e to apply to such a system of beliefs the name of Christian
pessimism.

If these and similar doctrines are so generally discredited as some
appear to think, we might expect to see the change showing itself in
catechisms and confessions of faith, to hear the joyful news of relief
from its horrors in all our churches, and no longer to read in the
newspapers of ministers rejected or put on trial for heresy because they
could not accept the most dreadful of these doctrines. Whether this be so
or not, it must be owned that the name of Jonathan Edwards does at this
day carry a certain authority with it for many persons, so that anything
he believed gains for them some degree of probability from that
circumstance. It would, therefore, be of much interest to know whether
he was trustworthy in his theological speculations, and whether he ever
changed his belief with reference to any of the great questions above
alluded to.

Some of our readers may remember a story which got abroad many years ago
that a certain M. Babinet, a scientific Frenchman of note, had predicted
a serious accident soon to occur to the planet on which we live by the
collision with it of a great comet then approaching us, or some such
occurrence. There is no doubt that this prediction produced anxiety and
alarm in many timid persons. It became a very interesting question with
them who this M. Babinet might be. Was he a sound observer, who had made
other observations and predictions which had proved accurate? Or was he
one of those men who are always making blunders for other people to
correct? Is he known to have changed his opinion as to the approaching
disastrous event?

So long as there were any persons made anxious by this prediction, so
long as there was even one who believed that he, and his family, and his
nation, and his race, and the home of mankind, with all its monuments,
were very soon to be smitten in mid-heaven and instantly shivered into
fragments, it was very desirable to find any evidence that this prophet
of evil was a man who held many extravagant and even monstrous opinions.
Still more satisfactory would it be if it could be shown that he had
reconsidered his predictions, and declared that he could not abide by his
former alarming conclusions. And we should think very ill of any
astronomer who would not rejoice for the sake of his fellow-creatures, if
not for his own, to find the threatening presage invalidated in either or
both