upheaved than a trifling
ripple in an insignificant pond. There is something almost pathetic in
his eagerness to magnify the proportions of the event. He boasts that in
six months 'more than three hundred souls were savingly brought home to
Christ in this town' (iii. 23). The town itself, it may be observed,
though then one of the most populous in the country, was only of
eighty-two years' standing, and reckoned about two hundred families, the
era of Chicagos not having yet dawned upon the world. The conversion,
however, of this village appeared to some 'divines and others' to herald
the approach of the 'conflagration' (iii. 59); and though Edwards
disavows this rash conjecture, he anticipates with some confidence the
approach of the millennium. The 'isles and ships of Tarshish,'
mentioned in Isaiah, are plainly meant for America, which is to be 'the
firstfruits of that glorious day' (iii. 154); and he collects enough
accounts of various revivals of an analogous kind which had taken place
in Salzburg, Holland, and several of the British Colonies, to justify
the anticipation 'that these universal commotions are the forerunners of
something exceeding glorious approaching' (iii. 414). The limited area
of the disturbance perhaps raised less difficulty than the equivocal
nature of many of the manifestations. In Edwards' imagination, Satan was
always on the watch to produce an imitation, and, it would seem, a
curiously accurate imitation, of the Divine impulses. As De Foe says, in
a different sense--

Wherever God erects a house of prayer,
The devil always builds a chapel there.

And some people were unkind enough to trace in the diseases and other
questionable products of the revival a distinct proof of the 'operation
of the evil spirit' (iii. 96). Edwards felt the vital importance of
distinguishing between the two classes of supernatural agency, so
different in their source, and yet so thoroughly similar in their
effects. There is something rather touching, though at times our
sympathy is not quite unequivocal, in the simplicity with which he
traces distinct proofs of the Divine hand in the familiar phenomena of
religious conversions. The stories seem stale and profitless to us which
he accepted with awe-stricken reverence as a demonstrative testimony to
the Divinity of the work. He gives, for example, an anecdote of a young
woman, who, being jealous of another conversion, resolved to bring about
her own by the r