e stern divine who consigned helpless infants to eternal torture
without a question of the goodness of their Creator. This vein of
meditation, however, continued to be familiar to him. He spent most of
his time reflecting on Divine things, and often walking in solitary
places and woods to enjoy uninterrupted soliloquies and converse with
God. At New York he often retired to a quiet spot--now, one presumes,
seldom used for such purposes--on the banks of the Hudson river, to
abandon himself to his quiet reveries, or to 'converse on the things of
God' with one Mr. John Smith. To the end of his life he indulged in the
same habit. His custom was to rise at four o'clock in the morning, to
spend thirteen hours daily in his study, and to ride out after dinner to
some lonely grove, where he dismounted and walked by himself, with a
notebook ready at hand for the arrest of stray thoughts. Evidently he
possessed one of those rare temperaments to which the severest
intellectual exercise is a source of the keenest enjoyment; and though
he must often have strayed in to the comparatively dreary labyrinths of
metaphysical puzzles, his speculations had always an immediate reference
to what he calls 'Divine things.' Once, he tells us, as he rode into the
woods, in 1737, and alighted according to custom 'to walk in Divine
contemplation and prayer,' he had so extraordinary a view of the glory
of the Son of God, and His wonderful grace, that he remained for about
an hour 'in a flood of tears and weeping aloud.' This intensity of
spiritual vision was frequently combined with a harrowing sense of his
own corruption. 'My wickedness,' he says, 'as I am in myself has long
appeared to me perfectly ineffable; like an infinite deluge or mountains
over my head.' Often, for many years, he has had in his mind and his
mouth the words 'Infinite upon infinite!' His heart looks to him like
'an abyss infinitely deeper than hell;' and yet, he adds, it seems to
him that 'his conviction of sin is exceedingly small.' Whilst weeping
and crying for his sins, he seemed to know that 'his repentance was
nothing to his sin' (i. 41). Extravagant expressions of this kind are
naturally rather shocking to the outsider; and, to those who are
incapable of sympathising, they may even appear to be indications of
hypocrisy. Nobody was more alive than Edwards himself to the danger of
using such phrases mechanically. When you call yourself the worst of
men, he says, be careful th