The Sense of the Heart

JONATHAN EDWARDS (348 pp.)--Perry Miller--Sloane ($3.50).

On the horizon back of Boston in 1740, there appeared a swirl of religious excitement no bigger than a preacher's warning forefinger. A Bostonian described it with disgust: "The meeting was carried on with . . . some screaming out in Distress and Anguish . . . some again jumping up and down . . . some lying along on the floor . . . The whole with a very great Noise, to be heard at a Mile's Distance, and continued almost the whole Night."

Yet in a few months the swirl became a whirlwind of religious frenzy that dragged all New England into its vortex. Whole towns went into visions and transports; preachers swarmed over the countryside to drive "the nail of terror into sleeping souls"; debts were forgiven, work was forgotten. Before the wind of the Great Awakening died, it had almost blown the Puritan state apart.

How Large Is Thought? The bony forefinger that raised the holocaust belonged to Jonathan Edwards, a powerful preacher, and one of the keenest theological minds of his time. He was also, says Harvard's Perry Miller in his careful study of Edwards, "one of America's five or six major artists, who happened to work with ideas instead of with poems or novels." His art falls on modern ears as queerly as a voice speaking through a 200-year-long speaking tube, but his thought comes clear, like a prophecy fulfilled. And behind Jonathan Edwards' thought, expressing it more grandly than his art was ever able, stands his life, an American tragedy.

Jonathan Edwards was born to the Puritan purple. His grandfather was Solomon Stoddard, the "Pope" of the Connecticut Valley, less known to history than Cotton Mather but far more powerful in his day. Jonathan was a boy wonder. At twelve, he wrote a masterly little treatise on spiders. Nearly 13, he entered Yale, where he studied the philosophy of John Locke and the new science of Sir Isaac Newton.

Locke and Newton gave Edwards his tools, and with them he began to work on the carved ice of Puritan theology. "How large is that thing in the Mind which they call Thought?" he cried. "Is Love square, or round? Is the surface of Hatred rough, or smooth? Is Joy an inch, or a foot, in diameter? ... It is no more reason that immediately perceives . . . the beauty or loveliness of anything . . . than it is reason that perceives the sweetness of honey: it depends on the sense of the heart."

Would God Be Safe? At 23, Edwards went to assist his aging grandfather at the Northampton church, and later that year he married Sarah Pierrepont, a religious girl who "seems to have someone invisible always conversing with her [and] to be always full of joy and pleasure; and no one knows for what."

It was a strange marriage. Jonathan rose at 4 a.m., spent 13 hours a day in his study and several more meditating in the woods. On long rides he took paper and pins, and whenever he had a thought, he pinned a paper to his coat; Sarah, according to legend, had the pleasure of unpinning him.

Seven years later, in 1734, Edwards delivered a series of broadsides of fire & brimstone at his congregation. "If the life of God were within your reach and you knew it," he told them, "it would not be safe one hour." And again: "The devil is waiting for [sinners], hell is gaping for them, the flames gather and flash about them, and would fain lay hold on them and swallow them up." A few such sermons more, and the town began to go into, a spiritual paroxysm. Conversions came 30 a week. Driven to despair by Edwards' sermons, Joseph Hawley, Edwards' uncle by marriage, cut his throat. Hawley's suicide started a reaction, and by the end of 1735, the revival had ended.

In 1740-41 the phenomenon recurred, and this time it spread to all New England, but a few years later the reaction was so complete that when Edwards asked for an investigation of some children accused of reading obstetrical literature in barns, the congregation turned on him. When he refused to admit an applicant without a public profession of faith, Edwards was ousted from his pulpit.

But Not Destroyed. Edwards had clearly sensed the challenge of the new science, and had made the first spectacular attempt on this continent to reconcile science and religion in a religion speaking both to head and heart. His attempt was largely forgotten, and Edwards with it, until science without religion came into question in the calamities of the 20th Century.

At 48, Edwards wearily led his wife and children across Massachusetts to the frontier post of Stockbridge, where for many years the theologian delivered sermons to Indian and white congregations. At 53, like manna in the wilderness, came an offer of the presidency of the College of New Jersey (later Princeton). A week after his arrival at Princeton he was inoculated for smallpox, took sick and died, "perplexed, but not in despair; cast down, but not destroyed." He had come at last into the full sense of the heart: "Oh how good . . . it is to work for God in the daytime, and at night to lie down under his smiles."

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