problems which have
puzzled generations of critics. Edwards sees the absurdity of hoping
that a genuine faith can ever be based on such balancing of historical
probabilities. The cobbler was to be awed by the learned man; but how
could he implicitly trust a learned man when his soul was at stake, and
when learned men differed? To convince the ignorant or the Houssatunnuck
Indian, God's voice must speak through a less devious channel. The
transcendent glory of Divine things proves their Divinity intuitively;
the mind does not indeed discard argument, but it does not want any
'long chain of argument; the argument is but one and the evidence
direct; the mind ascends to the truth of the Gospel but by one step, and
that is its Divine glory.' The moral theory of the contemporary
rationalists was correlative to their religious theory. To be religious
was to believe that certain facts had once happened; to be moral was to
believe that under certain circumstances you would at some future time
go to hell. Virtue of that kind was not to Edwards' taste, though few
men have been less sparing in using the appeal to damnation. But threats
of hell-fire were only meant to startle the sinner from his repose. His
morality could be framed from no baser material than love to the Divine
perfections. 'What thanks are due to you for not loving your own misery,
and for being willing to take some pains to escape burning in hell to
all eternity? There is ne'er a devil in hell but would gladly do the
same' (viii. 145).

The strength, however, and the weakness of Edwards as a moralist are
best illustrated from the two treatises on the Religious Affections and
on Original Sin. The first, which was the fruit of his experiences at
Northampton, may be described as a system of religious diagnostics. By
what symptoms are you to distinguish--that was the problem which forced
itself upon him--the spiritual state produced by the Divine action from
that which is but a hollow mockery? After his mode of judging in
concrete cases, as already indicated, we are rather surprised by the
calm and sensible tone of his argument. The deep sense of the vast
importance of the events to which he was a witness makes him the more
scrupulous in testing their real character. He resists the temptation to
dwell upon those noisy and questionable manifestations in which the
vulgar thirst for the wonderful found the most appropriate testimony to
the work. Roman Catholic archbishop