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the agencies which control the will that a man shall do the divine bidding while still acting in accordance with his own inclination. To the natural objection that such a view makes God the author of sin, he offers a brief reply, at the same time remarking that he has not space to consider at length the question of the first entrance of sin into the world. The subject of original sin was then clearly before his mind. But the idea of God had a deeper charm than the nature of man, and its exposition more imperatively demanded his attention. Before writing his work on Original Sin, he stopped to consider the nature of True Virtue and the Last End of God in the Creation.

With one brief remark we must dismiss the treatise on the Freedom of the Will. It no longer holds the same preeminence which was once accorded to it. The spell with which it was invested by an almost sacred tradition has been broken. Marred as it is by its controversial purpose, it cannot be regarded as a disinterested effort to reach the truth. It is disfigured also by methods of biblical interpretation which have been discarded by a later scholarship. It has been superseded by the advances made in psychology, a study which in Edwards' time was still in its infancy, — to whose progress we owe the idea of the education of the will, of which he takes no account whatever. Although the labors of modern students in this field of inquiry regarding the will have by no means resulted in agreement, yet the tendency of

later investigation has not been in the direction which Edwards was following, but for the most part tends toward the assertion of that freedom which it was his aim to disprove. But none the less does his work still possess a worth which is its own, that peculiar quality of his spirit, which gives to all his writings their interest and value. He impresses the imagination, as does no other writer, with the truth that, in some way unexplained, human freedom, however real or undiminished, must yet move and have its being within the sphere of a divine determinism. While it is true, as Rothe has taught, that moral freedom lies in a mastery over one's motives, in the ability to form and modify them or to react against their influence, yet this process goes on in a world where God is supreme, where the divine will mingles with human action; or, to adopt the words of Coleridge, "Will any reflecting man admit that his own will is the only and sufficient determinant of all he is and all he does? Is nothing to be attributed to the harmony of the system to which he belongs, and to the preëstablished fitness of the objects and agents, known and unknown, that surround him as acting on the will, though doubtless with it likewise?—a process which the co-instantaneous yet reciprocal action of the air and the vital energy of the lungs in breathing may help to render intelligible." 1

From Edwards' point of view, this inward union

1 Aids to Reflection, Works, Am. ed., vol. i. p. 150.

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or reconciliation of the divine with the human was an impossibility, since the human is conceived as having in itself no spiritual affiliation. But if we may be allowed to interpret him, to distinguish what he may have meant to affirm from what he actually teaches, it was his aim to enforce that real freedom which is in harmony with necessity, that service of God which is the only perfect freedom. The Arminians, against whom he was contending, also misrepresented themselves, so as almost to make it appear as if it were a desirable thing for the will to remain in a state of equilibrium, instead of regarding the liberty of choice as a means of rising to a higher freedom where the power to the contrary disappears, where a state is reached in which the will is fixed in its devotion to righteousness beyond the possibility of change. As Edwards contemplated this higher freedom, he rejoiced in the necessity which it involved. In this respect he is in agreement with Augustine and Anselm, with Luther and Calvin, with devout souls in every age whose eyes are set on God, with the spirit of all genuine worship, whose essence it is to disown self in order to the enthronement of the divine.

III.

DEFENCE OF THE DOCTRINE OF ORIGINAL SIN.

After the publication of the Freedom of the Will in 1754, Edwards wrote two dissertations, on the Nature of True Virtue, and on God's Last End in the Creation, as well as other treatises or essays which will be described in an ensuing chapter. It was after the preparation of these works that he proceeded to write his book on Original Sin, which was finished in 1757, and was going through the press at the time of his death. For some reason unexplained, he preferred to delay the publication of these earlier dissertations. A question therefore arises as to the order in which these works should be treated. If we were to follow the movement of Edwards' mind, in which there lay a certain significance, it would be proper to take up these remaining works in the order in which they were written. But as the treatise on Original Sin was published with the sanction of his personal approval, which is lacking in the case of the other treatises, it cannot be amiss to give it the precedence. In the case of the other dissertations, there is reason for thinking, that if he had lived he would have recast them in some different shape. Whichever course we take, there will be seen the profound suggestiveness of the intellectual and spiritual process in which he was engaged.

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The connection is a close one between the treatise on Original Sin and the doctrine of freedom set forth in the treatise on the Will. Edwards now proceeds to show how man comes into possession of that evil inclination which he is free to follow, but not free to reverse or overcome. It is needless to remark that this conception of freedom implies a low and degrading view of human nature. The younger Edwards, who defended his father's teaching in a logical treatise which won for him great distinction, plainly asserts what this doctrine of the will clearly implies: "Beasts, therefore, according to their measure of intelligence, are as free as men. Intelligence, therefore, and not liberty, is the only thing wanting to constitute them moral agents."1 But Edwards himself has left us in no doubt as to his meaning. The spiritnal element, he teaches, forms no necessary part of the human constitution. It is something added to man over and above his nature as man, donum supernaturale of mediæval theology. Virtue, though it may be necessary to the perfection and well-being of man, does not belong to man as One may have everything needful to his being a man where virtue is excluded. For one brief moment Adam, indeed, possessed this spiritual element, what Edwards calls the divine nature, in conjunction with his human nature. But

man.

the

1 Edwards the Younger, Improvements in Theology, etc., Works, vol. i. p. 483.

2 Original Sin, eh. ii. p. 477.