all your feelings, this dissection of emotion down to its finest and most intricate convolutions, was of the very essence of religion. No one, however, can read his account of his own feelings, even when he runs into the accustomed phraseology, without perceiving the ring of genuine feeling. He is morbid, it may be, but he is not insincere; and even his strained hyperboles are scarcely unintelligible when considered as the expression of the sentiment produced by the effort of a human being to live constantly in presence of the absolute and the infinite. The event which most powerfully influenced Edwards' mind during his life at Northampton was one of those strange spiritual storms which then, as now, swept periodically across the Churches. Protestants generally call them revivals; in Catholic countries they impel pilgrims to some devotional shrine; Edwards and his contemporaries described such a phenomenon as 'a remarkable outpouring of God's Holy Spirit.' He has carefully described the symptoms of one such commotion, in which he was a main agent; and two or three later treatises, discussing some of the problems suggested by the scenes he witnessed, testify to the profoundness of the impression upon his mind. In fact, as we shall presently see, Edwards' whole philosophical system was being put to a practical test by these events. Was the excitement, as modern observers would say, due to a mere moral epidemic, or was it actually produced by the direct interposition in human affairs of the Almighty Ruler? Unhesitatingly recognising the hand of the God the very thought of whom crushed him into self-annihilation, Edwards is unconsciously troubled by the strange contrast between the effect and the stupendous cause assigned for it. When the angel of the Lord comes down to trouble the waters, one would expect rather to see oceans upheaved than a trifling ripple in an insignificant pond. There is something almost pathetic in his eagerness to magnify the proportions of the event. He boasts that in six months 'more than three hundred souls were savingly brought home to Christ in this town' (iii. 23). The town itself, it may be observed, though then one of the most populous in the country, was only of eighty-two years' standing, and reckoned about two hundred families, the era of Chicagos not having yet dawned upon the world. The conversion, however, of this village appeared to some 'divines and others' to herald the approach of the 'conflagration' (iii. 59); and though Edwards disavows this rash conjecture, he anticipates with some confidence the approach of the millennium. The 'isles and ships of Tarshish,' mentioned in Isaiah, are plainly meant for America, which is to be 'the firstfruits of that glorious day' (iii. 154); and he collects enough accounts of various revivals of an analogous kind which had taken place in Salzburg, Holland, and several of the British Colonies, to justify