d the
orthodox Pharisee: and thus, by suffering their speculative opinions of
the next world to make them uncharitable and cruel in this, they are
really the worse for them, even admitting them to be true.

SAMUEL HOPKINS.

Three quarters of a century ago, the name of Samuel Hopkins was as
familiar as a household word throughout New England. It was a spell
wherewith to raise at once a storm of theological controversy. The
venerable minister who bore it had his thousands of ardent young
disciples, as well as defenders and followers of mature age and
acknowledged talent; a hundred pulpits propagated the dogmas which he had
engrafted on the stock of Calvinism. Nor did he lack numerous and
powerful antagonists. The sledge ecclesiastic, with more or less effect,
was unceasingly plied upon the strong-linked chain of argument which he
slowly and painfully elaborated in the seclusion of his parish. The
press groaned under large volumes of theological, metaphysical, and
psychological disquisition, the very thought of which is now "a weariness
to the flesh;" in rapid succession pamphlet encountered pamphlet, horned,
beaked, and sharp of talon, grappling with each other in mid-air, like
Milton's angels. That loud controversy, the sound whereof went over
Christendom, awakening responses from beyond the Atlantic, has now died
away; its watchwords no longer stir the blood of belligerent sermonizers;
its very terms and definitions have well-nigh become obsolete and
unintelligible. The hands which wrote and the tongues which spoke in
that day are now all cold and silent; even Emmons, the brave old
intellectual athlete of Franklin, now sleeps with his fathers,--the last
of the giants. Their fame is still in all the churches; effeminate
clerical dandyism still affects to do homage to their memories; the
earnest young theologian, exploring with awe the mountainous debris of
their controversial lore, ponders over the colossal thoughts entombed
therein, as he would over the gigantic fossils of an early creation, and
endeavors in vain to recall to the skeleton abstractions before him the
warm and vigorous life wherewith they were once clothed; but
Hopkinsianism, as a distinct and living school of philosophy, theology,
and metaphysics, no longer exists. It has no living oracles left; and
its memory survives only in the doctrinal treatises of the elder and
younger Edwards, Hopkins, Bellamy, and Emmons.

It is no part of our p