demeanor during these proceedings apparently was remarkably calm and helped earn him this a≈rmation even from his opponents. His supporters viewed him as simply saintly. One of those, the Reverend David Hall, recorded in his diary: ''I never saw the least symptoms of displeasure in his countenance the whole week, but he appeared like a man of God, whose happiness was out of the reach of his enemies, and whose treasure was not only a future but a present good, overbalancing all imaginable ills of life, even to the astonishment of many, who could not be at rest without his dismission.''∞≥

In his farewell sermon, preached July 1, 1750, Edwards ﬁrmly reminded his congregation of such an eternal perspective, which had been the central motif of his ministry. With the intensity and unrelenting logic to which they were so accustomed, he depicted a compelling scene of how they would meet again before the great throne of God on the judgment day. At that meeting they would have to give an accounting of how they had treated each other as spiritual father and children these twenty-three years. The rejected pastor kept the tone compassionate, yet he did not let anyone miss the point that his conscience was clear and that he was conﬁdent of vindication in the ﬁnal reckoning. He mentioned in passing that they would ﬁnd out whether his stance concerning admission to the sacraments was ''Christ's own doctrine,'' but the real issue would be his ministry as a whole. He could point to his tireless care for their souls. He had not acted out of any temporal concerns of self-interest for himself or his family. If that had ever been obscured during the salary disputes, he had in the communion controversy proved that he did not put temporal concerns ﬁrst. He had chosen a course that was ''plunging me into an abyss of trouble and sorrow.''

On the judgment day his congregation would have to give an accounting as well. Their eternal souls were are stake. That—as they would ﬁnd it di≈- cult to deny—had always been Edwards overarching concern. In point after

≥∏≤ The Crucible

point, Edwards expressed his reasons to fear that they might not measure up. If in the last judgment he should ''be acquitted and shall ascend with Christ,'' he prayed that would not be his former congregation's ﬁnal and most melancholy parting from him.

Edwards closed by reiterating advice he had often given the town. To the young people he said that he knew his e√orts to suppress vice had made him become ''so obnoxious,'' but it was a thing ''exceedingly beautiful'' when young people truly loved and followed God. To parents he emphasized that ''family order'' was another essential. ''Every Christian family ought to be as it were a little church.'' The people of the town needed to avoid their perennial contentions, not just with him but with each other. They furthermore had to be especially wary of Arminianism, which was growing in their midst. It would be a great calamity, he said, ''if these principles should greatly prevail in this town, as they very lately have done in another large town I could name, formerly greatly noted for religion.'' Northampton must ﬁnd a new pastor with these orthodox concerns, especially for their souls. Edwards promised to continue to pray that they might have ''truly a burning and shining light set up in this candlestick.''∞∂

Much of the congregation must have sat in sullen indignation as Edwards implied that he would be exonerated while many of them would be found irredeemably guilty on the last day. Still, Edwards had displayed his transparently genuine concern for the state of their souls, and he believed the sermon was e√ective. ''Many in the congregation seemed to be much a√ected and some are exceedingly grieved.'' Although a few might have relented, the vast majority never would.∞∑

Edwards was su√ering deeply, even if he controlled his outward demeanor. There are, he wrote, ''but few that know the heart of a minister under my circumstances.''∞∏ He believed that God had permitted these a∆ictions as a means of humbling him, and he had come to doubt whether he had the personal skills to be a pastor. He worried what would happen to his ''numerous and chargeable family'' now that his salary was cut o√ and they were ''thrown upon the wide ocean of the world.'' To John Erskine, his most supportive Scottish correspondent, he wrote, ''I am ﬁtted for no other business but study.''∞π

Erskine and other of Edwards' Scottish friends were attempting to step into the breach and inquired whether Edwards might accept a pastorate in Scotland. Edwards replied in July 1750 that he would have no di≈culty accepting ''the substance of the Westminster Confession'' and that he had long

The Crucible ≥∏≥

admired the Church of Scotland's Presbyterian form of government, especially in the light of the chaos of New England's polity. But he shrank from the prospect of moving so large a family across the ocean, especially at his advanced age of forty-six. More important, he worried whether his ''gifts and administration'' would suit any congregation that accepted him without trial. Nonetheless, despite these expressed misgivings, he deﬁnitely left the door open and assured that ''I think my wife is fully of this disposition.''∞∫

Edwards was duly humbled regarding his personal skills, but he had not the least doubt that he was fully in the right in the controversy and that he had been maligned with great injustice by the townspeople. It should have been obvious to them, he believed, that he was acting on principle since he was acting so much against the worldly interests of himself and his family. Instead the townspeople had circulated numerous false rumors, such as that he was trying to ''ensnare the church'' and acting out of ''sinister views, from sti√ness of spirit, and from pride, and an arbitrary and tyrannical spirit, and a design and vain expectation of forcing all to comply with my opinion.''∞Ω

Despite their painful relations with most of their neighbors, Edwards' ''large and chargeable family'' had a life of its own with its own dramas in 1750. In April Sarah bore their eleventh child (tenth surviving) and third son, Pierpont. The next youngest son, Jonathan Jr., was sickly and dangerously ill during the spring and summer but would live to follow his father's footsteps as a pastor (even to be dismissed from his church), theologian, and college president.

On Wednesday, June 11, 1750, just eight days before the fateful council, twenty-one-year-old Sally married Elihu Parsons, a prospering local young man. In November, Mary, only sixteen but sparkling and intelligent, married twenty-four-year-old Timothy Dwight Jr., a neighbor and son of the one local aristocrat who supported Edwards. The younger Dwights would reside in Northampton, though Mary's relation to the local congregation always remained strained, and she traveled to another town on communion Sundays.

The immediate problem after his dismissal was that he and his family had nowhere else to go, and so they remained awkwardly in Northampton for a year. Their relations with the town were ﬁlled with tensions. For instance, about a month after the dismissal the townspeople voted not to allow Edwards to continue to use the pastureland that was usually granted to him. Edwards, deeply worried about his family's ﬁnances, protested (to no avail) that he had been granted use of the pasture for the year.≤≠

≥∏∂ The Crucible

The relationship to the church, where the Edwards family still worshipped, was particularly strange. The church could not always ﬁnd visiting preachers and so resorted to the clumsy expedient of asking Edwards to preach on a week-to-week basis. Edwards remarked that, while they asked him to preach frequently, they always did so as a last resort and with great reluctance. Finally by November, the outcry was so great from some parishioners, unhappy to continue to endure their ousted pastor, that at a public meeting they voted that he should no longer be asked, even if it sometimes meant going without preaching.≤∞ A smaller group of Edwards' supporters were urging him to begin a separate congregation.

He had, in the meantime, been scouting prospects for a move elsewhere in New England, and in December he received an opportunity to which he was much attracted. He had in October traveled to Stockbridge, Massachusetts, forty miles over the mountains to the west, partly to care for some land he owned there but also to explore an opening. Now he had an invitation to consider the possibility of settling there as the pastor of the English congregation and missionary to the Indians. Despite his interest, Edwards moved cautiously, perhaps because of his doubts concerning his pastoral gifts. To test the situation, he left for Stockbridge in January and stayed until early spring, preaching to both whites and Indians and securing formal invitations to settle there.≤≤

Despite this prospect, soon after he returned to Northampton in spring 1751 the town was once again in an uproar. Friends of Edwards were mounting a campaign to start a local church with Edwards as pastor. All over New England, church division had recently become the common way to resolve the problems of irreconcilable di√erences within congregations. At the core of the group pressing for this solution was Colonel Timothy Dwight, whose son had just married Mary Edwards. In the winter Colonel Dwight had been making e√orts to reconcile members of the congregation to Edwards. That proved a thankless task. In the absence of Edwards himself, his enemies had displaced their anger to Dwight and ''now threaten to dismiss me from my o≈ce.''≤≥ By spring the Dwights were ready to break with their old congregation. They and other Edwards supporters argued that they had scruples about taking communion where the majority held looser (Stoddardean) views about the ordinance. They gained assurances from a number of like-minded persons from neighboring towns that they would join an Edwardsean Northampton church.≤∂

Edwards said later that he never had any intention of becoming pastor of

The Crucible ≥∏∑

a new church in Northampton and that he tried to discourage that campaign. Nonetheless, since his few loyal friends and probably both his married daughters were so strongly pleading with him to stay, he left the possibility open.≤∑

Perhaps there was some trepidation in his family concerning a move to a potentially dangerous frontier town. Rather than personally quash the warm entreaties to stay, Edwards followed what he believed the proper procedure whenever contemplating a move: he agreed to convene an ad hoc council of clergy that would meet in May to advise him what to do.≤∏

Edwards' enemies in the town were once again up in arms. They were sure that his calling of a council proved that he was behind the conspiracy to found a rival church. Led once again by the Pomeroys and Joseph Hawley, they replayed the acrimony of the previous summer. This latest move, they told their supporters, conﬁrmed their earlier claims that Edwards' motives from the start had been to enhance his own power. Although they refused to recognize the council as a proper ecclesiastical body, they nonetheless presented it with a strongly worded ''Remonstrance.'' Edwards in turn advised the council that he much preferred Stockbridge to presiding over a remnant in Northampton. Not surprisingly the council concurred and advised that he accept the Stockbridge calls.≤π

''Misrepresentations Corrected''

At nearly the same time Edwards was trying to stamp out the renewed ﬁres of false accusations, he was exasperated to see new fuel provided to feed those ﬁres. A shipment of copies of a book written by his cousin Solomon Williams and printed at the townspeople's expense arrived in town. In this work, entitled The True State of the Question Concerning the Qualiﬁcations Necessary to Lawful Communion in the Christian Sacraments, Williams defended the views of his grandfather Solomon Stoddard against Edwards' criticisms. Edwards believed his cousin had grossly misrepresented his views and felt it necessary to reply—at length.≤∫ In early summer he went by himself to assume his duties in Stockbridge, where he was installed in August. He had much to do in preparation for his family's move, but as soon as he could, he began devoting his spare hours to the engrossing process of setting the record straight. He had his reply ready by the following spring.

From the beginning, the Northampton majority, though their own minds were made up, had sought an intellectual champion to formally respond to Edwards. Like many eighteenth-century people, they believed it important

≥∏∏ The Crucible

to have reason and principle on their side. At ﬁrst the most likely candidate seemed to be Elisha Williams. When Edwards got wind of this, he was alarmed that his formidable cousin might enter the fray and wrote to Thomas Foxcroft in Boston in May 1749 to see if Foxcroft could dissuade Williams.≤Ω

After leaving his post at Yale, Rector Williams had pursued a career as a merchant and politician. Deeply involved in the political conﬂicts in Connecticut, in 1744 he had published anonymously an important volume defending New Light freedom of conscience—a work Edwards apparently admired.≥≠ During the war Elisha had served as a chaplain at Louisbourg and then was appointed as commander of the Connecticut regiment that was supposed to invade Quebec. In fact, his soldiers spent most of their time on furlough. Elisha headed a group of speculators who nonetheless paid them immediately in expectation of greater reimbursement from England. When, after the war, England balked at paying the salaries of soldiers who had mostly stayed at home, the Connecticut government dispatched Williams to England in late 1749 to recover their claims.

In England, Williams divided his time among political, economic, spiritual, and romantic interests. He gained partial reimbursement for the soldiers' salaries and transformed his business into an international enterprise. At the same time he retained his zeal as a New Light Calvinist, associating with notable English evangelicals, such as George Whiteﬁeld, the Countess of Huntington, and Dr. Philip Doddridge (a biblical commentator whom Edwards also admired). While Williams was in England he received news that his wife had died. Doddridge soon introduced him to one of the most remarkable women in the evangelical circle, Elizabeth Scott, known for her hymn writing. Since the Williams family is typically viliﬁed by evangelical writers for its role in opposing the pious Edwards, it is worth quoting Philip Doddridge's estimate of Elisha: ''I look upon Col. Williams to be one of the valuable men upon earth; he has joined to an ardent sense of religion, solid learning, consummate prudence, great candor and sweetness of temper and a certain nobleness of soul.''≥∞

It is easy to understand why Edwards feared published opposition from his highly regarded cousin, and he must have been relieved that Elisha Williams abandoned his plan to reply, most likely because of the upcoming trip to England. Elisha apparently turned over his notes to his brother Solomon, pastor at Lebanon, Connecticut, who completed the project.≥≤

Edwards' principal opposition outside of Northampton was coming from one unmistakable major source, the children of his onetime patron, the late

The Crucible ≥∏π

[To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.]

Elisha Williams (1694–1755), former rector of Yale College and leading Williams family spokesman

William Williams. Some of them, like the ambitious young magistrate Israel Williams, had long-standing antagonisms towards Edwards. The Reverend Jonathan Ashley of Deerﬁeld (married to William Williams' daughter Dorothy) also had fallen out with Edwards earlier (over the awakening) and aided the Northamptonites in the dismissal.≥≥ The two most inﬂuential sons, Solomon and Elisha, had long been close allies of Edwards and were, understandably, especially indignant that Edwards had betrayed the family cause.≥∂

Solomon Williams in his answer to Edwards made the mistake of overstating his case, thus setting himself up for his logician cousin, who proceeded

≥∏∫ The Crucible

to chop his arguments into splinters. Williams represented Edwards as demanding that the church require ''the highest evidence a man can give of sincerity.'' Edwards' view, as Williams characterized it, amounted to the old practice of requiring ''an account of their experience of the sanctifying work of God's Spirit on their hearts.''≥∑

In Misrepresentations Corrected, and Truth Vindicated . . . , published in 1752, Edwards truly had some misrepresentations to correct. He had, he insisted, not required the ''highest evidence a man can give of sincerity'' but was asking only for credible evidence of real godliness as opposed to credible evidence of moral sincerity, which had been su≈cient for Solomon Stoddard. Edwards showed that he had repeatedly said it was impossible to judge people's hearts and that the church could deal only in probabilities in evaluating visible sainthood. Furthermore, he had explicitly said that some charity must be granted to people who had scruples about the evidence of their own godliness. So he was not requiring the highest evidence of godliness; all he was demanding was some believable evidence that a candidate was truly godly.≥∏

Edwards might have said all this and further clariﬁed his di√erences with Stoddard in a few pages, but he was convinced that Williams' volume was so confused and self-contradictory as to conﬂict with Stoddard as much as with Edwards himself. So in a long ﬁnal section he presented numerous examples of Williams' logical fallacies and inconsistencies. He concluded with a letter to his former congregation in Northampton, warning them to be aware of dangers lurking in Williams' book that went beyond the immediate controversy. Williams, he conceded, was himself orthodox, but in trying to defend his position he had unwittingly introduced confused and faulty arguments that, if followed to their conclusions, would lead to Arminianism. As in his farewell sermon, Edwards concluded by warning against tendencies ''which have lately appeared in Northampton'' that ''tend to lead the young people among you apace into a liking to the new, fashionable, lax schemes of divinity, which have so greatly prevailed in New England as of late.''≥π

Edwards' repeated admonitions to the people of Northampton did eventually bring a small bit of vindication. Joseph Hawley later repudiated his own role in the a√air. Hawley, who like his father could be overwhelmed by guilt and melancholy, wrote a letter of apology to Edwards in 1754. Edwards replied gratefully but coolly that since Hawley's o√ense had helped lead the town in public sin, he should now lead them in public repentance. After Edwards died, Hawley did publish a letter in which he repented in the strongest terms,

The Crucible ≥∏Ω

declaring himself equivalent to Judas and other biblical traitors. He and others, he confessed, had rashly promoted ''severe, uncharitable, and if I remember right, groundless and slanderous imputations on Mr. Edwards, expressed in bitter language.''≥∫

The Tragedy of Jonathan Edwards?

The scene of America's greatest theologian and colonial America's most powerful thinker being run out of town and forced into exile in a frontier village has intrigued observers ever since. Is it the tragedy of the great man being crushed by following his own high principles? Or is it the pathos of a brilliant but impractical intellectual whose prudery and zeal for control brought out the latent pettiness of a small town? As in most of real life that rises beyond the ordinary, it was a mixture of both the exalted and the pathetic.

Biographers and historians have struggled to make sense of this drama by searching for one or two essential underlying causes. Ola Winslow, writing in the heyday of mid-twentieth-century American democracy, found the essential theme in the nascent spirit of the American Revolution. As she put it, ''The church member of 1750 was a democrat, although as yet he did not know it; and a good many of the 'Boys of '76' were already born.'' Adding plausibility to her explanation is the fact that Joseph Hawley became a patriot leader in the Stamp Act crisis and a representative in a revolutionary Massachusetts government, and Major Seth Pomeroy died as a general in the American Revolution. Colonel John Stoddard, by contrast, was considered a ''Tory'' in his time, and Edwards' son-in-law Timothy Dwight Jr. was a Tory during the Revolution.≥Ω

Patricia Tracy o√ered a more nuanced analysis. Writing in the 1970s, when social history was in vogue, she carefully examined the social and economic forces involved in the controversy. Edwards' strained relation with the changing mores of young people, she pointed out, was related to relative scarcity of new land and hence rising average age of ﬁrst marriages. Tracy did not ﬁnd, however, any clear economic or social explanation of Edwards' ouster. Timothy Dwight Sr. and Israel Williams, for instance, were rivals in the same elite magistrate social class, and during the American Revolution Israel Williams turned out to be a Tory.∂≠ The vast majority of Edwards' family and supporters, it might be added, supported the Revolution.

Tracy should be credited with developing the point that a major source

≥π≠ The Crucible

of the breakdown in Edwards' rapport with the townspeople was his oldfashioned view of ministerial patriarchy. Edwards was attempting to perpetuate the role of authoritarian father and moral arbiter that Solomon Stoddard had exercised for sixty years. That ideal, she correctly observed, had been characteristic of the seventeenth century but was breaking down by the mideighteenth century. Tracy also points out the irony that Edwards was both an authoritarian conservative and a revolutionary. Her concluding sentence is that ''perhaps, like all good fathers, Edwards gave his children the inner resources to rebel when it came to be time for them to be men.''∂∞

Edwards had some tragic ﬂaws that contributed to his undoing in Northampton, so that the issues can not be reduced to inevitable social tensions or to his being out of step with the times, even if these were factors. Edwards was a perfectionist who had insu≈cient ways of coping with imperfections in others. That trait, combined with his authoritarian assumptions and conservative views of sexuality, created some tensions in the community, notably in the ''young folk's Bible'' episode. Yet the real tensions with the town came not so much from his defending old ways as from relying on something relatively new, the nearly universal awakening. After the awakening of 1734–35, he came to realize that he had raised his hopes too high. Still, he could not get over holding his church members to the promises that they made at the height of the awakenings. Part of Edwards' problem was that he was building his nearly perfectionist hopes for the long-term spiritual strength of the town on the inherently unstable sands of revival.

Further, we must be reminded that Edwards' conﬂict with Northampton was not primarily about his e√orts to suppress vice, but over the terms of admission to the sacraments. Without his clumsily managed reversal of direction on that subject, he would have remained pastor in Northampton. True, there were pent-up resentments that came pouring out when the occasion arose.∂≤ Nonetheless, the question of admission to the sacraments was in itself a momentous issue, with potential to disrupt even a harmonious relationship between a pastor and a town.

Perhaps the greatest tragedy for Edwards was that his pastorate was undone by his commitment to principle. As he pointed out to his congregation, he had much to lose by attempting to reverse the policies of his grandfather. He was willing to give up his own and his family's worldly security for the cause of protecting eternal souls. He pursued that personally disastrous course because he was convinced that the logic of his conversionist theology demanded it.

The Crucible ≥π∞

It should also be noted that to the extent that the issue of suppression of vice was involved, which it surely was, Edwards was in one respect moving away from the Stoddardean version of patriarchy in which the minister had moral oversight of most of the town. One of his deep concerns in the ''young folks' Bible'' case was that communicant church members were indulging in vulgar parodies of holy speech. Accordingly, his radical reform was directed toward standards for church membership. He thus was moving toward what would become the more typically modern evangelical attitude in which clergy would have moral oversight over only those set aside by the sacraments as members of their congregations. Evangelical preachers would challenge male machismo (among other things), but the evangelical society would be a people set apart in a church called out from the dominant standards of the culture.∂≥

Edwards' Own Analysis

On July 1, 1751, after he had arrived in Stockbridge, Edwards sat down to write his own analysis of the town dynamics in a letter to Thomas Gillespie of Scotland.∂∂ Usually Edwards wrote history in purely theological terms, of God's or Satan's actions, and he has been criticized for not understanding history in the modern sense of analysis of temporal causes.∂∑ Yet his examination of the underlying factors in the Northampton controversy, though written from a deeply interested perspective, showed that he could deal with history in that mundane sense when the occasion arose.

He observed, as American colonial historians later discovered, that just as nations and individuals di√er in natural temperament, so do towns. Northampton had long been ''famed for a high-spirited people, and close [i. e., stingy], and of a di≈cult, turbulent temper.'' It was in this letter that he recorded that for the past forty or ﬁfty years (or since the rise of John Stoddard), there had been ''something like the Court and Country Party in England.'' Some men had great wealth and power and inﬂuence in the town and the church, and others had always been jealous of them, leading to ''innumerable contentions.'' Edwards was thus suggesting that there was a socialeconomic base for the town's contentiousness. He was not suggesting, though, that his dismissal had such a base; his repudiation of the Stoddards' view of communion alienated people from both the usual camps.

Town pride, inﬂated by its spiritual reputation, was a related problem. Not only had Northampton prospered, but it had become famous. ''There is

≥π≤ The Crucible

this inconvenience,'' Edwards confessed, that ''attends the publishing of narratives of a work of God among a people: such is the corruption that is in the hearts of men, and even of good men, that there is a great danger of their making it an occasion of spiritual pride.''

Added to that was that ''Mr Stoddard, though an eminently holy man, was naturally of a dogmatical temper.'' So people brought up under him, especially their leaders, ''seemed to think it an excellency to be like him in this respect.'' Furthermore, since Stoddard had presided over the community for sixty years, many of the older generation ''looked on him almost as a sort of deity,'' so opposing Stoddard's teachings ''appears to 'em a sort of horrid profaneness.''

Despite his respect for his grandfather, Edwards believed that the Northamptonites ''had got so established in certain wrong notions and ways in religion, which I found them in and never could beat them out of.'' Particularly, they were too ready to stress the ''impressions on the imagination'' that they took to be their conversion experiences and too unwilling to see ''the abiding sense and temper of their hearts'' and the ''exercises and fruits of grace'' as the true evidences of regeneration. Edwards acknowledged that, being young, ''I was not thoroughly aware of the ill consequences of such a custom'' and as much as admitted that he was taken in by the town's emphasis on the excitements of supposed conversions. Had he been more mature at the time of the awakening of 1734–35, he would have insisted on testing the spirits more carefully. Although ''there were numerous instances of saving conversions'' he confessed, ''the number of true converts was not so great as was then imagined.''

Having helped cultivate the Northamptonites' spiritual pride, Edwards eventually reaped the consequences. It was a great advantage to his opponents, especially in stirring up the common people, ''that the controversy was a religious controversy.'' Because ''a precious and important doctrine of the Word of God'' was said to be at stake, the people could ''look on their zeal against me as a virtue.'' They could ''christen even their passions and bitterness in such a cause with sanctiﬁed names, and to let 'em loose and prosecute the views of their bitterness and violence without check of conscience.'' Only after suggesting these and other factors in the controversy did Edwards conclude with a theological analysis that conﬁrmed his own adamant stand. ''I believe the devil is greatly alarmed,'' he wrote, ''by the opposition made to Mr. Stoddard's doctrine, and the agreeable practice, which had been so long established in Northampton, and so extensively in the country.'' God had

The Crucible ≥π≥

permitted Satan ''to exert himself in an extraordinary manner in opposition, as God ordinarily does when truth is in the birth.''

Though more convinced than ever that his analysis of the town's disparity between profession and action conﬁrmed his own principles, Edwards acknowledged in a general way that he too was at fault. In what must have been a refrain in his prayers during these painful years, he wrote: ''God knows the wickedness of my heart and the great and sinful deﬁciencies and o√enses which I have been guilty of in the course of my ministry at Northampton. I desire that God would discover them to me more and more, and that now he would e√ectually humble me and mortify my pride and self-conﬁdence, and empty me entirely of myself, and make me to know how that I deserve to be cast away as an abominable branch, and as a vessel wherein is no pleasure.''∂∏

In classic Puritan fashion, he saw his humiliation as a reminder of his utter unworthiness and prayed that God might use it like a reﬁner's ﬁre suiting him for more adequate service.

Edwards knew from decades of self-examination that his ''pride and selfconﬁdence'' were the traits for which he most needed to be humbled. Perhaps again recognizing these propensities, he acted with the disciplines of restraint he had so long cultivated. Although Edwards believed his opponents were being used by the devil, he seems to have made a mighty e√ort to manifest a personal demeanor of the gentleness that he espoused. He also kept in the foreground the constructive purposes of his pastoral role and frequently reminded the Northampton congregation that it was care for their eternal souls that was his preeminent concern.

Yet while his personal and pastoral disciplines may have tempered manifestations of his pride and self-conﬁdence in personal relationships, he drew a sharp line between pride and self-conﬁdence as personal vices and the conﬁdence one should have in standing for God's truth. If one was sure of God's revealed truth, then conﬁdence was a Holy Spirit–inspired virtue. Edwards believed he had learned something and grown through his years of struggling with the high-spirited Northamptonites, but that lesson had a paradoxical relation to his perennial struggles with his pride and self-conﬁdence. He thought the best lesson he had learned was that he should have been ﬁrmer in his convictions from the start. He should earlier have settled his mind on what God's Word demanded and then forgone all personal concerns. The paradox between this lesson and his critique in the same letter of his grandfather Stoddard for being of ''a dogmatical temper'' seems to have escaped him.

Edwards could justify his behavior, which others saw as unbending and

≥π∂ The Crucible

dogmatical, because he saw himself as a reformer who was part of a cosmic struggle. The devil's ragings were the pangs to be expected ''when truth is in the birth.'' Like Luther, he believed that the surrounding churches were falling into complacency and corruption and giving their blessings to worldliness. If the churches of the Reformation were to lead the way to the promised glorious new day, then they must themselves be once again puriﬁed. Scripture and his pastoral duties to watch over eternal souls, he was convinced, compelled him to take his stand no matter what the cost.

For someone who is known for his analysis of the centrality of a√ections in religion, Edwards retained remarkably high conﬁdence in the power of well-argued principle to prevail. As he observed in retrospect, because it was a religious controversy, his opponents took their stand on the high ground of principle and saw supreme spiritual concerns at stake. Once the bonds of a√ection were broken, each side, as in any controversy, soon saw the other as unreasonable and even perverse. In the Northampton case, the intensity of the feelings was heightened by the fact that the two parties had once been great lovers, each of whom now viewed themselves as betrayed.

C H A P T E R ≤≥ kl

The Mission

hen Edwards moved to Stockbridge, in June 1751, he had reason for renewed hopes. He could see the beauties of the setting on the Housatonic River in the Berkshires as communications of Christ's redemptive love. The village itself could inspire high expectations. It was designed to be a model community, a prototype for future missions where English and Indians would live side by side in peace. In Edwards' view this product of Gospel zeal was a glimmer anticipating the dawn of the millennium, when every tribe and nation would see the light of God's righteousness and dwell together in harmony (cf. Isaiah 60). Yet he also knew that the village's short history had sometimes been stormy. When the Gospel light was spreading, as his experience in Northampton had conﬁrmed, Satan was sure to counterattack by exploiting human self-interest. Though hopeful, Edwards also expected to have a struggle on his hands.

The Stockbridge experiment centered around a couple of hundred Mahican Indians (also known as Mohican, Muhhakaneok, Stockbridge, Housatonic, or Housatunnuck),∞ the largest single part of the remnant of the oncegreat Mahican confederacy, now struggling for survival and willing to be under English protection. In 1730 Governor Belcher proposed the establishment of a missionary village for Indians. Four years later a group of Mahicans living on the Housatonic expressed interest to Edwards' brother-in-law Samuel Hopkins (the elder) of West Springﬁeld in having a Christian missionary sent to them. The Massachusetts Commissioners for the Propagation of the Gospel among the Indians in New England chose a recent Yale graduate, John Sergeant, to be the ﬁrst missionary. Sergeant was soon joined by Timothy Woodbridge, a schoolmaster from Springﬁeld. Between 1736 and 1739 they established Stockbridge, a town for the Mahicans that also included four

≥π∏ The Mission

English (New Englander) families.≤ The idea was that Indians might be more e√ectively evangelized if they learned to live with the English and according to English principles. Civilizing, it was believed, should go hand in hand with evangelizing. The government granted the Indians lots from some of the best land by the river, and the English families land in the hills above the meadows. Although several of his close relatives and associates, including Colonel John Stoddard and Stephen Williams, helped lead the e√ort, Edwards' only direct involvement seems to have been that he was one of several clergy who helped buy some outlying land owned by an earlier Dutch settler.≥

Almost everyone directly involved in the project had some connection to the Williams-Stoddard Calvinist-evangelical clan, headed at that time by William Williams of Hatﬁeld. Ephraim Williams, the patriarch's younger brother, moved to Stockbridge in 1737, and by the time the town was incorporated in 1739 had assumed the role of English squire of the village. Two of the Indians, Captain John Kunkapaut and Lieutenant Paul Umpeecheanah were elected as selectmen in the town. Ephraim Williams was chosen moderator.∂

(For Edwards' Williams relatives, see charts of Edwards' Extended Family in Appendix A of this volume.)

True love helped seal the family connection to the mission. Sergeant, the missionary pastor, had been willing enough to take on a life of self-sacriﬁce, but he preferred not to do it alone. When he was ﬁrst embarking on the mission he had unsuccessfully courted Edwards' sister Hannah. The arrival of the Ephraim Williams family after he had been in Stockbridge for some time on his own seemed a Godsend. Sergeant was soon smitten by Ephraim's brilliant and charming daughter, Abigail, and the two married in 1739 when she was just seventeen. ''You will forgive me Sir,'' Sergeant wrote to Benjamin Colman, one of his Boston sponsors, ''if I think that most ingenious woman is not the smallest gift of divine bounty that I have received since I undertook a life thought to be so self-denying. The more tenderly I love her the more thankful I am to heaven, who has formed her as if on purpose for me, and given her to me as if (like the father of mankind) he thought it not good for me to be here alone.''∑

Abigail was ready to play Eve to Sergeant's Adam. Although she was pious enough to be happy to marry a missionary-saint, she also had the English tastes of New England's eighteenth-century elite and saw to it that they lived according to the style to which she had become accustomed. Sergeant had built a modest house on the plain near the Indians. Abigail, one of the more remarkable women of the time, convinced him that they must live in

The Mission ≥ππ

[To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.]

The Mission House, Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Home of Edwards' rival Abigail Williams Sergeant Dwight, it originally sat on a hillside overlooking the plain where the Edwardses lived, closer to the Indians.

a home of the highest quality, on the hill overlooking the town. The Mission House (which has been preserved), hauled by ox team from Connecticut and decorated with tasteful paneling and an elegant carving above the front door, is a tribute to Abigail's good taste.∏ It is also a monument to one of the classic tensions long found in elite American missions.

Sergeant had moderate success in working with the essentially friendly Indians. His e√orts were supported both by the Massachusetts Commissioners made up of the Colman circle in Boston and, more substantially, by the London-based Company for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England. The Reverend Isaac Hollis, a wealthy English dissenting pastor, was the principal benefactor. As historian Edmund S. Morgan observed, the Stockbridge experiment ''became more appealing to those who heard of it in direct proportion to their distance from the scene.''π In 1743 Benjamin Colman published a letter ''Containing Mr. Sergeant's Proposal of a more effectual Method for the Education of Indian children: to raise 'em if possible

≥π∫ The Mission

into a civil and industrious People, by Introducing the English Language Among them.'' The gist of Sergeant's argument was that, in order to overcome what seemed to be destructive habits of Indian lifestyles, it was essential to put more emphasis on teaching them the habits of English industry and husbandry. Speciﬁcally, Sergeant proposed a boarding school for Indian children of various tribes, which would provide opportunity to train a new generation in more thoroughly Christian and European ways.∫

Sergeant's plans for a boarding school were delayed by King George's War. Isaac Hollis, however, sent enough money to begin a school in 1748 for twelve Indian boys in a place safer than Stockbridge. Sergeant secured the aid of Captain Martin Kellogg of Newington, Connecticut, to instruct them there ''in learning and hard labour.'' The school emphasized the disciplines of agricultural life, the lack of which the English viewed as one of the greatest failings of Indian men. Typically, Indian men relegated most agricultural activities to their women, and by strict Yankee standards the men seemed conspicuously undisciplined.Ω Captain Kellogg, rough-hewn in his sixties, had been educated by hard experience on the frontier. As a boy, he had been one of the Deerﬁeld captives and so had learned some Indian languages. That valuable skill had put him in the middle of New England Indian a√airs as an interpreter ever since. Early in 1749, soon after the end of King George's War, Sergeant had Kellogg move his school to Stockbridge, where it occupied a partially constructed building on an attractive piece of land donated by the Mahicans. Then calamity struck. Just as the school was getting settled in Stockbridge, Sergeant was stricken with a fever and a throat canker and died in mid-1749. He was only thirty-nine.

At the time of Sergeant's death, 218 Indians were living in Stockbridge, of whom 125 had been baptized and 42 were communicants in the church. In addition to Captain Kellogg's ﬂedgling boarding school was Timothy Woodbridge's day school with 55 students. The town in 1749, much as Edwards would have found it when he visited the next year, had a single rambling main street with ﬁfty-three Indian dwellings, twenty of which were English-style homes. The number of English families in the surrounding area had grown from the original four to around ten.∞≠

The death of Sergeant threw the model village into a crisis. Already tensions had been mounting. The issue was the classic one that would plague every mission to the natives during the era of English and American expansion. Closely following the missionaries were settlers who, even if sympathetic to the mission, had stronger interests in their own lands, their economic

The Mission ≥πΩ

opportunities, and the security of their expanding families. Though Stockbridge was still predominantly a town for Indians, it was nonetheless an English town. The Indians were used to a more communal system of ownership and reluctant to adopt the more individualized English model; yet they also knew they had to play by the English rules if their claims were to continue to be recognized. The New Englanders, familiar with their own system, kept outmaneuvering them. No one had told them, the Indians complained to a government committee late in 1749, that the number of English families would be expanded from four to the current ten. The New Englanders were also buying up some of the best land or not mentioning that in measuring some of the acreage they traded they were including ponds and swamps. Most irritating to the Indians were the land maneuvers of Squire Ephraim Williams and his adult sons, who were building the family fortune by consolidating claims to choice real estate.∞∞ John Sergeant, Ephraim Williams' son-in-law, had served as a sort of bu√er between the Indians and the Williamses, but with their pastor removed, the Indians' distrust of the Williams clan increased.

By spring 1750 the Williams faction, led by Abigail and her father, had found their candidate for a replacement for Sergeant. Abigail, still only twenty-seven, was thinking of a replacement in more ways than one.∞≤ In April, Ezra Stiles, an urbane twenty-three-year-old Yale graduate, had come to preach on successive Sabbaths and had stayed the week at the widow's home. Stiles (later to be a distinguished president of Yale) matched Abigail in brilliance, and the two spent time talking of the meaning of life during, as he put it, ''the pleasant week I spent at your house; when sorrow itself appears beautiful.''

Stiles was going through a stage when he had deep doubts about his faith, even venturing beyond the fashionable Arminianism toward Deism. As he conﬁded to Abigail, he believed in ''no other religion but that of Nature and the Bible,'' and in fact he had his doubts about the Bible. From his week with her, Stiles had learned that Abigail too was of a liberal spirit, probably more so than most of her family. John Sergeant after marrying her had changed in his outlook (Edwards later said his e√ectiveness as a missionary su√ered after the marriage).∞≥ Sergeant became an Old Light during the awakening, one of the subscribers to Charles Chauncy's Seasonable Thoughts, and he had shocked some of his Williams relatives by questioning some traditional Calvinist doctrines.∞∂

Meanwhile Timothy Woodbridge led a ﬁrmly New Light Calvinistic

≥∫≠ The Mission

majority of the English in the mission town who soon became suspicious of Stiles. The schoolteacher was popular with the Indians and could enlist their support.

We can imagine the consternation of the Williams faction when in the fall Jonathan Edwards suddenly replaced Ezra Stiles as the leading candidate to ﬁll the vacancy. Abigail could not understand why Stiles, after the assurances of the spring, had not pursued his candidacy. She wrote to admonish him for backing out, confessing meaningfully in the process, ''I ﬁnd I am a great deal too much disappointed.'' Stiles explained that he was caught in an impossible bind. His father, the Reverend Isaac Stiles (Edwards' older protégé in college and later an Old Light pastor), had advised him to withdraw. To receive the position Ezra would have to be examined by the Commissioners in Boston. Their antennae for sensing heterodoxy were acute; they would surely discover his unacceptable views and his reputation would be ruined.

When Edwards visited Stockbridge in the winter of 1750–51, the Williams family at ﬁrst strongly opposed him, but by late February when the town invited their cousin to settle as minister, Abigail and her father appeared to have relented somewhat. Edwards later viewed their acquiescence as pure disingenuousness, arising only when they knew they did not have the votes to defeat him.∞∑ In fact, however, Abigail had been genuinely well impressed. ''Mr. Edwards is now with us,'' she wrote to Stiles in February. ''He has conducted [himself] with wisdom and prudence. . . . He is learned, polite, and free in conversation, and more catholic than I had supposed.''∞∏ Abigail may have enjoyed anyone who could intelligently converse on deeper issues. In any case, this was high praise from someone who had been ready to vilify her notorious relative.

Abigail's half-brother, Captain Ephraim Williams Jr., a young man of action, persisted in his misgivings. Ephraim Jr. had made a name for himself in the recent King George's War and was still stationed as commander at Fort Massachusetts. In May 1751 he wrote to his cousin by marriage, the Reverend Jonathan Ashley of Deerﬁeld, enumerating the reasons he had opposed Edwards. First, ''he was not sociable'' and so (quoting Scripture) ''not apt to teach.'' Second, ''he was a very great bigot, for he would not admit any person into heaven, but those that agreed fully to his sentiments, a doctrine deeply tinged with that of the Romish church.'' (Ephraim Jr. shared his sister's preference for a generically Protestant ''catholicity'' or openness.) Third, he was too old to learn the Indians' tongue. Fourth, the military man could

The Mission ≥∫∞

neither understand nor agree to Edwards' principles on the sacraments and, he wrote, ''that I had heard almost every gentleman in the country say the same.'' Though Ephraim Jr., ''like an honest fellow,'' had communicated these views to Edwards himself, he had eventually relented in his open opposition to the Stockbridge majority, ''since they are so set for him.'' Still, he did not think Edwards would do any good for the town except (in a telling admission) ''raise the price of my land.'' Edwards, he believed, was thoroughly impractical. ''I am sorry,'' he summarized in what must have been the prevailing view among the ''gentlemen'' of his acquaintance, ''that a head so full of divinity should be so empty of politics.''∞π

The Stockbridge Williamses were not, as has sometimes been suggested, simply Old Lights dead set against Edwards and his New Light advocates. The family itself was divided, ambivalent, and in transition in its views. In May 1748 Ephraim Jr., shortly after Colonel John Stoddard had appointed him to command Fort Massachusetts, had drawn up a will in which he named Edwards as one of three ministerial overseers, ''being of the Calvinistical persuasion and principles,'' to administer a small fund left for educating Indians in Stockbridge. Further, the squire, Ephraim Sr., was, like most of his clan, New Light and Calvinist. In 1749 he sent his youngest son, Elijah, to study with Aaron Burr at the College of New Jersey. He kept the young man supplied with a steady stream of letters urging him to care for the state of his soul.∞∫ He was perhaps worried—probably with good reason—that his children were turning away from strict Calvinism. Yet the family had a New Light orthodox reputation.

The Williams family also had some genuine commitment to the Indian mission. This is important to point out because much of the story of Edwards' relation to them involves his opposition to what he regarded as their e√orts to exploit the mission for their own advantage. Just about every interpreter takes Edwards' side in these controversies. As Ephraim Jr.'s o√hand remark that Edwards' coming would raise the price of his land suggests, ﬁnancial matters were seldom far from the family's concerns. The acquisition of land in the Stockbridge area was crucial for the economic advance of an expanding elite family, yet they did not see that interest as conﬂicting with their support for the mission. The Williamses had taken a risk to move to such an experimental frontier village and, especially through Abigail's connection with Sergeant, had become intimately involved with the mission.

If we put the story of the Williamses at Stockbridge in its larger historical context, we can view the family's experience as prototypical of that of many

≥∫≤ The Mission

European-American Christians who were displacing the Indians. By the time of the American Revolution, Elijah Williams, the younger son who had studied at Princeton, had succeeded his father as the wealthiest man in the region and had bought up much of the Indian land. As Stockbridge became increasingly a white village, its attractiveness declined for the Indians, even those who were Christianized. The Williamses' road to success in fostering this transition was paved with good intentions, some genuine piety, and a desire to beneﬁt both Indians and whites. Yet leading them down that road and eventually obscuring their original purposes were motives of self-interest and enterprise, which led the family to take for granted that they should exploit their economic opportunities. By the time Edwards arrived in Stockbridge in the 1750s, the forces of economic self-interest were, as he was especially alert to see, in control. Yet strains of piety and interest in the mission were still there as well, so that the Williamses could show some authentic righteous indignation in their e√orts to keep it under their guidance.

As for the Indians, the larger perspective on Stockbridge has a tie to the saga of ''the last of the Mohicans.'' James Fenimore Cooper's novel is set in New England in 1757 during the French and Indian War and was based very loosely on the model of some Stockbridge Mahicans in Robert Rogers' rangers. Edwards would have known the original men involved. The actual Stockbridge Mahicans faithfully served the English against the French and the Americans against the English, but after the Revolution there was little in Stockbridge to keep them there. They moved to New York State where Cooper, growing up in the early 1800s, may have encountered a remnant of the once great tribe.∞Ω

When Edwards arrived to settle in Stockbridge summer 1751, the potential for the mission's success—despite the disruption from the loss of Sergeant—was still near its peak. The prospects were exciting because the new boarding school, under Captain Kellogg, had attracted the attention of tribes beyond the Mahicans. The Mahicans were much diminished in numbers and could beneﬁt from English protection. At the same time the English desperately needed the goodwill of the powerful Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy, which occupied territory in New York, from just across the Hudson to Lake Ontario and the headwaters of the Susquehanna. Closest of these nations were the Mohawks, whose leaders had already shown interest in the Stockbridge boarding school. In August 1751, in connection with other negotiations with the English at Albany (only thirty miles west of Stockbridge), the Mohawk leaders agreed to come to Stockbridge to consider a treaty that

The Mission ≥∫≥

would involve bringing Mohawk children and possibly those of other nations to the boarding school.

Such a prospect had immense strategic importance to the English, who expected renewal of war with the French and urgently needed to do better in winning Indian allegiance. Enthusiasm for such practical beneﬁts of the mission was often wed to zeal for its spiritual beneﬁts, though we should not suppose that the union necessarily made either sort of motive the less genuine. Few eighteenth-century Christians would have thought of the two interests as separable. Especially in England, the happy coincidence of temporal and eternal interests as represented at the boarding school had attracted wide attention, and the Reverend Hollis' mission society contributors had included the Prince of Wales.≤≠

Stockbridge, after two years of struggle, seemed to be coming to life as the potential hub of New England missions. Since his arrival, Edwards was preaching and overseeing a major expansion of John Sergeant's original house in the village in preparation for occupancy in the fall by the Edwards household.

On Saturday, August 10, 1751, a committee of western Massachusetts notables headed by Brigadier General Joseph Dwight, an Edwards admirer from Brookﬁeld (near Worcester), arrived in town. The next Tuesday almost all the Mohawk chiefs ''came with a great train,'' some ninety-two in their entire company. The English proposed that the Mohawks settle in New England and send their children to the boarding school at Stockbridge. The chiefs responded by reminding the English of their many broken promises and that the same must not happen again. Nonetheless, they were favorable to the proposal ''and gave a belt of wampum in consideration of it.'' As Edwards summarized it, they indicated that this ''not only was done on their own behalf, [but] for all nations of Indians [presumably all nations of the Iroquois]; that by this they opened the door for all nations, that they might come and bring their children hither to be instructed, and as a conﬁrmation that they would do what they could to persuade other nations to send their children hither.''≤∞

On Friday, August 16, in a solemn gathering in the Puritan style, Edwards preached to the Mohawks. A violent storm the night before had broken the heat, though Edwards presumably would have appeared in wig and robe no matter what the temperature. The Indians probably knew of the tall Englishman by reputation as a great holy man. The Mohawks were on friendly terms with the local Mahicans (though their dialects di√ered), and the Mahicans

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Lake George

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Fort Oswego

Fort William Henry

T U S C

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Trenton Crossweeksung

Edwards' world as the embattled American west

The Mission ≥∫∑

had learned of Edwards as a friend of the saintly David Brainerd who had worked nearby with some of them. Edwards had also met with the venerable Chief Hendrick. Known as a great orator, Hendrick was a Christian, had visited England, and was celebrated as one of the most loyal Indian allies of the British. Edwards was also impressed by Hendrick's elder brother, Abraham Conaughstansey, also a dedicated Christian and the strongest proponent of the boarding school, ''who,'' Edwards said, ''I can't but look upon as a remarkable man.''≤≤

Edwards' sermon, a straightforward summary of the Gospel, also encapsulated his view of the Indians. Although Edwards in many respects viewed the natives through typically English categories, he also refracted his vision through the lenses of Scripture and his theology, which made his evaluations considerably di√erent from those of the English who had other priorities. For Edwards, people were not to be judged ﬁrst of all by nationality, although nation was for him an important category. He did believe God dealt with nations, as the Old Testament indicated. Yet even more important was his New Testament and New Light view that distinguished the regenerate from the unregenerate within every nation. As Edwards was more acutely aware than ever by 1751, many of the English, even in New England, belonged to the tribe of Satan. So while Edwards believed God was highly displeased with the degenerate state of most of Indian culture, he believed most of the Europeans in North American were equally degenerate, but worse for having rejected so many opportunities to hear the Gospel.

Building his message around the image of light and darkness, Edwards described how the Gospel potentially put all peoples on equal footing. ''It was once with our forefathers as 'tis with you,'' he assured them. ''They formerly were in great darkness.'' In Edwards' view of history all peoples had common ancestors in Adam and Eve less than six thousand years ago and all had equally fallen into darkness. All need the same gift of God's light. ''We are no better than you in no respect,'' he explained, ''only as God has made us to di√er and has been pleased to give us more light. And now we are willing to give it to you.''

Most of the Europeans had failed them; ''they have not done their duty toward you.'' ''The French, they pretend to teach the Indians religion, but they won't teach 'em to read. They won't let 'em read the Word of God.'' Most others are no better. ''And many of the English and the Dutch are against your being instructed. They choose to keep you in the dark for the sake of making a gain of you.'' Edwards kept the tie close between the light of the Gospel

≥∫∏ The Mission

[To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.]

Chief Hendrick (Theyanoguin, ca. 1680–1755), a Mohawk leader much celebrated by the English as one of their most faithful allies, was a friend of the Stockbridge mission

education and the Indians' practical interests. ''For as long as they keep you in ignorance,'' he continued, '' 'tis more easy to cheat you in trading with you.''

Nothing, however, was nearly as important as the Gospel itself. ''The temporal concerns that they treat with you about at Albany from year to year are mere childish triﬂes in comparison with this.'' The devil kept people blind and ignorant of the Gospel so he could destroy them and their children. ''I have read of some nations,'' he told the Indians, ''that when they take children captives in war, they keep 'em well for a while and feed 'em with the best till they are fat, and then kill 'em and eat 'em. So the devil does by wicked men.'' Edwards knew that the Indians loved children. So if the Indians wanted to protect their children from such deceptive slavery, they should consider that

The Mission ≥∫π

education is the best means to bring them to the light of God's Word through which they could see their true interests.≤≥

Edwards, who characteristically saw himself as involved in grand historical moments, reported to Thomas Hubbard, the speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, that the Stockbridge treaty with the Mohawks was possibly ''God in his providence . . . opening the door for . . . the gospel among these nations, more than ever [he] has done before.'' The new missionary's enthusiasm, however, was tempered by a cool assessment of many practical problems. The French, he told Hubbard, were making extraordinary e√orts to win the Indians. The Church of England was discouraging Abraham Conaughstansey from moving his people under dissenter auspices. Other Indians mocked Abraham for his Christian interests and trust in English education. The English typically gave the Indians so much rum that constructive living together became impossible. Much was needed to improve the ''miserable state'' of the facilities of the boarding school under Captain Kellogg. A ''young gentleman'' was needed as a teacher who could learn the Mohawk tongue. Also there was need for a distinguished gentleman or gentlemen to be appointed in residence to oversee the enterprise. Brigadier General Joseph Dwight was his ﬁrst choice of several candidates to counter the Williamses' de facto control.

The time to act on all this, Edwards emphasized in this lengthy report, was ''now or never.'' Aside from spiritual concerns, educating the Mohawks and instructing them in the Protestant religion would greatly aid the British cause. ''The only remaining means that divine providence hath left us to repair and secure these Indians in the British interest,'' he wrote, ''is this very thing . . . of instructing them thoroughly in the Protestant religion, and educating their children.'' One of the British o≈cers had assured Edwards that the plan deserved to be promoted simply on those grounds. It was crucial for the Massachusetts government to give the mission its full support.≤∂

The more he learned, the more Edwards was appalled by the English policies toward the Indians. As he put it in an extensive letter the next winter to Joseph Paice, an English Presbyterian merchant and prospective supporter for the mission, British negligence had ''brought the whole British America into very di≈cult and dangerous circumstances.'' The French were much wiser by comparison. For generations their missionaries had faithfully lived among the Indians. It was in Edwards' self-interest, of course, to represent missions as crucial to British survival in North America, yet he claimed this was conﬁrmed by the Indians themselves. In his ﬁrst year in Stockbridge,

≥∫∫ The Mission

wrote Edwards, ''I have had much acquaintance with many of the Iroquois or Six Nations (as we call them); and have had frequent conversation with some of their chiefs.'' English traders typically defrauded the Indians. Most of the king's annual present of £500 sterling to the Iroquois was embezzled before it ever got there, and the Indians were induced to spend the rest on rum. The Iroquois so mistrusted their English allies that many said that if they sent their children to English schools, the English would enslave them. The French had been awake to the strategic importance of the Indians while the English had been asleep. Edwards' Indian informants told him of how the French laughed about the English ineptness. ''Indeed,'' Edwards warned, ''there is a great prospect of the French king's having the greatest part of North America in his possession; though the king of Great Britain has much the greatest number of subjects here.'' Joseph Paice was so impressed by Edwards' analysis that he forwarded a copy to the Archbishop of Canterbury—despite having to apologize for a passage in which Edwards excoriated the Anglican missionaries as ''great bigots'' who would root out all dissenters and ''build up themselves here on the ruins of Protestant and British interest.''≤∑

In these letters on Indian a√airs and continuing through his Stockbridge years we see a new Edwards, or at least a new side of Edwards. If all we had were Edwards' letters from Stockbridge (more than four hundred large pages as published in the Yale edition), we would know him as a missionary deeply involved in the practical a√airs of his day. His letters provide detailed accounts of subjects ranging from the personal dynamics of a biracial village to strategies for empire. It is almost as though he had heard Ephraim Williams Jr.'s remark about ''a head so full of divinity should be so empty of politics'' and resolved to show them otherwise.

Perhaps, as he contemplated the wreck of Northampton, Edwards simply resolved to stay more on top of practical a√airs. Or perhaps the situation demanded attention to a wider range of issues. In Stockbridge there were far fewer precedents for how things should be done and no John Stoddard whom he could rely on to take charge. In Stockbridge Edwards was forced to manage more himself. It is possible, of course, that he always displayed the wider practical interests and that we simply know more about them in the Stockbridge years because he was forced to write letters about them. If so, our image of him in Northampton should be revised to see him as more like other notable eighteenth-century men who had an informed interest in everything. Nevertheless, we know that when he left Northampton he had a reputation

The Mission ≥∫Ω

for having his head in the clouds, while in his six and a half years at Stockbridge he not only contended with some formidable adversaries over practical matters but often prevailed.

Such practical concerns, it must be noted, hardly took most of his time or kept him from divinity. In Stockbridge, in addition to his preaching and pastoral duties, he produced four major treatises, two of which are often regarded as classics in the history of Christianity and in the history of American intellectual life. The Edwards who emerged at Stockbridge after passing through the ﬁres of Northampton, while hardly without his ﬂaws, was truly an extraordinary ﬁgure.

One subject he immediately took an interest in was the methods of teaching the Indians. As his sermon to the Mohawks suggested, he believed that literacy was a key to e√ective missions, since the Indians needed to be able to read and understand God's Word. Because no Scriptures existed in the local Indians' tongue, Edwards believed that they must become proﬁcient in English if real progress were to be made. In fact, he believed, ''Indian languages are extremely barbarous and barren, and very ill-ﬁtted for communicating things moral and divine, or even things speculative and abstract. In short, they are wholly unﬁt for a people possessed of civilization, knowledge and reﬁnement.''≤∏ Edwards had low regard for Indian culture but high trust in Indian potential.

Edwards was dismayed at the method of teaching English to Indians employed at Stockbridge and among the English generally. As far as he could see, what almost always happened was that ''the children learn to read, to make such sounds on the sight of such marks; but know nothing what they say, and have neither proﬁt nor entertainment by what they read, they neglect it when they leave school, and quickly lose [it].''

Edwards had some remedies for this colossal waste of time. Most basically, ''the child should be taught to understand things, as well as words.'' This observation, aside from being common sense, grew from Edwards' deeper reﬂections that words were symbols to excite vital encounters with realities. Ever since he was a child he had been against rote learning of languages. His solution was not only that the meanings of the words needed to be explained, but also that the teacher ''should enter into conversation with the child about them.'' The teacher should ask questions on the lesson and the child should be encouraged ''to speak freely and in his turn also to ask questions.'' This he believed would ''accustom the child, from its infancy, to think and reﬂect, and to beget in it an early taste for knowledge, and a regularly increasing appetite

≥Ω≠ The Mission

for it.'' Drawing on his own work with children, Edwards believed that Scripture stories were the best means of so engaging the children. They could eventually learn the fascinating intricacies of the whole saga of the biblical history of redemption.

Edwards recommended that girls be educated as well as boys and that they all be taught not only reading, but spelling and the basics of arithmetic. Those with the best genius should be encouraged to go on. Periodically the schools should also hold public assemblies to which families and all the chief persons would be invited. Children would recite their lessons in competitions and prizes would be awarded.

He also believed that it would be unusually popular with the Indians to teach singing, which he thought would have a powerful e√ect in leading them to civilized attitudes. ''Music, especially sacred music, has a powerful e≈cacy to soften the heart into tenderness, to harmonize the a√ections, and to give the mind a relish for objects of a superior character.''

These innovations, aimed at making school engaging and entertaining, would best be supplemented by some stronger methods to bridge the cultural gap. Some English children should be integrated into the Indian schools, thereby reinforcing the idea of English as a living language. More radically, Indian children should be encouraged to live a year with the best English families. The Edwardses eventually took at least one Indian boy into their home and perhaps others.≤π

Edwards had conﬁdence in the Indians' abilities if they could be properly educated. In his letter to Joseph Paice he remarked, ''they are a discerning people.'' That, he believed, gave the English an advantage over the French. The French, he said, forbade them to read the Bible and did not teach them to read and write. The English (at least the English dissenters), by contrast, had the truth on their side and so nothing to hide. ''And we have also this advantage, that our religion would recommend itself more to their reason and to the light of nature in 'em than the religion of the French.'' As always, convinced of the power of reason, Edwards was sure that a combination of education and the Gospel would be the key to enlightening the native peoples.≤∫

In addition to trying to determine how to turn Stockbridge into an effective center for Indian schooling, Edwards had plenty of practical concerns with relocating his family. Edwards' search for quiet in the modest John Sergeant mission house was interrupted daily by workmen building a much larger addition suitable for a large family.≤Ω Meanwhile, their Northampton

The Mission ≥Ω∞

home had not sold. Although they received some funds from collections made by friends, especially from Scotland, their immediate ﬁnancial situation was disheartening.≥≠

In October 1751 Edwards returned to Northampton to move his family. It was October 16 (October 27 by our calendars), about as late as one could wait before truly cold weather might set in. Amid much anxiety and sadness, the family left their home and friends. Seventeen-year-old Mary and her husband Timothy Dwight remained in Northampton. Sally and her husband Elihu Parsons planned to move to Stockbridge but remained temporarily in Northampton, probably in the unsold family home. As the rest of the family departed with carts stacked high with worldly possessions, a sense of defeat and banishment heightened the inevitable sense of loss.

Despite the hardships, Stockbridge proved a welcome respite. Even though Jonathan was already doing his best to correct what he considered mismanagement of the mission school by the Williamses and their ally Captain Kellogg, personal relations with his relatives may have still been cordial. If not, the tension in Stockbridge seemed to the Edwards family like child's play after years of feeling ostracized by the majority of former friends in Northampton. By January 1752 Edwards could write reassuringly to his aging parents that his family was very pleased with Stockbridge: ''They like the place far better than they expected. Here, at present, we live in peace; which has of long time been an unusual thing with us. The Indians seem much pleased with my family, especially my wife.''≥∞

Esther, just turning twenty, was especially delighted with Stockbridge in the winter. There was skating on the river and excitement in sledding. ''My sister and I had two Indian boys to pull our sleds for us,'' she wrote, ''and to guide them over the crust . . . we speed from one descent to another until we ﬁnally reach the level of our quiet street.''≥≤ Her second brother, six-year-old Jonathan Jr., soon had Indian playmates and seldom heard English outside the home. ''I knew the names of some things in Indian,'' he later recalled, ''which I did not know in English; even all my thoughts ran in Indian.''≥≥

Although family morale was high, their ﬁnancial straits were severe. Edwards told his father he was ''about 2,000 pounds in debt, in this province's money,'' and could not come to the aid of his widowed and destitute sister Eunice, who had just su√ered the ordeal of the deaths of two ''likely promising children.''≥∂ In Stockbridge the family thanked God for their health, but family ﬁnances were at an all-time low. Sarah and the girls helped support the

≥Ω≤ The Mission

family by making decorated fans out of silk paper. Jonathan was reduced to writing on the margins of useless pamphlets, on the covers of letters, and on the scraps of paper from the fans.≥∑

The great excitement of the spring was the arrival of Aaron Burr, a New Light admirer of Edwards who was pastor in Newark, New Jersey, and president of the College of New Jersey there. Though Stockbridge was isolated, it was relatively accessible to the New York City–New Jersey area via Albany and the Hudson. The thirty-six-year-old Burr's intentions were to ask for the hand of Esther. His rapid success caused much comment. ''He made a visit of but three days to the Rev. Mr. Edwards' daughter at Stockbridge,'' recounted Joseph Shippen, one of the students at the New Jersey College, ''in which short time, though he had not . . . seen the lady these six years, I suppose he accomplished his whole design.'' When he saw her in Newark, Shippen judged the twenty-year-old Esther ''a person of great beauty'' but ''rather too young for the president.''≥∏

Sarah accompanied Esther to Newark where the wedding took place on June 29, 1752. The Edwardses' oldest son, Timothy, just turning fourteen, went along to enroll at the college and to live with the Burrs. Jonathan remained behind, perhaps because of pressing matters in Stockbridge or because he was already committed to travel to New Jersey in the fall. He did visit the newlyweds in September, at the time of the college commencement. He was especially pleased to meet there the Reverend Samuel Davies, chief architect of the late revival in the Virginia backcountry. Edwards was also several times at the home of his old friend Governor Jonathan Belcher. On the same trip he met with correspondents of the Society for Propagating Christian Knowledge and preached before the Presbyterian Synod of New York a sermon published as True Grace Distinguished from the Experience of Devils.≥π

In Stockbridge during his ﬁrst full year Edwards had established an apparently e√ective ministry as preacher to both the English and the Indians. Although the church included both English and Indians, Edwards preached separately to the two groups, addressing the Indians through an interpreter, usually John Wauwaumpequunnaunt, whom Edwards described as ''an extraordinary man on some accounts.'' Edwards thought him an excellent interpreter and was impressed by his abilities to read and write English. He especially honored Wauwaumpequunnaunt for his understanding of Scripture and theology, which he thought might exceed that of any Indian in America. Even though Wauwaumpequunnaunt had a weakness for alcohol,

The Mission ≥Ω≥

Edwards valued him both as his interpreter and as an assistant at Timothy Woodbridge's school and urged that he be better paid for his diligent labors.≥∫

Edwards' sermons to the Indians reﬂect a good sense of his audience. For one thing, he did not just preach simpler versions of his sermons to the English, which were almost all old Northampton sermons. Rather, consistent with his advice regarding Indian education, he picked themes that involved narratives and plain vivid metaphors. He wrote out his sermons in outlines in such tiny hand that it would have required his spectacles to read. Probably he more-or-less memorized these but had them available to glance at as the interpreter was speaking. His outlines conﬁrm the recollection of a fellow missionary that, ''to the Indians he was a plain and practical preacher; upon no occasion did he display any metaphysical knowledge in the pulpit. His sentences were concise and full of meaning; and his delivery, grave and natural.''≥Ω

Seeking to explain the Gospel to those who knew little about it, Edwards preached predominantly on New Testament texts, especially from Matthew and Luke. Some of his most e√ective sermon series were from the parables. Early in his preaching to the Indians, Edwards emphasized, as he always had in Northampton, their sins and vices. After the ﬁrst year, though, he seldom provided catalogues of Indians' sins. This may have reﬂected in part the logic of Calvinist evangelism or a conscious shift in preaching strategy. It may be that Edwards' experience conﬁrmed what he had learned from David Brainerd who had written, ''the more I discour'ed of the love and compassion of God in sending his Son to su√er for the sins of men; and the more I invited them to come and partake of his love, the more their distress was aggravated, because they felt themselves unable to come. It was surprising to me to see how their hearts seem'd to be pierc'd with the tender and melting invitations of the Gospel, when there was not a word of terror spoken to them.''∂≠

Edwards did not shrink from preaching terror to the Indians or from explaining in narrative terms some hard points of Calvinism, such as original sin and the reasons for God's wrath and judgment, but he tempered these points with God's mercy as much as he could. Judgment and loving mercy were intertwined in all of Edwards' preaching and theology. He presented God as loving but righteously indignant at those who reject love and live under the rule of the devil. God was also marvelously forgiving in su√ering to provide salvation for many. While not altering his theology, Edwards dwelt especially on the mercy and compassion of God in allowing his own son to su√er and die. In a moving sermon on Revelation 3:20, Edwards pictured a bleeding Christ standing at the door and knocking. ''Let him in,'' Edwards

≥Ω∂ The Mission

pled. ''Will you shut him out of doors when he comes to you and knocks at your door with his wounded, bleeding hands?''∂∞

Although Edwards seems to have kept the respect of his Stockbridge Indian congregation, there was no revival there and he made no reports of remarkable conversions. Many of the adult Indians in his congregation were already communicant members. We do not know how many more became communicants, but we do have several Indian professions of faith, written in Edwards' hand, following the standards of the sample professions he had composed for Northamptonites during the controversy.∂≤

Edwards apparently kept good relations with the Indians through both his ministry to them and his even-handed ways of judging all people by the same spiritual standards. Once a week he took the time to teach their children the essentials of Christianity through Bible stories. He and his family also lived among them, so that there must have been daily contact as Sarah and the Edwardses' daughters shared everyday concerns with Indian families and dealt with sicknesses, births, deaths, marriages, and care of children. Jonathan may have seemed an imposing, aloof ﬁgure, closed o√ in his study most of the day, and doubtless he and his family let Indians know of behaviors of which they disapproved, much as they had among the English in Northampton. They also shared many of the English prejudices of their time, assuming the inferiority of almost everything in Indian culture. Yet it also must have been apparent that regarding matters spiritual, which the Edwardses insisted were most important, they could be genuinely more approving of a spiritual Indian woman or child than of a profane English gentleman.

C H A P T E R ≤∂ kl

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hile the Edwardses seemed to live in peace with their Indian neighbors, by spring 1752 relations with the most powerful of their English neighbors, the Williams family, took a sharp turn for the worse. Almost the ﬁrst thing Edwards had done to secure his position against the Williamses was to convince the authorities to appoint his friend Brigadier General Joseph Dwight of Brookﬁeld to be resident overseer of the schools and to convince the brigadier to settle in Stockbridge. Edwards' ﬁrst instinct, in other words, was to ﬁnd a pious magistrate-aristocrat to play the role of patron to the pastor as John Stoddard had so long done in Northampton. The Mohawks had liked Dwight during the negotiations, and the brigadier had been one of Edwards' great supporters during the communion controversy. Dwight's rather grand military title came from having been commander of the artillery in the famed campaign at Louisbourg, and he had also served as second in command of western forces under John Stoddard during the recent war. The brigadier, the same age as Edwards, was originally from Hatﬁeld and was a grandson of the ﬁrst Joseph Hawley of Northampton (who had established that family's fortune in the late seventeenth century). He was a typical western Massachusetts politician, merchant, and aristocrat.∞

Dwight seemed to Edwards to be the ideal magistrate-patron. The brigadier had been Edwards' great friend, conﬁdant, and adviser during the Indian negotiations in summer 1751 and had told Edwards that he had always wanted to sit under preaching such as his. Edwards, in turn, needed Dwight to wrest control of the Hollis-funded schools from the Williams family. In particular, he was alarmed that a proposed school for Mohawk girls was to be run by Abigail. The alliance between Edwards and Dwight seemed made in heaven—except for one thing.

≥Ω∏ Frontier Struggles

Dwight's wife, Mary, had died in the spring of 1751, and although that made him more movable, Edwards had not calculated the whole equation. Edwardsean preaching and Indian missions were not the only things the widower found charming about Stockbridge. There was also Abigail. Almost before Edwards knew it, the brilliant young woman and the impressive brigadier, nearly twenty years her senior, had won each other's hearts. By February 1752, soon after Dwight's arrival, they were engaged to be married.≤

Edwards was aghast. In February, less than a month after he had written to his parents that for the ﬁrst time in years ''we live in peace,'' he was writing to Andrew Oliver, secretary of the Commissioners in Boston, that Brigadier Dwight had turned out to be ''the furthest of any gentleman whatsoever from having the most necessary qualiﬁcation'' to oversee the mission.≥ Rather than helping Edwards lay siege to the corrupt Williams fortress on the hill, the brigadier was about to move in with the enemy. Suddenly Dwight had reversed his opinions concerning the very problems that Edwards had hoped he would correct: the inﬂuence of Colonel Ephraim Williams Sr.; Captain Kellogg's leadership of the boys boarding school; and, most decisively, Abigail's suitability to run the girls school.

Three factors were entwined in Edwards' opposition to the Williams faction in Stockbridge and to Abigail in particular. First, although he never mentioned it directly in his correspondence, he must have had some suspicions about Abigail's theology. He surely knew that Abigail opposed his own strictest principles, and he did report that the Indians said John Sergeant had changed for the worse after his marriage. Second, Edwards viewed the opposition of Colonel Ephraim Williams Sr. (who was orthodox) as part of the larger Williams family opposition to him over the communion controversy. Ephraim Sr. was the younger brother of the late patriarch William Williams of Hatﬁeld and so uncle to Edwards' principal opponents. Fueling Edwards' fears in that regard was news that the formidable Elisha Williams, while in England, had been appointed a commissioner of Isaac Hollis' London society that supported the mission schools.

The third factor, underlying all of Edwards' complaints, were intimations of ﬁnancial improprieties. At the root were the machinations of Ephraim Williams Sr. ''The Indians,'' Edwards reported to the Commissioners in Boston, ''have a very ill opinion of Colonel Williams and the deepest prejudice against him, he having often molested 'em with respect to their lands and other a√airs.'' The Indians, ''without anybody saying anything to lead 'em in

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[To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.]

Brigadier General Joseph Dwight (1703–65)

it,'' had at Edwards' house expressed a similarly negative view of Abigail as thoroughly in league with her father in these matters.∂

The Edwardses' relationship with Abigail was complicated by another factor: she was a friend of Aaron Burr. Abigail admired intelligence and perhaps had cultivated the friendship with the eminently eligible bachelor (her younger brother was a student at the College of New Jersey). Just before

≥Ω∫ Frontier Struggles

his marriage, Burr, probably trying to patch up relationships among his various friends, wrote a letter of congratulation to Brigadier Dwight on his engagement to ''so excellent a person so well qualiﬁed to communicate and have the joys of a reﬁned and virtuous friendship'' as Abigail. ''She is high in my esteem and has long been among the number of my particular friends.'' Something Burr had said to Abigail led to a misunderstanding for which Burr apologized to Edwards, but the issue is obscure.∑

Edwards professed that his disposition was ''entirely to have suppressed what I know that would be to the disadvantage of any of the people here,'' but that the more he learned about the management of the ﬁnances of Stockbridge, the more astonished he was. He was especially alarmed about what had been happening since the death of John Sergeant to the monies donated by Isaac Hollis to the mission. Under Abigail's and her father's control, the funds were either being wasted or were going for ''selﬁsh designs and intrigues for private interest.'' The Hollis money was going into Captain Kellogg's school, and Kellogg, in Edwards' view, was entirely incompetent as a schoolmaster. The Williams faction recognized his insu≈ciencies, but they kept him on because he was a ﬁrm ally—and, Edwards believed, Brigadier Dwight hoped to replace him with his own son.

The selﬁsh designs consuming much of the rest of the Hollis contributions related to Abigail's appointment as mistress of the proposed girls school for the Mohawks. Abigail was drawing a salary and was having the schoolhouse built on the Williamses' private land, which Edwards (correctly) suspected would then be turned to the Williamses' proﬁt. Abigail also had put her servants under salary from the public funds. Dwight, who was ﬁrst of all a merchant, was the steward of the boarding schools and was selling them all their supplies from his own shop for a proﬁt. Edwards, ﬁrst writing about all this in February just after learning of Abigail's engagement to Dwight, had lost all his inhibitions about exposing the sorry mess. With the impending marriage, ''things are like to [be] situated more preposterously still'' as the brigadier would become, in e√ect, the sole overseer, commissioned by the General Assembly, to watch over what would now be his own wife's ﬁnancial a√airs.∏

On the other side of the ledger, Edwards had the support of the schoolmaster, Timothy Woodbridge, most of the other white settlers, and most of the Indians. Woodbridge, who had worked with the Stockbridge Mahican Indians since the town's beginning, was Edwards' most valuable ally. ''By his long-proved justice and integrity,'' wrote Edwards, ''he has gained a vast

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esteem with the Indians, who are a people peculiar in that respect, if once they ﬁnd a man is mean, [and] deceitful, never will trust him again; but their friendship is mightily gained by upright dealing.'' By contrast, Edwards repeatedly emphasized that the Indians distrusted his English antagonists.π

Edwards' own transparent integrity seems to have won him the conﬁdence of the Indians.

Edwards procured his own candidate, Gideon Hawley, a recent Harvard graduate, to teach the Mohawk boys at the boarding school. Hawley arrived in early February 1752, and Edwards reported that the Indians were very pleased with him. In addition to about thirty-six Indians, including Mohawks and other Iroquois, Hawley's school included ''a couple of English'' (likely including six-year-old Jonathan Jr.), so that they might eventually learn to be missionaries or Indian teachers.∫ Predictably, conﬂict soon broke out between Captain Kellogg and Hawley. Kellogg refused to yield to Hawley and continued to claim partial authority over the school. Sometimes he would call the boys out of the school for his own purposes or to teach them himself, causing huge confusion in the school and dissatisfaction among the Mohawks. Kellogg thus kept up some pretense that he continued to conduct what he called the ''Hollisian School,'' drawing a substantial salary from Hollis but actually teaching only a few boys erratically for several weeks.Ω

Edwards countered by calling a meeting of the Stockbridge Mahican Indians in April at which Timothy Woodbridge and others of Edwards' allies convinced them to withdraw the few children who were still under the tutelage of Captain Kellogg at the so-called Hollisian School.∞≠

In May the conﬂict reached a crisis that threatened to destroy the entire Mohawk mission. Jonathan Hubbard, ''a great friend of Captain Kellogg,'' was at the boarding school and struck the child of one of the chief Indians. The Indians were enraged. Gideon Hawley came to Edwards for advice, but Edwards declined to intervene because Brigadier Dwight had told him in no uncertain terms to stay out of the Mohawk a√airs. The brigadier, on hearing of the blow-up, went to the school while it was in session and ''for three hours together by the watch'' loudly berated the young schoolmaster, Hawley. The Mohawk children were alarmed and said, according to Edwards, ''they did not know but that great man would kill their schoolmaster, and were very much afraid Mr. Hawley would go away.''∞∞ In the wake of this conﬂict, about half the Mohawks left.

By now the gloves were entirely o√ in the battle to control Stockbridge. Edwards was reporting that ''the Brigadier has plainly discovered many

∂≠≠ Frontier Struggles

designs tending to bring money into his own pocket'' and that the Williamses were building the girls school on their own land so that they could sell it to the state for a proﬁt.∞≤ The Williamses countered that Edwards was attempting much the same thing. Desperate for cash, Edwards had petitioned, via his ally Timothy Woodbridge, to the Massachusetts General Assembly that they purchase his Stockbridge house and house lot from him to be a parsonage. The popular Woodbridge had just been elected as Stockbridge's representative to the lower house, thus providing Edwards with political support. The Assembly, meeting in June, turned down Edwards' request, and word got back to Edwards that the culprit was Captain Ephraim Williams Jr., who was there ''the whole time of the sitting of the Assembly, constantly busy with the representatives, with his lime-juice punch and wine.'' The objections o√ered against the petitions, Edwards concluded, could only have come from the captain.∞≥

Despite the concerted attacks against him, Edwards still hoped to prevail. With half the Mohawks having left Stockbridge and almost all of the town, both English and Indians, on the side of Woodbridge and Edwards, the Williamses were having second thoughts about Stockbridge. The health of Ephraim Sr. was failing, and he was becoming increasingly irascible and erratic. He was thinking of returning to Deerﬁeld, where another son lived. Captain Kellogg, having little to do but still drawing support from the Hollis funds, spoke of perhaps leaving as well. Joseph Dwight and Abigail, who were to be married August 12, 1752, were not certain they would stay in Stockbridge either.∞∂

The balance of power swung dramatically back in the Williamses' direction, however, with the arrival of the clan's most distinguished member, Colonel Elisha Williams, and his renowned new wife, Elizabeth Scott Williams, just in time for the Dwight-Williams wedding. As a commissioner of Isaac Hollis' missionary society, Elisha claimed authority to adjudicate the Stockbridge dispute. Personal relations between the Williamses, who lived on the hill, and the rest of the village were already strained. The Edwardses were not invited to the wedding, a snub the pastor alluded to in his correspondence, reporting that the wedding had taken place, ''as we have been informed.''∞∑

Elisha Williams and his new wife did make a call on the Edwardses, but it did not go well. Jonathan was not at home, so Sarah received the distinguished couple. Sarah, likely wanting to explain the embarrassing North-

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ampton situation to the pious Elizabeth Scott, brought up the topic, remarking that it had been Solomon Stoddard's practice ''to admit all sorts of persons'' to communion. The imperious Elisha cut her o√. ''Madam, you must know better,'' as though she were telling an untruth. ''Mr. Stoddard has plainly declared in his book on that subject his sentiments were that none but visible saints ought to be admitted.'' Sarah confessed that she had not read Stoddard's book. Elisha retorted with another put-down: ''Then Madam I ask beg your pardon. I took it for granted you had read it when you used those words.'' Sarah expressed some resentment, whereupon ''another person'' (as Elisha reported it) remarked that ''it was natural to suppose you had read Mr. Stoddard's book as the controversy was on foot in that place.''∞∏

Elisha Williams' larger errand was, as agent for the London society, to inquire why the mission had been brought to such an impasse and, if possible, to reconcile the contending parties. Particularly he wanted to know the true reasons for Edwards' adamant opposition to Abigail as head of the girls school. So far Edwards had o√ered as his reason (to Abigail directly and publicly) only that Abigail, now with two families to care for, would not have the time personally to conduct the school. He had not gone into the delicate subject of his belief that she, as Colonel Ephraim's daughter, was distrusted by the Indians. Nor had he raised the question of the impropriety of the ﬁnancial beneﬁts she would gain by merging the school's and her family's ﬁnances.∞π

In Edwards' view, Elisha Williams was one of the last people who could impartially adjudicate the contentions, so he refused to meet with his former teacher or recognize his authority. Edwards was convinced that the opposition to him in Stockbridge was closely related to the Northampton controversy, in which Elisha was deeply involved.∞∫ Rather than meeting with Elisha, Edwards corresponded with him while both were in Stockbridge. Edwards agreed that a commission should review the mission controversy, but Elisha's view of the matter had already been too distorted by his friends and family for him to serve in that role. The insult to Sarah, which Sarah had interpreted as being accused of lying, was just one evidence. To the larger point Williams responded, not unreasonably, that as a commissioner it was his duty to hear all parties and to seek some Christian reconciliation. Edwards would hear none of it.∞Ω

Now it was all-out war for control of Stockbridge. Rather than pulling out, the Williams-Dwight-Kellogg faction, bolstered by Elisha's assurances of Isaac Hollis' continued support, stepped up their campaign to rid the town

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of Edwards. Ephraim Williams Jr. had returned in July from Fort Massachusetts to take over family a√airs from his failing father. The sociable soldier was telling people he would gladly spend £500 to rid the town of its minister.

Ephraim Sr., who was simultaneously losing his senses and becoming obsessed with righting his family's position, woke up one morning in September with another plan. (September 1752 was the shortest month in AngloAmerican history, eleven days being removed to reform the calendar). Rising before dawn, the old squire went from house to house of most of the dozen or so English families, attempting to buy them all out. Rousing some out of bed, he o√ered them very high prices waving cash in hand and demanding that papers be drawn immediately, but in utter secrecy. Then the word got out and the scheme fell apart. His family and all involved wrote it o√ to ''distraction'' but worried about what other damage the old man might do.≤≠

Edwards was more concerned about Brigadier Dwight, who went to Boston in November to report on the mission.≤∞ Edwards especially feared that Dwight might turn his former commander, Sir William Pepperrell, the colony's most famous New Light layman, against him and that Pepperrell would convince the London society to help oust him.≤≤ Edwards countered by providing Pepperrell with his fullest account of the Williams family's opposition to him (including the now-inﬂuential Israel Williams' long-standing coolness) and answered Dwight's charges one by one. Particularly, he demonstrated that he had authority from the Commissioners to preach to the Mohawks and to introduce Gideon Hawley as the schoolmaster.

Edwards was especially eager to refute decisively the accusation, now dogging him, that he was of an ''exceeding sti√, inﬂexible temper.'' Because the contentions in Stockbridge followed hard on the heels of those in Northampton, Dwight had made a case that it was Edwards' ''sti√ness and willfulness'' that was at the heart of the troubles. ''It has been represented,'' Edwards remarked, using an uncharacteristically worldly image ''that I had rather undo myself and my family than yield an ace.'' Edwards responded that his inﬂexibility had only to do with religious principles and that it was always the case that people who stood on conscience for a religious truth were accused of inﬂexibility. ''You must, Sir,'' he wrote, pulling out all the stops, ''be so well acquainted with the history of the martyrs as to be sensible that this has ever been the cry against the su√erers for religion, that they were sti√, willful, perverse, and inﬂexible.''≤≥

Edwards believed he could speak with such assurance because he often agonized over whether he might in fact be at fault. As he later wrote to one of

Frontier Struggles ∂≠≥

his critics, if his actions arose ''from private resentment, from implacableness of spirit, or sti√ness and willfulness of temper . . . [etc.],'' he would ''never . . . expect to be justiﬁed before my great Master and judge.'' With stakes so high, he constantly examined himself and was conﬁdent that ''if I have acted from such unchristian principles, and without an hatred of all remains of 'em in myself . . . it must be because I have been extremely and totally blinded concerning myself.''≤∂

Edwards' friends in Boston could see that he had too much support in Stockbridge for the troubles to have arisen primarily from his failings, as Dwight alleged. Josiah Willard, secretary of the province, wrote to Sir William Pepperrell in February 1753 to say that the Commissioners for Indian A√airs had carefully examined Dwight's charges and were ''well satisﬁed as to the general conduct of Mr. Edwards.'' Moreover, they a≈rmed, ''he has acquired the general a√ections of the Indians, and inﬂuence over them, which he constantly employs for the best purposes, and the success thereof will doubtless be more evident, were it not for the unwearied opposition of some people from personal prejudices.'' Pepperrell wrote back assuring Willard that ''I never thought of writing a syllable against [Edwards] in my life.''≤∑

Pepperrell was not going to intervene with London on Dwight's behalf. Still, any decisive action on the mission school would have to come from Isaac Hollis, who supplied most of the funds. Given the pace of transatlantic communication, that was not likely to happen soon.

Meanwhile, the situation at the school went from terrible to worse. In February 1753, Gideon Hawley's boarding school, including all his books and possessions, went up in ﬂames. Rumors circulated that it may have been arson by the Williams clan.≤∏ The few Mohawks that remained were fed up with what they had seen of English tribalism and announced their intention to leave. Chief Hendrick, who had been the most inﬂuential promoter of the boarding school plan, told Edwards that his people were thoroughly disgusted with Kellogg and Dwight.≤π

Gideon Hawley, disillusioned with trying to conduct an Indian mission in a settlement of feuding English, decided he would do better carrying his missionary work into Iroquois' own towns. In Stockbridge he had developed good relations with a number of Oneida from the village of Onohquaga at the headwaters of the Susquehanna in New York, about two hundred miles away. The Onohquagas (Oneida) had earlier heard of the boarding school, and a number had lived for a time in Stockbridge so their children could be educated.≤∫ Hawley now planned to take his mission to Onohquaga itself.

∂≠∂ Frontier Struggles

Edwards enthusiastically endorsed this plan and hoped that the Scottish Presbyterian missionary society and the Massachusetts Commissioners would be able to coordinate sending at least three missionaries to settle among the Iroquois. As it turned out, only Hawley went, accompanied on his initial journey by Timothy Woodbridge and taking along one of Stockbridge's most valued interpreters, Rebecca Kellogg Ashley (younger sister of Martin), her husband Benjamin, an ardent New Light, ''and three or four blacks.''≤Ω

Jonathan, Sarah, and others accompanied the entourage a considerable distance on ''our departure upon so great an errand as the planting of Christianity in the wilderness,'' until the road to Albany turned into an Indian track. The journey to the headwaters of the Susquehanna itself proved harrowing—it could be straight out of James Fenimore Cooper or, more likely, something Cooper read. More than once the party feared for their lives. Near Lake Ostego they made the mistake of joining up with a rum trader. The result in the Indian village where they stayed was disastrous. Hawley wrote: ''We soon saw the Indian women and their children skulking in the adjacent bushes, for fear of the intoxicated Indians, who were drinking deeper. The women were secreting guns, hatchets, and every deadly or dangerous weapon, that murder or harm might not be the consequence. Poor unhappy mortals! Without law, religion, or government; and therefore without restraint.'' The next morning in a canoe, only a fortuitous shift of his head saved Hawley from having his head blown o√ by the hunting gun of a still drunken and disgruntled Indian guide in what Hawley suspected may have been an assassination attempt. Despite all that, the group arrived safely and Hawley's mission at Onohquaga met with some initial success.≥≠ The depth of the Edwardses' commitment is suggested by their willingness in 1755, knowing full well the dangers, to send ten-year-old Jonathan Jr. with Hawley to prepare for a possible missionary career.

Meanwhile, as hopes shifted toward this ''errand in the wilderness,'' the grand ideal of the Stockbridge boarding school for the Mohawks was virtually ruined, but the competing English factions were too locked in a their deathgrips to give up their struggle over it. Control of the town and the Williams family fortunes were also at stake. So was the church. Since there was no hope of dislodging Edwards in that domain, the Dwights and Williams had simply stopped going. Joseph Dwight did not o≈cially belong to the local congregation, but Abigail and Captain Ephraim Jr. did, so Edwards made their absence a matter of church discipline.≥∞

By fall 1753 Edwards' hopes that he might prevail were growing. Ephraim Sr. was fast failing and had left town to live out his few remaining days in

Frontier Struggles ∂≠∑

Deerﬁeld, turning his lands over to his son Elijah, who was about to graduate from the College of New Jersey. Captain Martin Kellogg returned to Newington where he died in the fall. Brigadier Dwight personally took over a small remnant of the Hollis School until he could ﬁnd another teacher. He waited for instructions from Isaac Hollis that he hoped would conﬁrm his control. Edwards, in the meantime, had his own hopes buoyed by strong encouragement from the Commission for Indian A√airs in Boston and from interventions by New Jersey's Governor Belcher.≥≤

On February 25, 1754, Edwards ﬁnally received the vindication he had so long awaited. Isaac Hollis had appointed him to be the overseer of the boarding school. Edwards immediately informed Brigadier Dwight and went to the boarding school to inform Dwight's recently hired teacher, Cotton Mather Smith, who was teaching six remaining students.

Edwards now faced the sobering prospect that his victory might be empty. Since the fall, the Mohawks had expressed their intention to leave Stockbridge in the spring. Hollis' support was speciﬁcally directed toward the internationally signiﬁcant Mohawks, who might provide a mission entry into the Iroquois Confederacy. Now the Mohawks were about to leave for the spring sugaring season, and had announced their intention not to return. Edwards at once conferred with the Mohawk men, women, and children at his house, asking if they would stay under a new administration. Despite his entreaties, they persisted in their plans, which they said had been determined by a council in the fall. Nevertheless, in the next few days a few of the parents came to Edwards asking him to take their children in the school after they returned from sugaring. That was enough encouragement to try to keep the school alive.≥≥

Brigadier Dwight retreated, but not before ﬁring one more salvo. Noting that the Mohawks had deﬁnitively left Stockbridge immediately after Edwards took control of the school, Dwight blamed the exodus on dissatisfaction with Edwards. Edwards responded with indignation, documenting that the Mohawks' oft-announced intentions to leave antedated the takeover and that they had often expressed their dissatisfaction with the broken promises of Kellogg and Dwight. ''They have been this several years,'' wrote Edwards bitterly, ''murdering the Mohawk a√air themselves with cruel hands; and now just as it is expiring, they lay to me the mischief which they have most apparently done themselves.''≥∂

By the late spring, Edwards had six students in the school, ﬁve Stockbridge Indians and one Mohawk. He boarded the Mohawk boy in his own home, and the Stockbridge students lived with another English family. They

∂≠∏ Frontier Struggles

all attended school with Timothy Woodbridge, who was to give them special attention until they could ﬁnd a regular teacher. Edwards believed that the only hope for the Mohawks to return in numbers would be if they saw that there was a well-regulated school, ﬁrmly established.≥∑

Missions, Settlers, and Empire

By now, though, the darkest of clouds were overhanging the entire Stockbridge enterprise. Rumors of a renewed French and English conﬂict, and hence of Indian wars, were ﬂying. Worse, some Stockbridge Mahicans had become thoroughly disillusioned with English rule. Some even had threatened an uprising.≥∏

The incident that aroused the Stockbridge Mahicans had taken place the year before and was a version of what was becoming the classic story of how the best e√orts of British Americans and Native Americas to live together seemed always to collapse. In April 1753 the son and grandson of the leading Stockbridge Mahican, Solomon Waunaupaugus, were out sugaring. They saw two Englishmen whom they believed were stealing horses. When the Indians tried to stop them, the English shot and killed Solomon's son. The Indians were furious. To Edwards' chagrin, since Solomon and many other Stockbridge Mahicans were his parishioners, the Indians buried the young man according to their own rituals. The village sheri√ captured the two men and promised they would be tried in Springﬁeld, but some Indians spoke of taking justice into their own hands.

The Indians were further outraged when, at the trial in September, the English court acquitted one man and convicted the other only of manslaughter. Resentments continued to grow, especially among some of the younger Mahicans. The English heard that the Mohawks and other Indians were upset about the incident. It was around this time that the local Mohawk council decided to leave Stockbridge deﬁnitively the next spring. Meantime the English, so sharply divided among themselves, were united in their desire to appease the Indians. Timothy Woodbridge wrote to Governor Shirley urging the General Court to send some money to ''wipe away the tears'' of Solomon Waunaupaugus.

In the winter the General Court voted to send six pounds sterling. Then, hearing that the situation in Stockbridge was deteriorating and at the urging of both Woodbridge and Joseph Dwight, it increased the sum to twenty pounds. By late May 1754 the money had not yet arrived. Deeply alarmed,

Frontier Struggles ∂≠π

Edwards wrote to Secretary Josiah Willard, pleading that the money be sent before it was too late.

Some of the younger Mahicans, the dismayed Edwards reported, in league with some disa√ected Mohawks, had been found to be planning to massacre the English inhabitants of Stockbridge. The Indians were said to have attempted to draw the African slaves into the plot, but the slaves apparently reported it to their masters. Edwards believed the accusations, though he hastened to add, ''I am far from supposing that the generality of the Indians were in the conspiracy.'' One of the friendly Indians, who wanted his name withheld, had told Edwards that the Stockbridge killing was widely discussed among the Iroquois nations, and some were saying, encouraged by the French, that the English were planning to drive out all the Indians in the area. The young Stockbridge Indians who designed the conspiracy had been told that their people were fools for being taken in by pretended shows of English kindness and instruction when the English ''were only opening a wide mouth to swallow 'em up, when they should see a convenient time.''≥π

The events that led to the disa√ection of many of the Indians who had spent time at Stockbridge illustrate the great defect in English missions to the Native Americans and why they were so much less successful than their French counterparts. The English were almost always trying to settle the territories where they evangelized. Heroic French Jesuit missionaries who went to live among the Indians presented little immediate threat to the natives' territories or interests. The French population of New France was tiny and spread out compared to the situation in New England. Edwards and other English missionaries faced a situation where colonization was steadily advancing by way of settlement of land-holding families. Inexorably the Indians were being displaced. Even in a settlement like Stockbridge, where genuine e√orts were made to balance the interests of the two peoples, the ever-expanding English population inevitably tipped the balance in their own favor. When the French and their native allies said the English ''were only opening a wide mouth to swallow 'em up,'' it was di≈cult to demonstrate otherwise.≥∫ Gideon Hawley's e√orts to carry his mission into the native territories seems to have been a response to these problem, as perhaps were David Brainerd's forays before him. British settlements were advancing so rapidly, however, that it was already too late.

Although an uneasy calm was reestablished in Stockbridge by summer 1754, the international situation became increasingly unstable. In June, representatives from seven colonies, led by Benjamin Franklin, met nearby in the

∂≠∫ Frontier Struggles

Albany Congress with representatives of the Iroquois Confederacy to discuss the renewed French threats. The English proposed among themselves a colonial federation to help coordinate defense and regulate the frontiers. Elisha Williams was one of the Connecticut representatives and Oliver Partridge of Hatﬁeld, a Williams relative who had some involvement in Stockbridge a√airs, was in the Massachusetts delegation. Joseph Kellogg, Martin's brother, now of Stockbridge, served as translator for the Indians.

Behind the scenes at the Albany Congress, Timothy Woodbridge turned his goodwill among the Indians into an advantage for white New Englanders. Connecticut, which claimed a border on the Paciﬁc, was in competition with Pennsylvania for millions of acres of land in the upper Susquehanna Valley that the Iroquois appeared ready to sell. Woodbridge had learned of this land while accompanying Gideon Hawley on a preliminary mission tour. Acting as chief agent of the Susquehanna Company of Connecticut and working with a disreputable Indian trader, John Henry Lydius, Woodbridge completed a treaty with some Indian leaders for the land. Woodbridge and company claimed Chief Hendrick's endorsement of their purchase. Unfortunately, Hendrick was not happy with the arrangement, and Pennsylvania's respected negotiator, Conrad Weiser, convinced him to cede much of the same land to that colony—thus leading to a half century of disputes between Connecticut and Pennsylvania. Hendrick was disillusioned with what he considered Woodbridge's underhanded methods, further damaging the Mohawks' view of the Stockbridge mission.≥Ω

The incident once again illustrates the ﬂaw in even the best-intended government-supported mission. This was not the ﬁrst time that Woodbridge, though a genuine friend to the Stockbridge Mahicans, had used his growing political inﬂuence for white advantage and his own proﬁt.∂≠ He was, after all, emerging as a leading magistrate in Stockbridge and was doing what almost every magistrate of western New England did—invest in land to secure his family's position. At the same time, he did enough for the Indians to keep their trust. In expanding his interests to the Susquehanna Company, although he may have been overtaken by Yankee avarice, he also doubtless saw himself as performing a public service. In his view, Indians' true interests were spiritual, so that the advance of Protestant New England went hand in hand with Indian welfare.

Edwards, without being involved in the details of the land deals,∂∞ shared the essential conceptual framework in which Woodbridge, his closest Stockbridge ally, operated. For Edwards the preeminent goal was to reach the

Frontier Struggles ∂≠Ω

Indians with the Gospel. Working from a Constantinian perspective, he never questioned the premise that God used Christian empires to bring his message to unevangelized peoples. In his view the crucial concern was that as the British advanced they not neglect to teach the Indians Reformed Christianity. That was ﬁrst a spiritual duty, but it also had a humane cultural program. Once Christianized and taught European ways, Indians could live at peace with their new neighbors, beneﬁting from a civilization that had much to o√er. In the meantime, Christians like Woodbridge, who were true fathers to the Indians, might properly turn a proﬁt ﬁtting their own position, so long as they did so honestly.

One major practical ﬂaw in this outlook was that few European settlers had nearly as much concern for Indian welfare as did Timothy Woodbridge—

who, imperfect though he was, spent his career working with the natives. Most settlers were overwhelmingly concerned with protecting their own interests and were quick to blame the nearest available Indians when something went wrong. The European governments and their militaries who supported colonization were driven primarily by distant a√airs of state in which Indians served largely as dispensable pawns. Furthermore, the beneﬁts of British imperialism were lost on most of the Indians, who understandably were ready to ﬁght for their homelands. Adding to the di≈culties, the various Indians were divided among themselves and on the whole were no more virtuous than Europeans.

By summer 1754 too many such forces were at work for there to be much hope that a peaceful kingdom, such as Stockbridge was supposed to exemplify, would soon be realized. Even before the delegates assembled at the Albany Congress, they had heard of bloody encounters between the French and Virginians under the leadership of a young colonel named George Washington. By the time the congress was over in July, reports had arrived of Washington's surrender. The proposals of the Albany Congress for intercolonial unity and mutual protection would come to nothing. Warfare among the British, French, and Indians had resumed. Once again any settlement on the frontier, including Stockbridge, was vulnerable to attack.∂≤

In mid-summer 1754, likely in part from strain, exhaustion, disappointments, and anxieties, Edwards fell into his most protracted illness since his student days. For the better part of seven months, between July 1754 and February 1755, he su√ered ﬁrst ''under extreme weakness,'' then, after some respite in September, under ''ﬁts of the augue'' or fever, so that he ''became like a skeleton'' and was so weak that he feared he was ''going into a dropsy.''∂≥

∂∞≠ Frontier Struggles

If his long illness involved despondency, there was much to be despondent about. The mission school was in pathetic condition, war seemed inevitable, and the survival of any English in Stockbridge was an open question. In addition, the onset of illness interrupted the most ambitious writing program of his career. In Stockbridge, amid everything else, he had already completed his lengthy reply to Solomon Williams and a treatise on Freedom of the Will, and he dearly hoped to ﬁnish a shelf of other treatises before he died.

On Sunday, September 1, the ﬁrst Sunday Edwards was back in the pulpit after the ﬁrst round of his illness, the town was suddenly overtaken by terror and panic. Between the meetings, a man came rushing into town to report that he had just come upon a Canadian Indian who was abducting an English child from an outlying home. The Indian, seeing that he was pursued, tomahawked the child and escaped. The horriﬁed Englishman returned to the house to ﬁnd a servant and an infant dead, while the father and two other children were cowering before another Indian, who promptly ﬂed. An hour later the Indians killed another man on the outskirts of the town.

Predictably, in the midst of the pent-up fears, the Europeans in the area panicked. Terriﬁed settlers ﬂed south from one town to the next. People from the north were clamoring into Stockbridge, and Stockbridge residents were ﬂeeing south. Abigail Dwight left so quickly that she had to leave charge to a servant to bring her infant daughter. Edwards' friend Samuel Hopkins the younger, pastor in nearby Great Barrington to the south, described the scene two days later in a letter to Joseph Bellamy. When the news arrived during his afternoon service, the town went into a frenzy, some people ﬂeeing. Before long ''women, children and squaws presently ﬂocked in upon us from Stockbridge, half naked and frightened to death.'' Wild rumors circulated that the enemy was amassed on the other side of Stockbridge and about to attack.

During the following days, armed English and Dutch men from the region ﬂooded into the town. The men built a stockade around the Edwardses' house at the center of the town, and the Edwardses had to help accommodate them. Some of the town's new protectors, inﬂamed by the earlier rumors of a Mahican uprising, accused the Stockbridge Indians of encouraging the attacks and threatened to kill them. In fact, the attack had come from Abenaki Indians, long since displaced to northern New England and Canada by King Philip's War and now encouraged by the French. One gentleman of the town, suspecting that source, o√ered a reward for the scalp of a ''Canadian'' Indian. A couple of visiting English scoundrels dug up one of the local Indians who had recently died and trying to claim the reward.

Frontier Struggles ∂∞∞

Although the men were apprehended and punished, the Stockbridge Indians were again thoroughly outraged at English barbarism.∂∂

''Two Indians,'' an exasperated Samuel Hopkins remarked, ''may put New England to a hundred thousand pounds charge, and never expose themselves.'' The troops that had ﬂooded in and were now leaving had done no good: ''They have seen Stockbridge and eaten up all their provisions, and fatigued themselves, and that's all; and now we are left as much exposed as ever.''∂∑

The Edwardses bore the brunt of the care of the town's would-be protectors, who had trampled down most everything in sight. When things had settled, by October, Edwards signed a report to the General Court, asking for reimbursement for serving ''800 meals of victuals, pasturing 150 horses, and 7 gal. of good West Indian rum'' as well as food for ''all poor people driven from their homes above thro fear.'' In addition, they had served another 180 meals to the workers building the fort and supplied some of the lumber.∂∏

The Edwardses now lived in constant fear. In November, Esther, safe in New Jersey, was ''almost out of my wits'' at a report from a man from Albany that all but two or three Stockbridge Mahican families had left the village in great disgust with the English and that they had even spoken of sending a neighboring tribe to wipe out the town. Jonathan and Sarah were taking precautions and had sent at least several of their children to live with relatives. Esther wrote to eighteen-year-old Lucy, who had gone to live with her sister Mary in Northampton, that she was glad that ''Pinty'' (four-year-old Pierpont) and ''Betty'' (seven-year-old Elizabeth) were also in Northampton and hoped ''they will not go to Stockbridge till the danger is quite over.''∂π We can only try to imagine the distresses of such times when rumors ﬂew and reliable news traveled slowly and one lived weeks or months in dread of disasters that may have already happened. Esther prayed desperately that she could ''commit them to God who orders all things in mercy, and doesn't willfully a∆ict nor grieve any of his children.'' Yet she could hardly bring herself to such acceptance of God's will as she had been trained. ''Why is it,'' she sighed. ''Why does God su√er his own most dear children to be hunted about in this manner! But this is a very wrong temper of mind. I hope I may be able to crush it by divine assistance.''∂∫

By late fall the Stockbridge situation had stabilized, but now the town was an armed camp, with the large Edwards home one of several fortresses.∂Ω

In February 1755 Edwards wrote a note to Brigadier Dwight saying that they could not board and lodge more than four soldiers in their home and pleading

∂∞≤ Frontier Struggles

his continuing ill health (hence ''under much greater disadvantage than others to get provisions'').∑≠

By spring, while Edwards' health was only slowly returning, his discouragements were greater than ever.∑∞ He was nearly ready to give up on the Hollis Indian school altogether ''in this time of war and confusion.'' In addition to the new external threats, the ''di≈culties from within,'' from the Dwight-Williams faction, ''don't diminish, but increase.''∑≤ Brigadier Dwight was using all his inﬂuence in Boston to recover control of the school. Edwards' prospects in Stockbridge had fallen so low that in Northampton the other Dwights renewed their hopes he might return there. Colonel Timothy Dwight Sr. (father of the Edwards' son-in-law) wrote to Thomas Foxcroft that, especially because of ''the di≈culties that arise from the Indians being made so dependent on Brigadier Dwight,'' Edwards in Stockbridge was ''like a candle set under a bushel.''∑≥

Timothy Woodbridge countered Brigadier Dwight's e√ort to recapture the school by leading a delegation of Indians to Boston to testify to their a√ection for Edwards and the schoolmaster and against their opponents. The brigadier fought back by lobbying his friend Governor William Shirley. He also enlisted Edwards' old nemesis Colonel Israel Williams of Hatﬁeld, now one of the most powerful men in the province, as his ''chosen representative.'' In June Edwards heard that ''they have lately conceived new hopes of accomplishing their designs.''∑∂

The only bright spot was Gideon Hawley's mission to Onohquaga. Even though a war was going on, it was at this time (April 1755) that the Edwardses packed Jonathan Jr. away to ride with the missionary on another dangerous two-hundred-mile trip to the Indian settlement. In the distant village the English boy's skill with Indian dialects proved a great hit. ''It is also pleasing to the Indians, that Mr. Edwards' little son was with me,'' wrote Hawley. ''The Indians love him and make much the more so as he makes proﬁciency in their language.''∑∑

In May, a day after young Jonathan's tenth birthday, Edwards wrote to him, in a typical epistle to his children. He was much thinking about the boy, he said, but glad that he was always in God. The one thing for the lad to remember was that he might die at any time. Recently David, an Indian boy who had lived at the Edwards home and been a playmate of young Jonathan's, had died. ''This is a loud call of God to you to prepare for death.'' ''Never give yourself any rest,'' the loving father pleaded, ''unless you have good evidence that you are converted and become a new creature.''

Frontier Struggles ∂∞≥

Curiously and revealingly, Edwards included almost no family news. He closed only mentioning that he had heard that the boy's sister and brother in Newark ''are well'' and bringing salutations from ''your aged grandfather and grandmother,'' whom Jonathan Sr. had visited in Windsor. Yet, revealing of his priorities, he did not mention (as he did to a friend a few days later) ''a great hurt I received in a late journey to Windsor by a dangerous fall from my horse, the horse pitching heels over head with his whole weight upon me.''∑∏

Most parents would think such a harrowing experience at least of interest to a ten-year-old or even a lesson to be careful—as Edwards' own father would have made it. Yet the theologian had one concern and was not going to dilute it with personal trivia any more than one would expect such distractions in a Pauline epistle.

Death was indeed a prominent presence in eighteenth-century lives and aided by its ally, warfare, was rapidly changing the nature of the contest over the Stockbridge mission. Ephraim Williams Sr. and Captain Kellogg were already gone. In July Colonel Elisha Williams, the former Yale rector and one of Edwards' most inﬂuential opponents, died. Before the summer was out the war itself would take others. For the next several years, news of the war, in which so many Stockbridge families, both Indian and English, had a personal stake, would submerge other temporal concerns.

The war also made the main purpose of the school—educating the Iroquois—something of a moot point. In September Edwards received a letter from Isaac Hollis, providing funds to continue the school and to increase its enrollment to sixteen. The funds once again conﬁrmed Edwards' control. He gathered eleven boys, apparently all Stockbridge Mahicans, and kept up a semblance of a school, though apparently with Timothy Woodbridge still as their teacher. Edwards told Thomas Prince that he had ''reserved room for four or ﬁve Mohawk boys'' but realized that ﬁnding them was unlikely so long as the war continued.∑π

C H A P T E R ≤∑ kl

Wartime

the dreadful, awful news! General Braddock is killed and his army defeated,'' cried Esther Edwards Burr in Newark. ''Oh my dear what will, what must become of us! O our sins, our sins—they are grown up to the very heavens, and call aloud for vengeance, the vengeance that the Lord has sent—'Tis just, 'tis right.''∞

The overwhelming destruction of General Edward Braddock's proud army of redcoats as they approached Fort Duquesne on July 9, 1755, sent shock waves through the colonies. From Virginia to northern New England, British settlers on the frontier were thrown into a panic. Braddock had conﬁdently expected to capture the strategic French fort (now Pittsburgh) as part of a multipronged British e√ort to use superior military force to dislodge the French from their frontier strongholds. Instead, the British failure to enlist much Indian support proved disastrous in the bloody forest encounter. The French had demonstrated their ability to marshal Indian allies, and the victory on the Monongahela immediately drew more tribes to the French side and others away from the British into neutrality. Of the major tribes, only the Mohawks in the east under old Chief Hendrick remained willing to join with British forces.≤ The less numerous Mahicans were among the few other Native Americans willing to lend support.

Nothing struck more terror into the hearts of colonists than the threat of a general Indian uprising—another King Philip's War, more Deerﬁelds! Esther agonized over the dangers for her family in Stockbridge. Even in New Jersey she did not feel safe. Later in the fall she heard a report from Madam Belcher, the governor's wife, that ﬁfteen hundred French and Indians were amassed on the borders of New Jersey. Even before that Esther was expecting the worst. ''You can't conceive my dear friend,'' she wrote to her beloved Boston cor-

Wartime ∂∞∑

respondent, Sally Prince, daughter of Thomas Prince Sr., ''what a tender mother undergoes for her children at such a day as this, to think of bring[ing] up children to be dashed against the stones by our barbarous enemies—or which is worse, to be enslaved by them, and obliged to turn Papist.''≥

Esther's fears were grounded in Aaron Burr's millennial theology, which was much like her father's but more immediately pessimistic. On New Year's Day of that same year (1755) President Burr had preached a fast-day sermon of lament in light of the renewed French and Indian threats. Unlike Edwards, who believed the church had already su√ered its worst persecutions, Burr believed that the most horrible birth pangs preceding the millennium were still to come. Ministering in the Middle Colonies during these rapidly changing times, when vice seemed rampant and awakenings rare, may have disposed Burr to view the current state of Protestantism as bleak. In his sermon he painted in lurid terms how God might use the French and Indians to bring judgment. ''Our men slaughtered!—Our wives and daughters delivered to the lusts and fury of a lawless soldiery!—Our helpless babes dashed against the stones.'' Esther, whose daughter Sally was less than one, came away terriﬁed. She wrote that same day to Sally Prince: '' 'Tis very probable you and I may live to see persecution, and may be called to give up every thing for the cause of God and a good conscience—even to burn at the stake.'' The next day she added that she was grateful to see people shaken from their spiritual lethargy by ''the danger of being swallowed up by our popish enemies.''∂

Back in Stockbridge, Jonathan was, to all appearances, decidedly more tranquil. While duly concerned that disaster could strike Stockbridge at any moment, and always prone to melancholy, he was also steeled by years of discipline to be prepared for whatever God might will—an attitude that his daughter, as a young mother, worried she could not emulate. He even urged Esther to visit when Timmy returned from the college before commencement in September.

Preaching on a fast day called in response to General Braddock's defeat, Edwards assured his anxious English congregation that ''we haven't reason at all to despair'' even though ''God hath awfully rebuked us in this defeat.'' Edwards' long-range conﬁdence was built on his optimistic eschatology. His text, Psalm 60: 9–12, was a prayer for Israel's victory over Edom—an ancient nation that was a type of the Antichrist. Despite British setbacks, there was great reason to hope for victory when the enemy was the Antichrist, ''the greatest enemy of God's church that ever was on earth.''

Edwards was still tracking the decline of the papacy in his notebook ''An

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Account of Events Probably Fulﬁlling the Sixth Vial,'' which had to do with the drying up of the Rivers of Babylon (i.e., Rome). In it he was meticulously recording items from newspapers that dealt with any adverse ﬁnancial news about the pope and his minions. (A recent entry: ''Boston Evening Post, July 21, 1755, the clergy . . . [of France] will be required to make a free gift suitable to the exigencies of the state,'' followed by details of various accounts of the amount.)∑ Given this trajectory, Edwards had high hopes for eventual British victory in the New World.

Yet in the short run there would be defeats and disasters that were both Satan's counterattacks and God's loud calls for repentance. Braddock's defeat was particularly a judgment on British pride and self-conﬁdence. That divine message was evident in that God had so humiliated the British in the eyes of the Indians. ''The killing of so great a number of the chief o≈cers [two-thirds had died],'' Edwards lamented in the sermon, ''whose clothing, armor, treasure, and scalps are fallen into the hand of the enemy to be carried in triumph through the French settlements of America, 'tis an awful rebuke of the most high for our pride and vain conﬁdence.''∏ For the near future Edwards saw the defection of the Indians as the greatest danger. Although the British had a twenty-to-one population advantage over the French, he explained to Scotland's William McCulloch, the British colonies were in real danger because of the French ability to enlist the Indians.π

Most immediately Edwards and other English townspeople pled strongly with Edwards' politically inﬂuential cousin Colonel Israel Williams in early September 1755 for adequate troops to protect Stockbridge. Thirty of the Indian men of Stockbridge had gone o√ to war under Governor William Shirley only on the condition that troops be sent to defend the town. Their enemies, argued Edwards, would glory in destroying Stockbridge and its several forts ''and so breaking the union between the English and Indians, and drawing o√ this tribe, among the many others that are forsaking the English interest and joining with the French since the Ohio defeat.''∫

A few days later, Stockbridge was shaken to the core by news of a ﬁerce battle near Lake George, about ﬁfty miles north of Albany near the south end of Lake Champlain. A regiment of about a thousand colonial troops under the command of Stockbridge's own Colonel Ephraim Williams Jr. and accompanied by Ephraim's friend, the seventy-ﬁve-year-old Chief Hendrick, and two hundred Mohawks marched into an ambush of Canadian Indians and elite French troops under the command of the French general Baron Jean-Armand de Dieskau. Chief Hendrick and Ephraim Jr. both died in the

Wartime ∂∞π

initial ﬁghting. Unlike the similar encounter with Braddock's troops, the remaining colonials had enough savvy to break ranks and regroup so that they could help counter the French and Indian assault. Reinforced with troops under General William Johnson, the colonials eventually repulsed the enemy advance and captured the wounded Dieskau on the battleﬁeld.Ω

Edwards thought it a Pyrrhic victory. ''The army under General Johnson had a kind of victory over the French,'' he wrote, ''yet we su√ered very greatly in the battle.'' Aside from Hendrick and Ephraim Williams Jr., the Edwardses knew at least ﬁve young men (including their cousin Captain Elisha Hawley, Joseph's sometimes wayward brother) from Northampton who died in the conﬂict.∞≠

Whatever the mixed feelings of the Edwardses, Abigail was devastated by the death of her brother. ''There was not a gentleman in the army,'' she lamented, ''who could have been less easily spared.'' Abigail and Brigadier Dwight were again talking of leaving Stockbridge. Abigail wrote to a friend in New York City, ''I long to be with you eating lobsters, crabs, and oysters, and drink[ing] lemons: but must content myself with small beer and country ﬁres and yet is too good for me since I am su√ered to live when so many of my dearest friends are gone to the dead.''∞∞ The Dwights did stay. By spring the brigadier had secured some Connecticut troops to help protect the town. Though Ephraim Jr. was gone, two younger sons of Ephraim Williams Sr. also remained. (Ephraim Jr. left a lasting legacy. In July 1755, the day after he heard of General Braddock's defeat, he revised his will. He removed an earlier small benefaction for the Stockbridge Indian school but left a substantial sum to found a school in nearby Williamstown. In 1785 the money was used to endow Williams College.)∞≤

Aside from the cost in lives, Edwards saw Lake George as only a ''kind of victory'' because the original purpose of the English expedition had been to drive the French from their fortress at Crown Point (near Ticonderoga) at the base of Lake Champlain, the route to Montreal. The battle had instead led to a stando√. Having an English army stationed north of them provided some protection from the ravages of the sorts of Indian attacks that were now common on the Virginia and Pennsylvania frontiers. Altogether, though, 1755 was a year of ''great frowns of providence on British America.'' Only in Nova Scotia did the British arms succeed. On the mainland the French held their ground and, having consolidated their Indian alliances, appeared stronger than ever.∞≥

Shortly after hearing the news from Lake George, Edwards left for

[To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.]

Death of Colonel Ephraim Williams Jr. at the Battle of Lake George, 1755

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Newark, where he arrived in time for the college commencement in late September 1755. Aside from the pleasure of seeing his daughter and toddler granddaughter, Edwards found himself in the vortex of alarmed colonial wartime politics. Immediately after the commencement he and Aaron Burr set out for Philadelphia for a meeting of the Synod of New York and New Jersey.∞∂ Burr was an outspoken proponent of intercolonial unity.∞∑ If ever Edwards met Benjamin Franklin, it would have been on this visit to Philadelphia. Franklin had published and even read some of Edwards' works, and the circles of elite men in Philadelphia were not large. If they did meet, their conversation may have included talk of their mutual friendship with Whiteﬁeld and shared intelligence about the military situation since the battle of Lake George.

We can imagine another sort of conversation with Esther and her circle when Edwards was back in Newark. The subject there may have turned to Samuel Richardson's Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded. Esther had read the novel in the spring. Her father, if he had not read it himself, had certainly heard a lot about it from his family in Stockbridge. Gideon Hawley noted in his diary that when he had visited the Edwardses in summer 1754, he had found a copy of Pamela there, which he read and enjoyed.∞∏ That was at the time when Jonathan was ill, so it is possible that the theologian read it during his convalescence. As Esther was reading this moral tale of a lowly maid who, after refusing to be seduced by her master, married him, she believed the author was setting up ''riches and honor as the great essentials of happiness.'' When Pamela's husband proved unfaithful, Esther was disgusted and believed the title should be ''virtue tried.'' Nonetheless, Esther admired the pious Pamela's angelic character and her exemplary views of her marital duties and was relieved to learn that her long-su√ering virtue ﬁnally won faithfulness from her husband.∞π Esther's father would have had some theological reﬂections on all this. He had been working on a treatise on ''The Nature of True Virtue,'' which would reﬁne evangelical thinking about the much-discussed eighteenth-century topic of ''virtue.''

Edwards could be talkative in the right circles of friends and family, so long as the conversation stayed on serious edifying themes. Esther, a year earlier, painted our most vivid picture of a typical gathering. Writing to Sally Prince when Aaron Burr was away in Boston and her father was supposed to be there also, Esther visualized the scene at the home of Sally's father, Thomas Prince. ''I imagine now this eve Mr. Burr is at your house. Father is there and some others. You all set in the Middleroom, Father has the talk, and Mr. Burr

∂≤≠ Wartime

has the Laugh, Mr. Prince gets room to stick in a word once in a while. The rest of you set and see, and hear, and make observations to yourselves . . . and when you get up stairs you tell what you think, and wish I was there too.''∞∫

In this portrait the women are deeply involved with the intellectualspiritual fare, but in their subordinate position. They are making mental notes and then debating the issues once alone in their bedroom. Esther, though not questioning her social subordination, was used to women being taken seriously as spiritual and intellectual (even if not educational) equals of men. Hardly able to abide ''triﬂing women'' who ''talk about fashions and dress,'' she deplored one group of ''young women from Trenton'' as ''poor vain young creatures as stupid as horses.'' Yet Esther was not shy about putting men in their place if they denigrated women's capacities. On one occasion a male guest made the mistake of saying that he believed women did not know what true friendship was since ''they were hardly capable of anything so cool and rational as friendship.'' Esther, whose extraordinary friendships were with other women of high intelligence, let him have it. ''(My tongue you know, hangs pretty loose, thoughts crowded in—so I sputtered for dear life),'' she wrote to Sally Prince. ''You may guess what a large ﬁeld this speech opened for me. I retorted several severe things upon him before he had time to speak again. He blushed and seemed confused.'' They argued for an hour, until the guest ﬁnally retreated. ''He got up and said your servant and went o√.'' ''I talked him quite silent.''∞Ω

When Edwards left Newark and his formidable daughter in October 1755, he sailed from New York City, where he was delayed some days by contrary winds. There he spent his time among Presbyterians almost as divided as they had been more than three decades earlier when he had been a young intern. Currently they were in a fracas concerning choosing a new pastor, complicated by the insistence of a Scottish party that they sing only psalms.≤≠ Edwards still had friends in New York, and we can imagine that, even as they argued church politics, they may have served him lobsters, crabs, oysters, and lemon drinks. Presumably his appreciation of all of creation would have allowed him to relish these, though always in strictly disciplined quantities. In any case, we can be almost sure that he brought home a supply of chocolate, which had become a favorite family indulgence.≤∞

Back in Stockbridge, the winter of 1756 was relatively free of alarms, but the war was taking a distressing toll on Indian missions. Especially painful to Edwards was that Gideon Hawley's mission to Onohquaga, in which they had placed such high hopes, was in danger of being ''entirely broke up.'' The

Wartime ∂≤∞

[To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.]

Esther Edwards Burr, ca. 1750–60

French had aroused the Delawares who now controlled much of the upper Susquehanna. In mid-December, the village became a place of constant dread after Onohquaga received news that the Delawares had declared war on all English, accompanying their message with a couple English scalps. The Indian villagers feared for their lives so long as any English were there, so in early January Hawley and Jonathan Jr. left through the snows on a trek back to safety. They spent most of the winter northwest of Albany at the fortressmansion of Sir William Johnson, recently commanding general at the costly victory at Lake George. The powerful Sir William, who had been a close friend of Chief Hendrick and was the English's best link to the Indians, used

[To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.]

Indian conference at Johnson Hall. The conference depicted here took place the decade after the one in which Gideon Hawley served as interpreter. When Hawley and Jonathan Edwards Jr. visited in 1756, during wartime, Johnson lived in an older, fortress-like mansion, Fort Johnson.

Wartime ∂≤≥

Hawley as an informant and interpreter for an Indian congress designed to shore up deteriorating relationships.≤≤

Although young Jonathan returned home safely in late winter from his precarious adventures, the Edwardses worried that Stockbridge would soon become as dangerous as Onohquaga. Massachusetts and Connecticut were recruiting new volunteer armies for another strike against Crown Point, but this plan involved a risk for the frontier settlements. The colonial army would be largely amateur, and Edwards and his friends feared a defeat would unleash French and Indian forces against weakly fortiﬁed frontier towns. Conducting an Indian school under such wartime circumstances was unrealistic. As an expedient to preserve a remnant of the Indian school, Edwards sent the Stockbridge boys to study with Joseph Bellamy in Bethlehem, Connecticut.

Bellamy believed Edwards should care more for his personal safety. ''I am in pain,'' Bellamy pleaded in late May, ''fearing our army against Crown Point will be defeated. God only knows how it will be.'' Bellamy o√ered ''all the comforts our house a√ords,'' if Edwards would bring his family to Bethlehem.≤≥ Edwards, whose spiritual disciplines were a lifelong preparation for calamity, remained a pillar of resolution. All things were in God's hands and he was determined to do what he had been called to do. If it all ended in a horrible Indian attack, so be it. Death always stalked family and friends in any case. Edwards would remain at his post and accept whatever God willed.

We have one vivid picture of the terror Stockbridge could inspire during the darkest days of the war. Somehow Jonathan and Sarah persuaded their daughter Esther to make her postponed visit from New Jersey in late summer of 1756, now bringing with her the latest grandchild, six-month-old Aaron Burr Jr. The young mother was ﬁlled with trepidation, but, as she said, ''I have endeavored to know duty and think I am doing of it.'' Esther kept a candid daily record of her sojourn, written for Sally Prince in Boston.≤∂

After a ﬁve-day journey by sail and wagon, Esther arrived on August 30, 1756, drenched from a rainstorm, surprising her family ''almost out of their wits.'' Her sisters Lucy (aged twenty) and Sueky (Susannah, aged sixteen) were ''almost overcome'' with joy. But then ''the melancholy news that I brought them ﬁlled the house with gloom.'' The news was of the capture of Fort Oswego in New York by the French and Indians. The French general, Montcalm, had obtained the Anglo-American surrender after a brief resistance, promising safe treatment of the prisoners. While Montcalm acted in good faith according to European conventions, he did not fully appreciate his Indian allies' rules of war, which demanded trophies of scalps, prisoners, and

∂≤∂ Wartime

booty. The Indians accordingly fell upon and killed scores of captives and carried o√ others before Montcalm could stop them.≤∑ The colonials were convinced the fort was taken, as Esther said, ''by treachery.''

Esther spent most of her three weeks in Stockbridge ''scared out of my wits about the enemy.'' Two days after her arrival there was ''an alarm.'' The townspeople set up a watch at the fort that surrounded the house, and for two nights ''most of the Indians came to lodge here.'' Some reported they had seen the enemy at night. ''This place is in a very defenseless condition—not a soldier in it,'' she wrote a few days later. Almost all the ﬁghting Indians had gone into the army, as were many of the white men. Esther lamented, ''10 Indians might with all ease destroy us entirely.'' Enemy Indians, she now heard, had been sighted within thirty miles. ''I want to be made willing to die in any way God pleases,'' wrote the distraught Esther after many ﬁtful nights, ''but I am not willing to be butchered by a barbarous enemy nor can't make myself willing.''

To make matters worse, after about a week of Esther's stay, her mother announced that she was going to Northampton, where the next daughter, Mary Dwight, was soon expecting her third child. Clearly Sarah was the person who did most to keep family spirits up. ''My mother gone!'' Esther moaned. ''It adds double gloom to everything.'' A few days later seventeen soldiers arrived to help protect the town. Esther believed them still too few to defend the three small local forts. Some were staying with the Edwardses, which created more work, especially for Lucy who was in charge in Sarah's absence.

On the Sabbath Jonathan preached on Amos 8:11, ''Behold I send a famine in the land, not a famine of bread nor a thirst for water, but of hearing of the words of the Lord.'' Esther concluded, as apparently her father had warned, ''that God is about to deprive this land of his word and ordinances for their shameful abuse of them, and just and right will he be in so doing.'' At night she comforted herself with the assurance that still ''God would be gloriﬁed—and oh my dear this is refreshing that the ever blessed God will lose none of his glory, let men or devils do their worst.''

God would be just as much gloriﬁed, she reasoned, if she and her son were not butchered in Stockbridge. So the next day she proposed to her father that she go home early. He would hear none of it. ''If the Indians get me,'' she grimly resigned herself, ''they get me, that is all I can say, but 'tis my duty to make my self as easy as I can.'' Finally, on the eve of the last Sabbath, Esther had a candid talk with her father: ''Last eve I had some free discourse with my

Wartime ∂≤∑

father on the great things that concern my best interest—I opened my di≈- culties to him very freely and he as freely advised and directed. The conversation has removed some distressing doubts that discouraged me much in my Christian warfare—He gave me some excellent directions to be observed in secret that tend to keep the soul near to God, as well as others to be observed in a more public way—What a mercy that I have such a Father! Such a guide!''

Edwards himself, despite knowing how to ﬁnd spiritual solace, was far from conﬁdent concerning matters temporal. ''What will become of us, God only knows,'' he wrote to Gideon Hawley in early October, a few weeks after Esther left. The war had displaced Hawley from his Onohquaga Indian mission, and the missionary was now serving, apparently with Edwards' urging, with the large colonial expedition that was supposed to move against Crown Point. Now in the wake of the disastrous loss of Fort Oswego, the colonists had abandoned that o√ensive against Lake Champlain, disbanded much of the volunteer army, and built defensive positions. A recent letter from Hawley included some ''very a√ecting accounts'' of the expedition. Edwards responded that, indeed, God seemed to be ''remarkably frowning on us everywhere'' and the English were rapidly losing credibility in Indian eyes. ''It looks as if something great, and perhaps almost decisive, were to happen before winter.'' The war might be nearly over and the worst to come soon. The only hope was prayer, ''humble cries to the God of armies.''≤∏

Gideon Hawley's time with the army had given him a new view of how the British and American military were using missions to the Indians. Hawley saw that his expected function in the army was to try to keep the loyalty of the few remaining Indian allies. He also witnessed the dissipation among New England soldiers and some of the brutality of warfare. Having lived among the Iroquois, Hawley appreciated better than did most of his European contemporaries some of the ambiguities and paradoxes in the warfare with the Indians.≤π He recorded in his diary, for instance, the swiftness with which the English beheaded a passing Indian who was foolish enough to boast of taking British scalps in Ohio.

Hawley's experiences with actual warfare were leading him to disagree with his mentor Edwards, who tended to view warfare through the lenses of his millennialist categories and Constantinian assumptions. In fall 1756 Hawley returned brieﬂy to Stockbridge, where he may also have had an unrequited interest in Lucy Edwards, ''a charming girl,'' as he later put it. Hawley then attempted to return to Onohquaga but was turned back by early winter and ended up spending the winter studying with Samuel Hopkins in nearby

∂≤∏ Wartime

She≈eld. By now he was bitter and disillusioned with the role he was put in as a missionary in wartime. Edwards was among those who had celebrated the dual role of the missionary as minister of the Gospel and agent for winning Indian alliances. ''I won't go among the Indians in the character of a Christian missionary, except I can go upon Christian principles,'' Hawley wrote bitterly in his private journal. ''But why do I talk of Christian zeal in this case 'tis a political a√air.'' ''Those who talk about the propagation of Christianity among the Indians, don't care much whether any of them go to heaven,'' he wrote, referring apparently to many of the provincial o≈cials and army o≈cers. Even Edwards, Hawley was convinced, was not exempt from allowing his political interests to interfere with his higher goal. ''Mr. Edwards . . . has blind notions about things and no wonder seeing he knows nothing but by hearsay and the half has never been told him. If he would endeavour to excite me to engage in my mission and use only the motives which are suggested in Christianity I should like it better. Mr. Edwards is a very good man but capable of being biased.''≤∫

Hawley's dose of realism in the army helped him recognize the essential defect in the Anglo-American missions to the Indians, as Edwards did not. The sheer numbers of Anglo settlers meant that, whatever the announced intentions, almost all the British interest in the Indians was with the ultimate aim of displacing them. Many of the less religious British and Americans acknowledged that explicitly. Others, such as Edwards, who wed the political to the religious, were in Hawley's view naïve if they thought that the Gospel was not undermined when it was used for military recruitment.

In summer 1757 Hawley was again frustrated in an attempt to return to Onohquaga, this time by a smallpox epidemic in the region. He again returned to Stockbridge and accompanied Edwards to Boston. Presumably he expressed some of his misgivings to Edwards, and the outcome of the visit was that the Commissioners for Indian A√airs assigned Hawley to inspect the old Indian churches at the isolated settlement at Mashpee, on Cape Cod. Hawley soon made Mashpee the base for what turned out to be a long and fruitful life's work, far from the wars and political upheavals that would disrupt Indian missions almost anywhere to the west, including Stockbridge.≤Ω

During winter 1756–57 Stockbridge remained distressingly vulnerable. In November, Edwards, Woodbridge, and other townspeople sent a petition to the Massachusetts General Court begging for protecting troops. Because the Stockbridge Indians were among the few natives who had fought as allies of the British the previous year, the people feared reprisals against the town. The

Wartime ∂≤π

next spring the still defenseless townspeople sent two more petitions, the latter written by Brigadier Dwight and signed not only by him and the two remaining sons of Ephraim Williams Sr., but also by Edwards. Common danger had brought a rare show of cooperation. Both Massachusetts and Connecticut ﬁnally sent some troops for the summer when most of the Indian men would again be gone.≥≠

While the military situation remained precarious, the Edwardses celebrated one bright victory in the larger spiritual warfare for the soul of North America. A revival—of late a rarity in their circles, except in Virginia—broke out at the College of New Jersey. Just a few months earlier, in November 1756, the college had moved from Newark to its new site at Princeton. There they had constructed an impressive new building, described as ''the most spacious on the continent.'' Burr and the trustees named it Belcher Hall in honor of the old governor, their greatest benefactor. Belcher saved generations of students from bad jokes by modestly suggesting that it instead be named Nassau Hall in memory of King William III, thus dedicating it to the Protestant politicalreligious cause. The Burrs settled into a tastefully elegant president's house on the property.≥∞

The remarkable revival that broke out among the students at Nassau Hall in February 1757 seemed a most wonderful inaugural of the school's history at Princeton. Both Aaron Burr and Esther took time to write excitedly to Edwards. One veteran of the Great Awakening of 1740–42, Esther reported, said ''he never saw anything more remarkable in the late revival than what he saw last night.'' ''Religious concern has been universal,'' added Aaron Burr, ''not one student excepted.'' Though only time would tell how many would be permanently changed, Burr believed that many showed the most promising signs. Immediately this auspicious new beginning for the relocated college revived hopes for the reformation North America desperately needed.≥≤

Edwards too had his hopes slightly raised. He reported to John Erskine that, amid the ''great darkness,'' was the ''truly joyful'' news of the Princeton revival and that of a few other scattered revivals.≥≥ Though he had no local revival to recount, he was at least heartened that ''we have had less drunkenness of late among the Indians than for many years.''≥∂ Esther continued to rejoice throughout the spring at the ongoing work among the Princeton students and hoped that as they returned to their homes in May, they would carry the revival fervor with them. As always, she also feared that Satan would counter the revival's progress.≥∑

In August, Aaron Burr (who was racing from one task to another) made a

∂≤∫ Wartime

quick trip to Stockbridge to see Edwards. His stay coincided with another military disaster, the worst yet for the New Englanders. The French under Montcalm, aided by an unprecedented number of Indians from as far away as the shores of Lake Michigan, besieged and captured the new AngloAmerican fort on Lake George, Fort William Henry. This time after the surrender the Indians, in quest of what they saw as the just fruits of victory, went on a much larger rampage than they had at Fort Oswego, killing nearly two hundred soldiers, mostly of the wounded, and taking hundreds more captive. When Burr returned home he told Esther ''they heard the ﬁring at the fort very plain,'' referring to the ﬁerce bombardment with heavy French canons during the siege, seventy miles away. The family, he said was ''under dreadful apprehensions of the enemy.'' Edwards was almost ready to give in. He added a postscript to a letter to Bellamy, written the day they ﬁrst heard the distant thunder of the relentless cannonade, ''I don't know but we must soon ﬂee to Bethlehem.''≥∏

A New Beginning?

The attacks that would decimate the family in the next year came from a di√erent direction and an older enemy. No sooner had Aaron Burr reached Princeton on September 1 than he received word that Governor Belcher had died the day before and that Burr was wanted to preach the funeral sermon in Elizabethtown. Though Belcher was seventy-ﬁve, his death was a great blow to the Burrs. ''This is such a loss that we can't expect to have made up in a governor,'' wrote Esther. When Aaron heard the news, he became too melancholy to think of much else. The next day, as he was writing the sermon, he was seized by ''a ﬁt of the intermitting fever on him and the whole night after was irrational.'' Still he managed to get to Elizabethtown to deliver the eulogy on September 4. Three weeks later Burr was dead. He was forty-one.≥π

Esther was devastated but also transformed. She had been deeply attached to her energetic husband. Esther's letters to Sally Prince had alluded to countless occasions when she and Burr enjoyed discussing common concerns and acquaintances. Now she was left suddenly lonely with two small children. Yet, when almost the worst imaginable had happened, she had also found spiritual resources that she had not realized she had. To her mother, she wrote in early October, not long after the funeral, that ''God has seemed sensibly near. . . . I think God has given me such a sense of the vanity of the world, and uncertainty of all sublunary enjoyments, as I never had before. The world

Wartime ∂≤Ω

vanishes out of my sight! Heavenly and eternal things appear much more real and important, than ever before.''

The next month she wrote to her father, ''such a near and dear a√ectionate father and guide,'' whom she longed to see. Her young son, Aaron, had contracted a fever and been near the grave. Yet even then she found that she could cry, ''O how good is God.'' God had given her the child and God could ''recall what he had lent.'' So she found herself willing ''to o√er up the child by faith,'' knowing of Christ's ''willingness to accept of such as were o√ered to him.'' Esther herself was transformed. A year earlier in Stockbridge she had been unable to ﬁnd resignation. Now she could say with Job, ''although thou slay me yet will I trust thee.''

One evening, a few days after ﬁnding strength for this submission, when she was ''talking of the glorious state my dear departed husband must be in,'' Esther experienced quintessentially Edwardsean ecstasy with which both her parents could resonate. ''My soul was carried out in such longing desires after this glorious state,'' she told her father, ''that I was forced to retire from the family to conceal my joy. When alone I was so transported and my soul carried out in such eager desires after perfection and the full enjoyment of God and to serve him uninterruptedly that I think my nature could not have borne much more—I think dear sir I had that night a foretaste of Heaven.''

Edwards, ever the wise counselor, wrote back immediately rejoicing in God's blessing and reminding Esther that true faith was not found in perpetual ecstasy, but in God's covenant faithfulness. ''How do the bowels of his tender love and compassion appear, while he is correcting you by so great a shake of his head! Indeed, he is a faithful God; he will remember his covenant forever; and never will fail them that trust in him. But don't be surprised, or think some strange thing has happened to you, if after this light, clouds of darkness should return.''≥∫

While Esther was ﬁnding spiritual comforts, the College of New Jersey, at its new location in Princeton, was reeling from the dual blows of the losses of Governor Belcher, its patron, and Aaron Burr, its president. In spring 1757, the new Nassau Hall, spiritually aﬂame with revival, had shone as the brightest light for the Protestant cause on the continent. How could it now recover? The solution was not hard to think of, and the college trustees lost no time in ﬁnding it. On September 29, ﬁve days after Burr's death, the clerk of the trustees, Richard Stockton (later a signer of the Declaration of Independence), wrote to Edwards of the board's choice of him to succeed his son-inlaw. They hoped he and his family could be there within six weeks.≥Ω

∂≥≠ Wartime

In a long and revealing letter of October 19, Edwards equivocated. Moving so precipitously, he began, without time to dispose of their property, would be a ﬁnancial disaster. They had only just begun to recover from the calamitous move from Northampton. But, having made his characteristic point that his large family would need better compensation, he moved to his two main objections. The ﬁrst was the matter of his physical health. He described his ''peculiar unhappy'' constitution in a way that suggests chronic poor digestion resulting in low spirits, ''childish weakness and contemptibleness of speech, presence, and demeanor; with a disagreeable dullness and sti√ness, much unﬁtting me for conversation, but more especially for the government of a college.''∂≠

His second objection, which he expounded at length, seemed the primary one. He had spent his entire career using every spare moment to write on innumerable subjects in what was now an immense collection of notebooks. He was nearing completion of a set of works in which he purported to consider ''all the . . . controverted points'' in the disputes between Arminianism and Calvinism. As soon as those were completed, he had in mind to write two major lifeworks and many smaller ones. The largest was to be ''a great work, which I call A History of the Work of Redemption, a body of divinity in an entire new method, being thrown into the form of an history, considering the a√air of Christian theology, as the whole of it, in each part, stands in reference to the great work of redemption by Jesus Christ.'' The second, on which he had also done much work, was ''The Harmony of the Old and New Testament, in three parts,'' which would be, part 1, a comprehensive compendium of all the prophecies of Scripture and their fulﬁllment, part 2, all the types of the Old Testament point toward their fulﬁllment in Christ, and part 3, an exposition, of ''the harmony of the Old and New Testament, as to doctrine and precept.''

''My heart is so much in these studies,'' Edwards continued, ''that I cannot ﬁnd it in my heart to be willing to put myself into an incapacity to pursue them any more.'' In part this was a negotiating point. Were he to be president, he would not do nearly the teaching that Burr had done. Burr had taught all the languages and also the entire instruction of the senior class. Edwards was willing only to serve as professor of divinity and to assist in some instruction in arts and sciences to the seniors. He would teach no languages, except perhaps Hebrew, which might help his biblical study.∂∞

Even gaining all these concessions, to which the trustees promptly acceded, Edwards followed his practice of putting such a move in the hands

Wartime ∂≥∞

of a council of local ministers. ''What the council will do, I can't tell,'' he wrote to Esther in November. ''Deacon Woodbridge is a cunning man, and an eloquent speaker,'' he warned, and he knew that Woodbridge would make a powerful case for him to stay and might persuade the Indians to do the same.∂≤

When the council, delayed by snow, ﬁnally met at Stockbridge on January 4, 1758, it heard both sides and quickly decided that Edwards should accept the Princeton o√er. His close friend Samuel Hopkins, who served on the council, wrote: ''When they published their judgment and advice to Mr. Edwards and his people, he appeared uncommonly moved and a√ected with it, and fell into tears on the occasion; which was very unusual for him, in the presence of others: and soon after said to the gentlemen, who had given their advice, that it was a matter of wonder to him, that they could so easily, as they appeared to do, get over the objections he had made against his removal, to be the head of a college; which appeared great and weighty to him.''∂≥

Why did Edwards weep? Perhaps it was the show of a√ection of his congregation, in such dramatic contrast to the council at Northampton. Perhaps it was at the sorry state in which he was leaving the Indian mission and school. That he should stay to serve the Indians, however, seems not one of his major concerns. On that issue, he believed the local prospects might be improved, since both the English and Indians had agreed to attempt to bring John Brainerd from New Jersey to be missionary to the Indians.∂∂ Perhaps he wept at the prospect of going back to a college setting, a position for which he was not sure he was suited. Or, more likely, he was overwhelmed by the sense of loss at maybe never getting to his projected great works. In his letter to the Princeton trustees he mentioned several times how deeply ''my heart is . . . in these studies.''

As soon as he composed himself after hearing the council's decision, he said he would cheerfully follow what he saw as God's will and his duty. Within weeks he would leave for Princeton, planning to move his family from the dangers of Stockbridge in May.∂∑

C H A P T E R ≤∏ kl Against an ''Almost Inconceivably

Pernicious'' Doctrine

dwards' life did not lack for drama. He played major roles in the awakenings, some of the most momentous events of his day. He long served as a pastor who agonizingly cared for immortal souls. He spent much time in his relationships with a large immediate family of siblings, wife, and children. He took leading parts in the a√airs of his extended family and local communities. He was enmeshed in partisan international politics and the violent clashes of nations and religions.

Yet his heart was most often in his work as a writer. If one can judge true a√ections by how one's time is spent, the center of Edwards' life was his devotion to God expressed with pen and ink. That devotion was not divorced from the many hours he also spent weekly in formal worship. Rather, his studying was another kind of worship. Much of it was directed toward the immediately practical goal of sermon preparation, closely tied with his passion for souls. Nor should we see his work on his beloved notebooks and treatises as a retreat from the world. He was just as engaged in combat as any New England colonel who might lead an assault on the French and their Indian allies. He had certainly done his share of preaching and teaching, but he believed his scholarship to be an even more important ministry. ''So far as I myself am able to judge of what talents I have,'' he wrote to the Princeton trustees, ''for beneﬁting my fellow creatures by word, I think I can write better than I can speak.''∞ So great was his passion for writing that, had his ministerial peers agreed to it, he would have been willing to forgo accepting the presidency of the most pivotal training center for his cause in North America. He did not let even the prospect of moving his family to safety be decisive in determining how best to serve God and his fellow creatures.

Edwards turned ﬁfty-four in October 1757, and as he grew older his

''Almost Inconceivably Pernicious'' ∂≥≥

calling to complete the intellectual tasks seemed increasingly urgent. He knew that his physical constitution was not strong, yet even more the sense of urgency reﬂected the crisis of the times. By the 1750s what we call ''the Enlightenment'' and what Edwards called sardonically ''this age of light and inquiry,'' was waxing toward its meridian.≤ Edwards was determined to demonstrate, as only a true philosopher of the age could, that what most of its proponents took to be the sun was only dimly reﬂected light.

Most alarming was how popular the deceptive doctrines had suddenly become in New England. Since his youth, Edwards had been well aware of advanced opinions in England, which had brought into the churches there, both Anglican and dissenter, an array of Arminian, Socinian (rationalist antiCalvinist and unitarian), and even Deist doctrines that threatened to destroy the Protestant kingdom from within. As early as the 1730s, he had campaigned to suppress even the mildest expressions of such views before they infected the countryside. Now, since the later 1740s, views that Robert Breck would not admit to in the 1730s and that Charles Chauncy would not broach during the Great Awakening were suddenly being widely and openly expressed.

Even in western Massachusetts Edwards had been encountering boldly open expressions of what he sometimes loosely lumped together as ''Arminian'' (i.e., anti-Calvinistic) views. During his ouster from Northampton, his outspoken cousin, Joseph Hawley III, proved to have been infected with liberal opinions. Though young Hawley had been a ward and protégé of Edwards, he had picked up the advanced ideas in eastern Massachusetts or else while serving at Louisbourg. True religion, he a≈rmed, echoing the commonplaces of advanced British thought, ''is the most reasonable of all things,'' consisting ''in that which the unprejudiced reason and sense of all mankind says is right.''≥ In Stockbridge in 1750 Ezra Stiles and Abigail Williams Sergeant had shared similar views. Stiles, following the advice of his father, feared his views were so liberal that if subjected to theological examination by the orthodox commissioners for the Indian mission, they might permanently ruin his reputation, especially in his native Connecticut.

Edwards, who had long kept his ear to the ground for any Arminian rumblings, was keenly aware of how rapidly the fashionable opinions were spreading not only among laity, but also among clergy. Boston turned a corner in 1747 when the well-to-do and relatively new West Church, already known for progressive views, ordained young Jonathan Mayhew (Harvard 1744) as its pastor. Mayhew's rationalist and moralist, or ''Arminian,'' leanings were already well known and his ordination took place conspicuously without the

∂≥∂ ''Almost Inconceivably Pernicious''

presence of the town's orthodox New Light clergy, such as Thomas Prince, Benjamin Colman, Joseph Sewall, and Thomas Foxcroft. Two years later, Lemuel Briant (Harvard 1739), a friend of Mayhew, preached a guest sermon in Mayhew's church, published under the provocative title, The Absurdity and Blasphemy of Depretiating Moral Virtue (Boston, 1749), attacking the Calvinist teaching of salvation by grace alone. A pamphlet barrage ensued, followed by the ecclesiastical equivalent of hand-to-hand combat in Briant's congregation in Braintree, just south of Boston. In 1753 a council of local pastors condemned Briant for a number of o√enses, including his celebrated sermon. One of their speciﬁcations was that he had recommended to a parishioner ''Mr. John Taylor's book (which we esteem very erroneous),'' referring to a well-known English dissenting theologian's attack on Calvinism in The Scripture-Doctrine of Original Sin, Proposed to Free and Candid Examination (1740). The majority of Briant's congregation nonetheless supported him and refused his dismissal. Soon after he was forced to resign owing to ill health and he died in 1754. John Adams, who had been a teenager in Braintree during the controversy, recalled in 1815 that Briant was one of the ﬁrst New Englanders to promote unitarianism. More precisely, Briant was an early proponent of the rational Christianity that during Adams' lifetime virtually displaced Calvinism in and around Boston. In 1751 Edwards' friend Thomas Foxcroft described Briant's views as not strictly Arminian but more ''Socinian,'' referring to a more thoroughly rationalist movement, which included denial of traditional notions of the Trinity and of most distinctive Calvinist doctrines. Foxcroft was particularly alarmed at Briant's claim that ''Christ's Sermon on the Mount contains his whole doctrine'' and his apparent denial of Christ's substitutionary atonement.∂

More important than the labels was the overarching principle that guided the proponents of the advanced views: that universal truths of reason and morality should be the standards by which to interpret Scripture. Mayhew himself made this point in a series of sermons published in 1749. Reason was a gift of God, and it would be wrong not to use it. The ''doctrine of a total ignorance, and incapacity to judge of moral and religious truth, brought upon mankind by the apostacy of our ﬁrst parents, is without foundation.'' Human freedom to choose the good followed from the gift of reason. ''Exercise your reason, and the liberty you enjoy, in learning the truth and your deity from it,'' Mayhew proclaimed in another set of sermons. While still using much of the old language of grace in ambiguous ways, Mayhew and the many other New

''Almost Inconceivably Pernicious'' ∂≥∑

England Christian rationalists of the 1750s had set up a standard that, if allowed to stand, would surely undermine not only Calvinism but Nicene trinitarian orthodoxy.∑

By 1757 Edwards was so distressed by what was going on in Boston that he took the extraordinary expedient of writing to Edward Wigglesworth, Hollis Professor of Divinity at Harvard, asking him to intervene. Wigglesworth was an Old Light to whom Edwards was not close, but he knew Wigglesworth to be an orthodox Calvinist. Edwards' alarm was over one of Jonathan Mayhew's published sermons that contained a marginal note where, in Edwards' words, ''he ridicules the doctrine of the Trinity.'' Edwards urged Wigglesworth to answer Mayhew. Wigglesworth politely declined, pleading that other Boston pastors had already lectured in opposition to Mayhew and that he himself had been defending the more basic doctrine of biblical inspiration.∏

The same day he wrote to Wigglesworth, Edwards penned a letter to his friend and chief Boston publicist, the Reverend Thomas Foxcroft, explaining his concern for doctrinal laxity, especially at a time when the war was going badly. ''I cannot in the least doubt,'' he declared, ''but that the guilt of the land (which already is great, and awfully testiﬁed against by heaven at this day) will be greatly increased by the neglect, if none should now appear to attempt a full vindication of the doctrine of Christ's divinity.''π

Crucial to the outlook of the fashionable new theologians and essential to their appeal in New England was that they claimed to be more true to Scripture than were their Calvinist opponents. They were, they believed, applying new superior standards of reason to clarifying the old texts. As in much of advanced eighteenth-century thought, they believed that a thorough application of reason, based on unimpeachable foundations of common sense, would put to rest the interpretive controversies that had torn apart the Christian world.

In England various anti-Calvinist theologians had been judging biblical texts according to the current standards of reason. John Taylor's ScriptureDoctrine of Original Sin (1740) and A Key to the Apostolic Writings (1745) were especially inﬂuential in popularizing such rationalist ideas among New Englanders. An ex-Calvinist himself, Taylor clariﬁed how one might turn the old technique of ''comparing Scripture with Scripture'' to subvert Calvinist biblicism. When one assembled biblical statements on a disputed doctrine, one could use those that seemed most consistent with universal principles of reason and morality as lenses through which to interpret more mysterious

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