The American Spirit in Literature: A Chronicle of Great InterpretersPerry, Bliss
History
The American Spirit in Literature: A Chronicle of Great Interpreters
Perry, Bliss
American literature -- History and criticism
to go, for though he is only fifty-four, his health has never been
robust, and he has his great book on the History of Redemption still to
write. But he accepts, finds the smallpox raging in Princeton upon his
arrival in January, 1758, is inoculated, and dies of the disease in
March--his dreams unfulfilled, his life-work once more thwarted. Close
by the tomb of this saint is the tomb of his grandson, Aaron Burr, who
killed Hamilton.
The literary reputation of Jonathan Edwards has turned, like the
vicissitudes of his life, upon factors that could not be foreseen. His
contemporary fame was chiefly as a preacher, and was due to sermons like
those upon God Glorified in Man's Dependence and The Reality of
Spiritual Life, rather than to such discourses as the Enfield sermon,
Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, which in our own day is the best
known of his deliverances. Legends have grown up around this terrific
Enfield sermon. Its fearful power over its immediate hearers cannot be
gainsaid, and it will long continue to be quoted as an example of the
length to which a Calvinistic logician of genius was compelled by his
own scheme to go. We still see the tall, sweet-faced man, worn by his
daily twelve hours of intense mental toil, leaning on one elbow in the
pulpit and reading from manuscript, without even raising his gentle
voice, those words which smote his congregation into spasms of terror
and which seem to us sheer blasphemy.
Yet the Farewell Sermon of 1750 gives a more characteristic view of
Edwards's mind and heart, and conveys an ineffaceable impression of his
nobility of soul. His diction, like Wordsworth's, is usually plain
almost to bareness; the formal framework of his discourses is obtruded;
and he hunts objections to their last hiding-place with wearisome
pertinacity. Yet his logic is incandescent. Steel sometimes burns to the
touch like this, in the bitter winters of New England, and one wonders
whether Edwards's brain was not of ice, so pitiless does it seem. His
treatise denying the freedom of the will has given him a European
reputation comparable with that enjoyed by Franklin in science and
Jefferson in political propaganda. It was really a polemic demonstrating
the sovereignty of God, rather than pure theology or metaphysics.
Edwards goes beyond Augustine and Calvin in asserting the arbitrary will
of the Most High and in "denying to the human will any self-determining
power." He has been refuted by events and tendencies, such as the growth
of historical criticism and the widespread acceptance of the doctrine of
evolution, rather than by the might of any single antagonist. So, too,
the Dred Scott decision of Chief Justice Taney, holding that the slave
was not a citizen, was not so much answered by opponents as it was
superseded by the arbitrament of war. But the idealism of this lonely
thinker has entered deeply and permanently into the spiritual life of
his countrymen, and he will continue to be read by a few of those who
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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