holding up the roofs over our own heads. Still more,
if one of our ancestors built on an unsafe or an unwholesome foundation,
the best thing we can do is to leave it and persuade others to leave
it if we can. And if we refer to him as a precedent, it must be as a
warning and not as a guide.

Such was the reason of the present writer's taking up the writings of
Jonathan Edwards for examination in a recent essay. The "Edwardsian"
theology is still recognized as a power in and beyond the denomination
to which he belonged. One or more churches bear his name, and it
is thrown into the scale of theological belief as if it added
great strength to the party which claims him. That he was a man of
extraordinary endowments and deep spiritual nature was not questioned,
nor that he was a most acute reasoner, who could unfold a
proposition into its consequences as patiently, as convincingly, as a
palaeontologist extorts its confession from a fossil fragment. But it
was maintained that so many dehumanizing ideas were mixed up with his
conceptions of man, and so many diabolizing attributes embodied in
his imagination of the Deity, that his system of beliefs was tainted
throughout by them, and that the fact of his being so remarkable
a logician recoiled on the premises which pointed his inexorable
syllogisms to such revolting conclusions. When he presents us a God,
in whose sight children, with certain not too frequent exceptions, "are
young vipers, and are infinitely more hateful than vipers;" when he
gives the most frightful detailed description of infinite and endless
tortures which it drives men and women mad to think of prepared for "the
bulk of mankind;" when he cruelly pictures a future in which parents are
to sing hallelujahs of praise as they see their children driven into the
furnace, where they are to lie "roasting" forever,--we have a right to
say that the man who held such beliefs and indulged in such imaginations
and expressions is a burden and not a support in reference to the creed
with which his name is associated. What heathenism has ever approached
the horrors of this conception of human destiny? It is not an abuse
of language 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 horror