gradually reconciled to this appalling dogma. In the
second year of his collegiate course, we are told, which would be about
the fourteenth of his age, he read Locke's Essay with inexpressible
delight. The first glimpse of metaphysical inquiry, it would seem,
revealed to him the natural bent of his mind, and opened to him the path
of speculation in which he ever afterwards delighted. Locke, though
Edwards always mentions him with deep respect, was indeed a thinker of a
very different school. The disciple owed to his master, not a body of
doctrine, but the impulse to intellectual activity. He succeeded in
working out for himself a satisfactory answer to the problem by which he
had been perplexed. His cavils ceased as his reason strengthened. 'God's
absolute sovereignty and justice' seemed to him to be as clear as
anything he saw with his eyes; 'at least,' he adds, 'it is so at times.'
Nay, he even came to rejoice in the doctrine and regard it as
'infinitely pleasant, bright, and sweet' (i. 33). The Puritan
assumptions were so ingrained in his nature that the agony of mind which
they caused never led him to question their truth, though it animated
him to discover a means of reconciling them to reason; and the
reconciliation is the whole burden of his ablest works. The effect upon
his mind is described in terms which savour of a less stern school of
faith. God's glory was revealed to him throughout the whole creation,
and often threw him into ecstasies of devotion (i. 33). 'God's
excellency, His wisdom, His purity, and love seemed to appear in
everything: in the sun, moon, and stars: in the clouds and blue sky; in
the grass, flowers, and trees; in the water and all nature, which used
greatly to fix my mind. I often used to sit and view the moon for
continuance, and in the day spent much time in viewing the clouds and
sky, to behold the sweet glory of God in these things; in the meantime
singing forth, with a low voice, my contemplations of the Creator and
Redeemer.' Thunder, he adds, had once been terrible to him; 'now scarce
anything in all the works of nature' was so sweet (i. 36). It seemed as
if the 'majestic and awful voice of God's thunder' was in fact the voice
of its Creator. Thunder and lightning, we know, suggested
characteristically different contemplations to Franklin. Edwards'
utterances are as remarkable for their amiability as for their
non-scientific character. We see in him the gentle mystic rather than
th