what they at once knew for their own thoughts, in what they suddenly discovered would have been their own language if they could have said such things at all. He was a plain man who kept a shop and had humorous tiffs with Bridget his wife; who knew enough about the stars and the zodiac, but still more about a thousand matters intimate to humble Pennsylvanians. Wise as he was, he was even wittier, with the rare and irresistible gift of making proverbs. Little though most of his readers must have understood it, when they preferred Poor Richard to his rival Titan Leeds they were rewarding superior skill in literature. "Necessity," said Leeds, "is a mighty weapon." "Necessity," said Poor Richard, glancing at the obverse, "never made a good bargain.' "Be careful of the main chance," said Leeds, "or it will never take care of you." "Keep thy shop," said Poor Richard more specifically, "and thy shop will keep thee." ""Tis best," said Leeds, "to make a good use of another's folly." "Fools," said blunter Poor Richard, "make feasts, and wise men eat them." "Bad hours and ill company have ruined many fine young people," said the moral Leeds. Poor Richard said "The rotten apple spoils his companions." For twenty-five years Franklin wrote for his almanac, and in 1758 concluded with the valedictory and summary, The Way to Wealth, which is the true American Book of Proverbs, the authentic Elder Scripture of our worldly wisdom.

In that same year Edwards had in the press his final treatise, The Great Christian Doctrine of Original Sin Defended-defended, because it was under fire from many sides. He had been on the defensive for years, most particularly in the late thirties and the forties, when the Great Awakening was stirring New England and not a few remoter parts of the world. Some echoes of the Awakening pleasantly appear in Franklin's Autobiography. When Whitefield came over, says Franklin, Philadelphia grew so religious "that one could not walk thro' the town in an evening without hearing psalms sung in different families of every street." A great meeting house was erected, for the service of any preacher who might come by, even "a missionary to preach Mohammedanism to us." Franklin found Whitefield very effective. "I happened," he says, "soon after to attend one

of his sermons, in the course of which I perceived he intended to finish with a collection, and I silently resolved he should get nothing from me. I had in my pocket a handful of copper money, three or four silver dollars, and five pistoles in gold. As he proceeded I began to soften, and concluded to give the coppers. Another stroke of his oratory made me asham'd of that, and determin'd me to give the silver; and he finished so admirably, that I empty'd my pocket wholly into the collector's dish, gold and all." Franklin believed that Whitefield was an honest man. "He us'd, indeed, sometimes to pray for my conversion, but never had the satisfaction of believing that his prayers were heard. Ours was a mere civil friendship." Whitefield's writings seemed to Franklin unimportant; his preaching excellent. It was indeed a "mere civil friendship" which allowed Franklin, at the most impassioned meetings, to pass his time calculating the distance Whitefield's voice would carry. "I computed that he might well be heard by more than thirty thousand. This reconcil'd me to the newspaper accounts of his having preach'd to twenty-five thousand people in the fields, and to the antient histories of generals haranguing whole armies, of which I had sometimes doubted."

From this dry, cool atmosphere Edwards was worlds away. Perhaps earlier than we realize, his visions of a New Philosophy had given way to others of a New Holiness. Having himself outgrown secular for religious aspirations, and having given up all private right to his senses and faculties, he questioned, in his narrow parish, whether New England might not follow his course to a ⚫ millennium of consecration. Others, indeed all, must see how dependent upon God mankind was; others, indeed all, might believe in the reality of spiritual light and direct revelation. Not only duty but the soul's interest demanded that all the children of God should turn away from their little affairs to follow God to His Kingdom, perhaps soon to be planted upon earth, with New England as the seed and garden. Edwards has himself traced the rise of his influence in Northampton-the quickening signs of grace, he thought-in his Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God, with the earnestness of a prophet, the observation of a psychologist, and the skill

of a novelist. We need not look very deep into the mysteries of grace to understand the process. For over fifty years the Northampton congregation had been ruled by the iron will and creed of Solomon Stoddard. Though reaction had followed after his death, during Edwards' tentative years, the people were too accustomed to such a sway, and too little reached by the world beyond their farms and forests, not to respond to the imperious eloquence with which Edwards taught. Late in 1733 came the first signs, "a very unusual flexibleness, and yielding to advice" among the young members. The long brooding winter intensified it, and the spring warmed it. The deaths of two of them lent confirmation to Edwards' arguments. He himself believed that the stir over Arminianism did much, though perhaps doctrine actually accomplished less than fear. By 1735 "a great and earnest concern about the great things of religion, and the eternal world, became universal in all parts of the town, and among persons of all degrees, and all ages; the noise amongst the dry bones waxed louder and louder." In a little while the people were swept by a passion not unlike that earlier recorded in Edwards' Diary, and the first great American revival had begun. The phenomenon, so often recurrent, has since been systematized and vulgarized by those who believe in it, and cynically analyzed by those who do not; but in its first flush for a time seemed above system or vulgarity or analysis. At least Edwards saw in it vastly more than his own success: the true Light, so long shut out, shone purely, fiercely, upon his flock. Rapture, had come among them, and might save the world. He was as busy about this great business as Franklin about his printing and his shop in Philadelphia, preaching and exhorting with all his strength, and explaining the work to distant clergymen by letter. In this form he cast his Faithful Narrative, written to the Rev. Benjamin Coleman of Boston, late in 1736, when the excitement was dying down but Edwards had lost nothing of his hopefulness. Others, he admitted, had not his assurance that the method was authentic. He pointed to the effects. "And whatever the circumstances and means have been, and though we are so unworthy, yet it hath pleased God to work! And we are evidently a people blessed of the Lord! And here in this

corner of the world, God dwells, and manifests his glory."

As Edwards expected, the revival at Northampton was but prologue to a more general one, since known as The Great Awakening. It will be sufficient briefly to indicate his literary contributions (excluding sermons) to the movement, of which, however, he was actually the profoundest thinker and the richest voice. In The Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God (1741), reprinted by Franklin at Philadelphia, Edwards took issue with all who viewed the Awakening coldly, content to point out its passions and extravagances, and, under the prevailing rules of commonsense, to condemn it therefore as fanaticism. He spoke for the authenticity of vision. Even the "bodily effects," the swoonings and cries which had so scandalized the peace of churches, he defended as credible, though not essential, symptoms of the Spirit; but more important to him were the states of rapture which had been induced, and the increase of serious concerns in so many congregations. These were facts, and he would not hear them gainsaid. A year later he published Some Thoughts Concerning the Present Revival of Religion in New England, when the Awakening had begun to frighten even its adherents by its abuses. Prosaic or undisciplined people were coming to judge conversions by the volume of the "bodily effects" which accompanied them. There were not enough mystical poets in New England to keep up a proper emphasis on the necessity of inwardness. Extravagance had bred frenzy, and frenzy was followed by dissension, recrimination, and reaction. Again Edwards defended the work of the spirit, justifying the appeal to the "affections," that is, the emotions, which are a part of the soul. Warmth of devotion as much as clearness of reason is called for in true religion, he urged. But for all he pleaded for a proper use of the bodily effects, and set himself firmly against mere impulses and impressions, he offered no rule to discipline them by, not even a rule founded on morality or decent human behavior. His critics wondered, unanswered, how infinitely dependent men could govern in themselves the inclinations, both true and false, which the Spirit seemed to rouse. It may well have been some sense of this difficulty which made

Edwards' third apology for the Awakening, A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections (1746), less applicable than the others to the immediate occasion, less concerned with the signs and marks recently discussed. Passing by all the lower evidence, he carried religious affections up to origin in the divine influence, revelation through divine illumination, foundation on love to divine excellency; he associated with them conviction of certainty, humiliation, change of nature, softening of the heart, beautiful symmetry and proportion, and the outward fruit of Christian practice. Dreadful as some of the Calvinistic and predestinarian implications of his argument now seem, the book cannot be read without a thrill at its subtlety and its sustained power, and at its ringing echoes of a deep religious experience.

Through all his books upon the great event of his life we may trace the memory of his youthful illumination. The people of Northampton, according to his Faithful Narrative, had the same experience. "All things abroad, the sun, moon and stars, the clouds and sky, the heavens and earth, appear as it were with a cast of divine glory and sweetness upon them. . . . The joy that many of them speak of is, that to which none is to be paralleled; is that which they find when they are lowest in the dust, emptied most of themselves, and as it were annihilating themselves before God, when they are nothing, and God is all." In Thoughts on the Revival he tells of a certain person (actually his wife) who had experienced "resignation and acceptance of God, as the only portion and happiness of the soul, wherein the whole world, with its dearest enjoyments in it, were renounced as dirt and dung, and all that is pleasant and glorious, and all that is terrible in this world, seemed perfectly to vanish into nothing, and nothing to be left but God, in whom the soul was perfectly swallowed up, as in an infinite ocean of blessedness." Without doubt Edwards drew much of his confidence in the Awakening from the mystical ecstasies which then possessed his wife, which he studied with close attention, and of which he persuaded her to write out an account in 1742. The resemblances between her sensations and his are too close to need emphasis now, though he seems not to have perceived how far it was from him that his sensitive and loving wife had learned the way of