The chariot wheels suggested cycles but also progress. The building was more
The Unfinished Masterworks ∂∫∑
work, there were three great periods, with Christ at the center. First was the creation to the birth of Christ. The second was Christ's life and death. The third extended from Christ's death to the end and consummation of all things. Each of these periods would be ''preparation for the next.'' He also planned to divide Christian history into seven periods. These were: ''1. The work begun at pentecost. 2. Destruction of Jerusalem. 3. Destruction of heathenish empire in Constantine's time. 4. The Reformation. 5. The fall of the Antichrist. 6. The overthrow of Judaism, Mahometanism, and heathenism through the world. 7. The consummation at the end of the world.'' In the final era, the millennium, all people ''shall be brought into the church of Christ and it looks as if they would generally be true Christians. There will be a new world. The multitude of people will be such then that all the number [of] the preceding world of inhabitants are nothing to it.''
Although this scenario was optimistic in the long run, Edwards now had projected two major eras that yet had to come prior to the millennium, indicating that he expected some hard times in the future. '' 'Tis reasonable to suppose,'' he wrote, ''that just before the end of the world the wickedness of the world should be at its greatest height.'' He also noted a number of biblical images he should use in explaining how God acted in history: ''1. the revolutions of the wheels of a chariot, 2. the erecting a great building, 3. the growing of a tree, 4. the flowing of a great river in its innumerable branches, 5. carrying on a war.'' These images depicted di√erent dimensions of history. The chariot wheels suggested cycles but also progress. The building was more progressive, one era built on the next. The tree was organic. The great river suggested an immense pattern that could be seen as connected only from a great height. The warfare indicated the central theme of conflict. Taken together, the picture is of history as organically related progressive cycles, in which God's method of e√ecting redemptive progress is, as at the cross, through conflict and su√ering.≤∑
A major feature of his history would have been to detail the primary conflict of the present era, that with the Antichrist of Rome. One of his ''History of Redemption'' notebooks included information mainly on the history of the papacy—a topic he found endlessly engrossing. His notebook on setbacks to papal power, or the ''drying up of the rivers of Babylon,'' might have supplemented such accounts.
In the seven eras into which Edwards divided history since the coming of Christ, the next to last (the one following the defeat of Antichrist) was ''the overthrow of Judaism, Mahometanism, and heathenism through the world.''
∂∫∏ The Unfinished Masterworks
Edwards had an intense interest in other religions, gathered all the information he could about them, and made numerous entries on them in his various notebooks. His time in Stockbridge, when he was daily confronted with Indian culture, only increased his interest in the topic. Much of his concern was to answer the Deist challenge to the particularity of Christianity. Was there not some truth in all religions drawn from the universal light of nature? For his answer Edwards drew on a tradition of prisca theological, that whatever elements of truth were found in other religions were remnants of earlier revelations to the ancestors of all people, as indicated in Genesis. Although reason could provide some limited knowledge of the truth, true religion could only be based on the revelation that pointed to Christ. Moreover, while other religions, such as those of the ancient Greeks or the Chinese, might produce some relatively good people, true virtue arose only from true religion. Most fundamentally, he viewed other religions, such as Islam, as false and pernicious.≤∏
Each era of history ended with the triumph of Christ over Satan, so Edwards would have included the hopeful dimensions of the present era as well. Presumably he still would have emphasized the theme of periodic awakenings, so prominent in the Northampton sermons. In the notes though, drafted when he had turned his ministry so largely to writing, it is his hopes for intellectual triumph that are most striking. ''The true philosophy of Isaac Newton,'' he wrote, is ''one thing to make way for the universal setting up of Christ's kingdom.'' He also noted ''the settlement of new-england as one great thing done to prepare the way for the introducing of the Gospel light into the American world—being a colony chiefly enlightened etc. where colleges are erected, etc.'' He added: ''The erecting New Jersey college''—a revealing comment that suggests his estimate of the practical relationship between his grand historical vision and his subsequent call to Princeton. Learning, specifically the true philosophy of Isaac Newton as refracted through the theology of early New England, was not only the source of true ''enlightenment,'' it was a key to the kingdom.
Yet the particulars of what Edwards was projecting were not as important as the firmness with which he was challenging another of the most formidable trends of the age. Most broadly put, leading eighteenth-century thinkers were severing history from divinity. Throughout the ages peoples of most cultures had seen divine agency as the main force in shaping historical events. In Christendom, as in the biblical world, history had always been a source of
The Unfinished Masterworks ∂∫π
revelation and a locus of divine action. Even Protestants, who demystified the world in some ways, understood history as first of all a providential order in which God was the primary actor.
By Edwards' time Western thinkers were increasingly looking on history as driven by self-actuating powers. The study of history might yield some moral principles, many leading thinkers assumed, and these principles in turn might be ascribed to a distant ''Creator'' or to ''Providence.'' Such terms allowed for equivocation on the divine role or at least its separation from specific biblical precedents. A few brave skeptics even dared to drop the divine from the equation altogether. It was not simply coincidence, therefore, that in the very decades Edwards was determining that history must provide the framework for his theology, both Voltaire and Hume turned to historical studies. Even though Edwards never saw Siècle de Louis XIV (1751) or the History of England (1754–1762), he shared with the two greatest skeptics of his age the conviction that many of the questions of modernity would be settled on the battlefields of historical understanding.≤π
At the same time, the great challenge of the era to traditional Christian faith was the assertion that historical claims were insu≈cient to establish universal religious truths. That was one of the grand arguments of the Deists. The accidental truths of history, they said, could yield only partial knowledge from local perspectives. Only reason could yield universal truths on which the whole race could rely.
When Edwards answered Matthew Tindal's Christianity as Old as Creation (1730) by pointing out that there were many truths in electricity, magnetism, and the like that were well attested and accepted as ''reasonable'' even though their first principles were not understood, he was defending history, when it is a well-attested experience, as a source of truth. Deists were operating with too narrow a definition of reason if they excluded historical knowledge from rational sources of religious truth. As he put the matter more bluntly to his Northampton congregation, ''To object against a book's being divine merely because it is historical is a silly objection.''≤∫
It would be another generation until such objections were canonized in Western thought in Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's famous aphorism, ''Accidental truths of history can never become the proof of necessary truths of reason,'' but that fateful handwriting was already on the wall.≤Ω Edwards recognized that if history were allowed to stand as an autonomous authority, then Christian revelation would be dissolved into cultural relativism. Deism
∂∫∫ The Unfinished Masterworks
would be the only reasonable option. If one allowed the undemonstrated premise that history was essentially accidental, then there would be no way to get from the historical claims of Scripture, across what became known as ''Lessing's ditch,'' to essential theological truths. The new history started out with human experience, on the wrong side of the ditch. For Edwards the only place to start in trying to understand history was—as for everything else—
with the triune God. History, like nature, was the language of God's redemptive love.
Edwards was so enamored with seeing the eternal significance of human history that his ''entire new method'' not only ran counter to the Deist trends of the age but also departed from the traditional deductive-logical method that had long shaped Christian theology itself. Although Edwards yielded to no one in utilizing rational deductive arguments, he was determined that a true view of universal reason must include historical knowledge as well as deductive. Hence his grand comprehensive theology would not imitate the forms used by Thomas Aquinas or even the Reformed systematizers such as Francis Turretin or Peter van Mastricht, but rather it would imitate Scripture itself, by being ''thrown into the form of a history.''≥≠ History, instead of being an encumbrance to the logic of theology, was of the essence for understanding God's ways.
Edwards was also addressing the ancient theological conundrum: How could God be perfect and complete in himself and yet be involved in history? Would not creation and involvement with its imperfections necessarily be a diminishment of God's perfections? Drawing on his Augustinian heritage, much of Edwards' deepest theological insight involved explaining how history was an extension of the intertrinitarian love. For Edwards, history was an expression of the ''external existence'' of divine glory. Like language, history was of God, but not identical to God. The triune God had an essential disposition to communicate his love to other persons, so he created creatures whose purpose was to return his love yet who had the power to resist.≥∞ That rebellious resistance led to even higher expression of God's love as God the Son took on the guilt of sin and God's wrath and died for absolutely undeserving human rebels.≥≤ In Edwards' favorite image, Christ is the bridegroom who is bringing his bride, the church, into a creature's fullest possible experience of trinitarian love.
History, according to Edwards, was in essence the communication of God's redemptive love in Christ. The history of redemption was the very purpose of creation.≥≥ Nothing in human history had significance on its own,
The Unfinished Masterworks ∂∫Ω
any more than created nature had significance on its own. Christ's saving love was the center of all history and defined its meaning. Human events took on significance only as they related to God's redemptive action in bringing increasing numbers of humans into the light of that love or as they illustrated human blindness in joining Satan's warfare against all that was good.
C H A P T E R ≥≠ kl The Transitory and the Enduring
dwards spent his whole life preparing to die. As he often reminded his congregations, those who were sitting comfortably one Sabbath might be in the grave by the next. For those who spurned God's Spirit, life was like walking on a rotten canvas, and at any moment they might suddenly find themselves plunged simply by the weight of their sins into everlasting hell. By contrast, if one had experienced God's transforming work, then death would be a release in which one was borne upward to see Christ's glory. Holding to that hope, Edwards worked constantly to cultivate gratitude, praise, worship, and dependence on his Savior. Whatever his failings, he attempted every day to see Christ's love in all things, to walk according to God's precepts, and to give up attachments to worldly pleasures in anticipation of that closer spiritual union that death would bring.
In an era when life was precarious and when on every return home one had to hope one would not be greeted by a new grave, the Edwards family had been remarkably free from such sorrows. At the beginning of 1758, when Edwards accepted the position at Princeton, both his parents were still living. His father, though failing, was in his eighty-ninth year. His mother was in fine health and would live until 1771, dying at age ninety-eight. Jonathan's own health was seldom robust, but it may have been better than usual. His memorialist in the New York Mercury remarked that ''in middle life he appeared emaciated (I had almost said mortified) by intense study and hard labour,'' implying perhaps that he had appeared less so in his later years.∞ At age fiftyfour, still hoping to complete his massive writing projects, Edwards could easily imagine the possibility of living into the 1770s or 1780s, even if he was always prepared for less.
In January 1758, soon after the council in Stockbridge confirmed that he
The Transitory and the Enduring ∂Ω∞
should accept the call to Nassau Hall, Edwards set out for Princeton. He left Sarah and his children in Stockbridge, as seventeen-year-old Susannah later reported, ''as a√ectionately, as if he should not come again.'' When he was outside the house, he turned and declared, ''I commit you to God.''≤ He arrived in Princeton amid some fanfare. Not long afterward, he received the news that his father had died, on January 27. A great force in his life was finally gone, though the power of the personality had faded some years earlier.
In Princeton, Jonathan immediately assumed his duties. He preached several Sundays in the college chapel. The trustees met on February 16 and o≈cially installed him as president. Since Nassau Hall had three tutors under Edwards, his immediate tasks were light. The one thing he did was to set some questions in divinity for the senior class. When he met with them, according to Samuel Hopkins, ''they found so much entertainment and profit by it, especially by the light and instruction Mr. Edwards communicated . . . that they spoke of it with the greatest satisfaction and wonder.''≥
Just one year earlier Nassau Hall had been inaugurated by the remarkable awakening that had lasted until the boys went home in the spring. The death of President Burr just before the fall commencement of the school year must have been a great sobering event for the returning boys, and likely many of them were still in a reverential mood as they welcomed their renowned new president. Ezra Stiles later remarked of Edwards' presidency, ''The volatility of 100 youth would have disturbed his calm quiet and made him unhappy.''∂
Stiles, who presided over Yale College during the Revolutionary era, was probably right. But in the brief time Edwards was at Princeton, he likely saw little of such volatility. Edwards himself, by Hopkins' account, ''seemed to enjoy an uncommon degree of the presence of God.'' He remarked to his daughters that, although he had experienced great apprehensions about taking on the position, he now saw it as a calling he could cheerfully pursue.∑
Edwards came alone to Princeton but was comfortably situated in the handsome president's home next to the college hall. Sarah was still in Stockbridge, preparing to move the household in the spring, but two daughters were already in Princeton to meet their father and to care for him. Esther was there with her two children, and Lucy had been there since at least the previous spring. Esther presumably still enjoyed some of the glow of her heightened spirituality in the otherwise agonizing months after Aaron Burr's death. Her deepened piety was a source of the greatest satisfaction to her father, and their mutual joy and comfort in their shared devotion may have increased the sense of the presence of God for each.
[To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.]
Nassau Hall and the president's house, where the Burrs and Edwards lived and where Aaron Burr and Edwards died
The Transitory and the Enduring ∂Ω≥
Jonathan also got to spend some time with his Burr grandchildren. Sally, aged four, could recite prayers and some of Isaac Watts' verses. Aaron Jr. was just turning two. In her final entry of her surviving diary or letters to Sarah Prince, dated September 2, 1757, when Aaron Jr. was just nineteen months, Esther Burr described the future vice president and duelist who killed Alexander Hamilton in terms that sound almost prophetic. ''Aaron is a little dirty noisy boy,'' she wrote, ''very di√erent from Sally almost in every respect. He begins to talk a little, is very sly and mischevious. He has more spri[ghtliness] than Sally and most say he is handsomer, but not so good tempered. He is very resolute and requires a good governor to bring him to terms.''∏ One might picture the encounters between the strict grandfather and the rambunctious grandson. Edwards may have felt confirmed in his views on original sin.
Submission
Edwards was concerned for his family's health in Princeton. Smallpox was rampant in the area, and Edwards himself had been closely exposed to it on his trip. Always the scientist, Edwards was a champion of inoculation, one of the few eighteenth-century medical practices proven beneficial. Although inoculation with a mild case of the disease involved some risk, in times of epidemic the procedure substantially improved chances of survival. In 1752 Edwards had urged Aaron Burr, when Burr was contemplating a trip to England and Scotland, ''If you can find a skillful, prudent physician, under whose care you can put yourself, you would take the smallpox by inoculation before you go, after properly preparing your body for it, by physic and diet.''π
Burr had not gone abroad nor had he been inoculated. In spring 1757 Esther had received a deep scare when Lucy contracted smallpox and she feared, incorrectly, that Aaron Sr. might have too.∫ Still, Lucy had survived, and none of the family had taken the precaution of inoculation until Jonathan, after much consultation and advice, decided on it. William Shippen, an excellent Philadelphia doctor and a close friend of Nassau Hall, agreed to inoculate the whole family on February 23 and to oversee their recoveries.Ω
At first everything went fine. Some days after the inoculation Edwards was ''quite easy and cheerful'' about his decision to undergo the inconvenience. Then, while Esther and the children were recovering normally, Edwards contracted smallpox on the roof of his mouth and throat. It soon became impossible for him to swallow the liquids that were considered necessary to
∂Ω∂ The Transitory and the Enduring
prevent a secondary fever. After weeks of fever and starvation ravishing his ''feeble frame'' he died peacefully on the afternoon of March 22.
When he realized that he would not survive, he called his daughter Lucy, who was attending him, and said (in words she almost immediately wrote down): ''Dear Lucy, it seems to me to be the will of God that I must shortly leave you; therefore give my kindest love to my dear wife, and tell her, that the uncommon union, which has so long subsisted between us, has been of such a nature, as I trust is spiritual, and therefore will continue forever: and I hope she will be supported under so great a trial, and submit cheerfully to the will of God. And as to my children, you are now like to be left fatherless, which I hope will be an inducement to you all to seek a Father, who will never fail you. And as to my funeral, I would have it be like Mr. Burr's; and any additional sum of money that might be expected to be laid out that way, I would have it disposed of to charitable uses.''∞≠
Edwards always chose his words carefully, and ''uncommon union'' was an expression of the deepest a√ection, coming from someone for whom the highest relations in the universe were unions of a√ections among persons. Most important for Jonathan, the union was spiritual and hence eternal. As to the funeral, Samuel Hopkins explained that Burr and Edwards had opposed the custom of ''modish funerals'' for the famous, ''attended with that pomp and cost, by procuring and giving away a great number of costly mourningscarfs, etc. and the consumption of a great quantity of spirituous liquors.'' Edwards asked that equivalent sums be instead donated from his estate for care of the poor.∞∞
Dr. William Shippen immediately wrote to Sarah assuring her of the peacefulness of his passing. ''And never did any mortal man,'' the doctor consoled, ''more fully and clearly evidence the sincerity of all his professions, by one continued, universal, calm, cheerful resignation, and patient submission to the divine will, through every stage of his disease, than he; not so much as one discontented expression, nor the least appearance of murmuring through the whole. And never did any person expire with more perfect freedom from pain;—not so much as one distorted hair—but in the most proper sense of the words, he really fell asleep. Death had certainly lost its sting, as to him.''∞≤
Although this account was written by a devotee to a bereaved widow in an era when it was conventional to give embellished accounts of how the saintly had ''died well,'' it is also consistent with everything else we know about Edwards.∞≥ Edwards, despite some evident shortcomings, was a saint accord-
The Transitory and the Enduring ∂Ω∑
ing to the highest Reformed spiritual standards to which he aspired. Opponents, of course, viewed him as sanctimonious. Yet all would admit that few people have been so thoroughly disciplined. Far fewer have left so much written evidence that is so thoroughly consistent with a desire to know and to submit to the will of God.∞∂
Sarah was ill at the time she received the news in Stockbridge and was able to write only a few lines in comfort to Esther:
O My Very Dear Child,
What shall I say? A holy and good God has covered us with a dark cloud. Oh that we may kiss the rod [of reproof], and lay our hands on our mouths! The Lord has done it. He has made me adore his goodness, that we had him so long. But my God lives; and he has my heart. Oh what a legacy my husband, and your father, has left us! We are all given to God: and there I am, and love to be.
Sarah Edwards.∞∑
Esther never saw this letter. Less than two weeks after her father's death she was seized with a fever that soon turned severe, produced a violent headache, and then delirium. She died a few days later, on April 7. Apparently the fever was not from the smallpox. Her sister Sally believed it was much like the sudden fever from which Jerusha had died.∞∏
Despite knowing that such chastisements were to teach them to depend more on God, family and friends were su√ering grievously. The oldest daughter, Sally (Sarah Edwards Parsons), wrote from Stockbridge to her sister Mary Dwight in Northampton, ''Sister I hope you are in a much better [way] under these trials than I am.'' She agonized for Lucy in Princeton and especially for the two orphaned children. Still she hoped that ''God's dealings might be sanctified'' and that ''God grant these corrections may be in covenant love and faithfulness.''∞π
What could be the meaning of such chastisements? Back in Northampton, Mary's husband, Timothy Dwight Jr., had been already reflecting on that before learning of the family's second loss. His perspective, shaped by the same conventions as Solomon Stoddard had propounded fifty or seventy-five years earlier, looked most at the public implications. The College of New Jersey had lost as presidents three of the most distinguished leaders on the continent, Jonathan Dickinson, Aaron Burr, and now Jonathan Edwards. The prospects in the war with France still looked bleak. ''God seems to have a controversy with this land in general with the College of New Jersey and with us of the bereaved family in particular,'' wrote young Dwight. '' 'Tis God's
∂Ω∏ The Transitory and the Enduring
strange works as to us, his calling so many faithful servants from his service here, the pillars of our sinking land seems to portend some strange grievous and heavy judgments to be brought upon us which are only to be prevented by repentance and turning to God which I pray God we may all do and the tokens of his displeasure be averted.''∞∫
The family members were supposed to fit their personal agonies into the conventions of greater submission to God but, as Esther's sisters knew, that was far easier said than done. One close friend of the family, Sarah Prince of Boston, best expressed the struggle involved. Upon learning that Esther Burr, her most deeply beloved friend, was suddenly taken, she wrote a private lament. It is one of the most poignant reflections in all of colonial literature on the anguish that many must have experienced in trying to place the deepest earthly loves in the expected spiritual context.
Sarah Prince began with a properly pious quotation: ''God will have no rival in the heart which he sanctifies for himself.'' Yet for her, she soon made clear, Esther's love was a rival. ''My whole dependence for comfort in this world gone: she was as dear to me as the apple of my eye—she knew and felt all my griefs.'' This was theological language, usually reserved for Christ. Celebrating Esther's friendship, she went on, ''How faithful? How sincere? How open hearted? How Tender how careful how disinterested—And she was mine.'' Her friend had exemplary virtues. ''The mortified humble selfdenied lively Christian—generous a√able courteous and kind to all—But—
she is gone! Fled this world forever. Tired, she longed for rest—dead to this world, she prayed and panted and agonized for a better and with her went almost the all in which I had summed up my earthly good.''
Where was the spiritual comfort? The emptiness reached to the bottom of Sarah's soul. ''My earthly joy is gone! Not only so but my God hides his face! Can't see love in this dispensation! All seems anger yea wrath to me. . . . God points his arrows at me. . . . My judgement is passed over from my God and that he has set me as a mark for his arrows!''
Despite her agonizing doubts, she worked her way to the proper evangelical conclusion. She would be glad to die herself, but even that was not an option since she was not sure of her spiritual state. ''O! were I ready,'' she lamented, ''I would gladly welcome the kind summons to follow my dear beloved into the valley of death. Had I the evidence I want of a title to glory, joyfully wou'd quit earth and all that earthly minds admire.'' She closed with a prayer of desolate resignation. ''I want to lay low at the foot of God and resign to him. I choose to live at loose from the world, and live only on him and have
The Transitory and the Enduring ∂Ωπ
done with idols and get prepared. . . . Acquaintance with him, the all in all. Lord grant these mercies for thy Son's sake. amen.''∞Ω
Had Esther, her sisters, her mother, even Jonathan himself, been able to see Sarah Prince's elegy they would have readily understood and sympathized. They had all been through the same. All had experienced the absence of God in the face of deep sorrow. Some had found wonderful release, even ecstasy, as Esther had after Aaron's death, but even that, as Jonathan warned her, would be followed by ''clouds of darkness.''≤≠ All who viewed the world through this lens had often confessed, as Sarah Prince did, that their earthly loves were more powerful than their love to God. Even as they resolved to put away every idol, to subordinate every good love to perfect love, they would find themselves loving the lesser more than the greater.
In the Edwardses' world, the meaning of life was found in intense loves, including earthly loves. Yet as overwhelming as earthly a√ections might be, they were supposed to have their true value only when subordinated to heavenly and eternal loves. In that proper relationship even the most humble lives and loves radiated with eternal significance. In such eternal perspective death lost its power to take meaning from life. In the face of a devastating loss, however, temporal loves often overwhelmed that perspective. Submission was the only proper response, the great lesson being taught, and ultimately the path to immense comfort. Yet for almost everyone in the Edwards circle, such submission involved heart-wrenching struggles.
Sarah Edwards is remembered as an exemplar of how the saints were to cope with their calamities and was a model her daughters and friends found di≈cult to emulate. For Sarah the expected attitudes had not come easily either. Her great spiritual ecstasy of the 1740s had grown precisely out of a terrible internal struggle as to whether she was ready to accept God's will. Would she submit to God, she asked herself, even if it would mean losing her children, Jonathan, or even her own life? According to Samuel Hopkins, who long had admired Sarah, ''She had long told her intimate friends, that she had, after long struggles and exercises, obtained, by God's grace, an habitual willingness to die herself, or part with any of her most near relatives.'' Though she grieved deeply at her terrible double loss, still, says Hopkins, ''she was quiet and resigned, and had those invisible supports, which enabled her to trust in God with quietness, hope, and humble joy.''≤∞
We cannot know how much emotional turmoil may have lain beneath Sarah's discipline and exterior calm in accepting such devastation, but it soon took its toll. She also faced immense responsibilities. She determined that she
∂Ω∫ The Transitory and the Enduring
should take care of her two orphaned grandchildren herself. In September she traveled to Princeton and then to Philadelphia to pick up the children who had been staying there. Soon after arriving, she was seized with dysentery. She died October 2, 1758, aged forty-eight. She was buried next to Jonathan in Princeton.≤≤ The family had lost another tower of strength, their fourth sudden loss in a year.≤≥
The Edwards Legacy
It is tempting to speculate what would have happened had Edwards lived as long as his contemporary Benjamin Franklin, through the Revolutionary era. How would he have viewed the Revolution? How would he have coped with such a hotbed of rebellion as Princeton during those heady years, adverse as he always had been to insubordination to authority? As it happened, one of his successors as president of Nassau Hall, the Scotsman John Witherspoon, was the only clergyman to sign the Declaration of Independence. Edwards surely would not have played that role, but he probably would have found a religious rationale, as almost all his disciples did, for supporting the Revolutionary cause. Still he would not have been happy to see spiritual concerns submerged amid the political ardor. In the same vein, we might wonder whether James Madison, just one of many statesmen trained by Witherspoon at Princeton, would have been any di√erent with Edwardsean training. Would Edwards have spoken out against slavery as Samuel Hopkins and Jonathan Edwards Jr. did? Would Aaron Burr Jr., had he been reared in his grandparents' household, persevered in his plans to go into the ministry? Would the Edwardsean spiritual-theological movement, with its mentor firmly entrenched near the center of the continental culture, have flourished as a national movement in the Revolutionary era? Would it have changed the new nation or perhaps even divided the Revolutionaries?
As it turned out, Edwards' death, especially since it was followed so soon by the onset of the American Revolution, diminished his immediate influence. He did, of course, have a loyal following. Hopkins and Bellamy eventually saw to the publication of Two Dissertations and a few of his other writings. John Erskine oversaw the publication of a number of his works in Scotland, where Edwards' reputation remained strong. In America, however, Edwards' impact waned until after the Revolutionary era. President Ezra Stiles of Yale predicted in 1787 that Edwards' works ''in another generation will pass into as transient notice perhaps scarce above oblivion, and when
The Transitory and the Enduring ∂ΩΩ
posterity occasionally comes across them in the rubbish of libraries, the rare characters who may read and be pleased with them will be looked upon as singular and whimsical.''≤∂
Stiles, whose own work is dusty on library shelves, underestimated the resiliency and popular support of strict Calvinism. Even in the era of Revolutionary politics, Edwards had a following, especially in Connecticut, and a good reputation among heirs to the New Lights elsewhere. John Adams in his retirement correspondence with Thomas Je√erson claimed that Aaron Burr Jr. ''from the single circumstance of his descent'' was always ensured of one hundred thousand votes.≤∑ Though Adams likely exaggerated in order to help explain his own defeat in 1800, he correctly recognized that Edwardseans were a cultural force.
After the French Revolution, when many New Englanders were seeking to recover a distinctive heritage, Edwards' reputation began to soar in some circles. His grandson Timothy Dwight (1752–1817) became president of Yale in 1795 and from there helped spark a long era of zeal for revival and reform that New Englanders eventually called ''the Second Great Awakening.'' Timothy Dwight's protégés, such as Lyman Beecher (1775–1863), the progenitor of the most influential evangelical family of the era, helped expand the Edwardsean heritage from theology and revival into a program for national transformation. Connecticut Yankees, their o√spring, and their allies took the lead in settling much of New York State and the upper Midwest. In this new era, Edwards' reputation was a force to be reckoned with. Many of his admirers—the famed revivalist Charles Finney (1792–1875) is the best-known example—modified significant details of his thought. Yet for about half a century from 1800 to 1850, Edwards was the polestar of the most formidable and influential American theology.≤∏
Through the Civil War era, Edwards' spiritual o√spring infused some significant aspects of American culture with Reformed and evangelical concerns. Much of antebellum collegiate education was shaped by New Englanders with an Edwardsean heritage. ''Disinterested benevolence,'' popularized by Samuel Hopkins as the practical meaning of Edwards' ''benevolence to being in general,'' became a slogan for many evangelists and social reformers. Not only did The Life of David Brainerd inspire countless missionaries to lives of self-denial, a similar Edwardsean ideal of sacrificial service was institutionalized in the path-breaking women's school Mount Holyoke Seminary, founded by Mary Lyon in 1837. Mount Holyoke is best remembered for providing one of the first opportunities for American women to achieve