n the errors of the time is very proper when we are trying
our predecessors in foro conscientace: The houses they dwelt in may have
had some weak or decayed beams and rafters, but they served for their
shelter, at any rate. It is quite another matter when those rotten
timbers are used in holding up the roofs over our own heads. Still more,
if one of our ancestors built on an unsafe or an unwholesome foundation,
the best thing we can do is to leave it and persuade others to leave it
if we can. And if we refer to him as a precedent, it must be as a
warning and not as a guide.

Such was the reason of the present writer's taking up the writings of
Jonathan Edwards for examination in a recent essay. The "Edwardsian"
theology is still recognized as a power in and beyond the denomination to
which he belonged. One or more churches bear his name, and it is thrown
into the scale of theological belief as if it added great strength to the
party which claims him. That he was a man of extraordinary endowments
and deep spiritual nature was not questioned, nor that he was a most
acute reasoner, who could unfold a proposition into its consequences as
patiently, as convincingly, as a palaeontologist extorts its confession
from a fossil fragment. But it was maintained that so many dehumanizing
ideas were mixed up with his conceptions of man, and so many diabolizing
attributes embodied in his imagination of the Deity, that his system of
beliefs was tainted throughout by them, and that the fact of his being so
remarkable a logician recoiled on the premises which pointed his
inexorable syllogisms to such revolting conclusions. When he presents us
a God, in whose sight children, with certain not too frequent exceptions,
"are young vipers, and are infinitely more hateful than vipers;" when he
gives the most frightful detailed description of infinite and endless
tortures which it drives men and women mad to think of prepared for "the
bulk of mankind;" when he cruelly pictures a future in which parents are
to sing hallelujahs of praise as they see their children driven into the
furnace, where they are to lie "roasting" forever,--we have a right to
say that the man who held such beliefs and indulged in such imaginations
and expressions is a burden and not a support in reference to the creed
with which his name is associated. What heathenism has ever approached
the horrors of this conception of human destiny? It is not an abuse of
languag