ish
literature, were also the three men who were regarded as most
emphatically the devil's advocates. In the latter part of the eighteenth
century, it was indeed adopted by Hartley, by his disciple Priestley,
and by Abraham Tucker, all of whom were Christians after a fashion. But
they reconciled themselves to the belief by peculiar forms of optimism.
Tucker maintained the odd fancy that every man would ultimately receive
a precisely equal share of happiness, and thought that a few thousand
years of damnation would be enough for all practical purposes. If I
remember rightly, he roughly calculated the amount of misery to be
endured by human beings at about two minutes' suffering in a century.
Hartley maintained the still more remarkable thesis that, in some
non-natural sense, 'all individuals are always and actually infinitely
happy.' But Edwards, though an optimist in a very different sense, was
alone amongst contemporary writers of any speculative power in asserting
at once the doctrine that all events are the result of the Divine will,
and the doctrine of eternal damnation. His mind, acute as it was, yet
worked entirely in the groove provided for it. The revolting
consequences to which he was led by not running away from his premisses,
never for an instant suggested to him that the premisses might
conceivably be false. He accepts a belief in hell-fire, interpreted
after the popular fashion, without a murmur, and deduces from it all
those consequences which most theologians have evaded or covered with a
judicious veil.

Edwards was luckily not an eloquent man, for his sermons would in that
case have been amongst the most terrible of human compositions. But if
ever he warms into something like eloquence, it is when he is
endeavouring to force upon the imaginations of his hearers the horrors
of their position. Perhaps the best specimen of his powers in this
department is a sermon which we are told produced a great effect at the
time of revivals, and to which, we may as well remember, Phebe Bartlet
may probably have listened. Read that sermon (vol. vii., sermon xv.) and
endeavour to picture the scene of its original delivery. Imagine the
congregation of rigid Calvinists, prepared by previous scenes of frenzy
and convulsion, and longing for the fierce excitement which was the only
break in the monotony of their laborious lives. And then imagine Edwards
ascending the pulpit, with his flaccid solids and vapid fluids, and the