respect to their posterity, in times of general declension and degeneracy?"

There are six pages of argument on this baptismal point of the question-this secondary and scarce-considered issue in the general tumult and smoke of the strife over the more immediately visible and pressing question of qualification for the Supper; but they show specifically that Mr. Edwards had already before his dismission broken with the whole half-way covenant system, and not simply with the Stoddardian development of it. This thorough breach with the whole scheme is manifest also, and in passages more extended, in Mr. Edwards's reply to the pamphlet of Rev. Solomon Williams, published two years after his dismission from Northampton. Two sentences however must suffice:

"Mr. Williams knows that through the whole of my book I suppose this practice of baptizing the children of such as are here spoken of [parents not real Christians] is wrong." "The baptism of infants is the seal of the promises made to the seed of the righteous; and on these principles some rational account can be given of infant baptism; but no account can be given of it on Mr. Williams' scheme [that is the general half-covenant way], no warrant can be found for it in Scripture.”

Doubtless the fact that the main stress of the Northampton struggle was over the Sacramental Table side of the controversy, availed at the time as it has since availed occasionally to obscure Mr. Edwards's position on the Baptismal question. And indeed there was not much immediate effect produced on the practice of the churches by his arguments. The halfway covenant system of baptism was in general use, and so it long continued to be. Opposed by Dr. Bellamy in a popular and vigorous series of pamphlets, some of them in dialogue form, from about 1760 onward some years; and later by cogent arguments by Chandler Robbins of Plymouth, Dr. Hopkins of Newport, and Cyprian Strong of Chatham, it had also its vigorous defenders; and it was not till the commencement of the revival period of the New England Churches between 1790 and 1800, that any considerable breaches were made on the practice, or on the judgment of the churches respecting it. And as late as 1792 so eminent a minister as Dr. Joseph Lathrop of Springfield, published two discourses in which he not only defends the half-way covenant system

still in common use, but uses language whose only possible significance (p. 20) is a justification of the Stoddardian doctrine of the right of every "serious person" to the Lord's Supper.

The system died hard. It continued in many quarters till well into the present century. Chief Justice Williams of Connecticut, who died in Hartford in 1861, and his wife, both "owned the Covenant" in their younger years, and only made such a confession of their faith as is now usual in the churches in 1834, in the days of Dr. Hawes. There is a still living member of the Church of Windsor, Connecticut, who was baptized on the strength of his half-way covenant parents' church membership in 1822. In Cambridge, Mass., the system held out to 1828, in Marlborough till 1834.

But though surviving long after him there is a real sense in which Jonathan Edwards may be said to have been the great and successful antagonist of the half-way covenant. The principles so cogently argued by him in his tractate of 1749, the year before his Northampton dismissal, though directed mainly against the Stoddardian practice of his own church, sweep the whole field. The treatise leaves no logical standing ground for the one practice without the other. That essay has been a reservoir out of which all subsequent writers have consciously or unconsciously derived very much of their argument for the churches' present usage in opposition to what went before. Reading it to-day one is amazed at its acuteness, its cogency and its comprehensiveness. Struck out in the heat of a church quarrel, when all his own personal interests were involved, it has all the clearness, coolness, and resistlessness of a mathematical demonstration. It goes far, of itself, to justify (according as a man may feel disposed toward its author) the statement of Dr. O. W. Holmes that Edwards was "a man with a brain as nicely adjusted for certain mechanical processes as Babbage's calculating machine," or the more sympathetic eulogium of Sir James Mackintosh, that the Northampton pastor "was the greatest of the sons of men."

ARTICLE II-JONATHAN EDWARDS AS A MAN; AND THE MINISTERS OF THE LAST CENTURY.

[Read at Northampton, before the Connecticut Valley Congregational Club, June 9, 1884.]

AFTER long ages of observation and experience it would be very difficult for any one to define the conditions on which God raises up the few leading intellects of our race. So various, not to say diverse are these conditions; so fresh and original is each new production, that He seems perpetually to baffle our research and keep the secret to Himself. If, in any given instance, we attempt to trace the wonderful result to peculiar mental and moral characteristics in the parents, meeting and blending in the child, we are apt to be confronted with the stubborn fact, that other children of the same parentage, are, in no special way, distinguished above their fellows.

Indeed, it often happens, that the man who comes upon the theatre of human action, with this kingly order of mind, and leaves his name as a heritage to all future generations, rises out of some obscure household, which except for him would never have attracted public notice, or have been kept in after remembrance. So Moses and David appeared upon the earth, and took their places in the records of the early world. So Socrates, Luther, Shakespeare, and others of this lofty name, came forward in their several generations, to act their conspicuous parts.

If we search for the cause of such transcendant greatness in special outward facilities for culture, in books, in schools, in travel, in intercourse with learned men, we shall find, as a common truth, that just when and where these facilities are the greatest,-just when society has accumulated to the highest degree all helps to learning and intellectual culture,-libraries, richly endowed universities, accomplished teachers - costly apparatus, just then, somehow, the man we are looking for is not forthcoming. He has perhaps already come and gone, and we shall not in that particular nation or province see his like

again. One would show himself of a sanguine temperament who should expect the England of to-day with all its treasurehouses of learning, to reproduce a Shakespeare, or a Lord Bacon.

Or if we turn to outward nature, to happy influences of sun and sky-to a nice balancing of heat and cold-to favoring aspects of hills, mountains, and streams-to genial winds and beautiful landscapes, it will often occur, that this princely child whose character we are studying, enjoyed no rare opportunities of this kind, or, if he did the question will still arise, why, if these influences were fitted to nourish greatness in him, they were not equally fitted to nourish it in all his early playmates and companions. That brilliant French writer Rénan, in his life of Christ, thought he could discover in the sights and sounds and favoring aspects of nature around the ancient Nazareth, all the elements out of which to construct that marvelous Child Jesus, ignoring the fact that for thousands of years, before and since, children have been born and reared amid these self-same sights, and sounds, and influences, but only one of them is known on earth as Immanuel, the Wonderful, the Counsellor, the Prince of Peace.

Whatever method therefore we pursue, whatever considerations we urge to determine why it is that a few men of the race tower so loftily above the average, the real causes will probably still remain unknown, or will resolve themselves into the infinite wisdom and resources of God, the great first cause.

Nevertheless an intense interest always gathers about the early life of a truly great man. "The child is father of the man," and we eagerly search the records to find the first intimations of that superiority which afterwards becomes so impressive. And in this search we are often sorely disappointed, for all human life is of necessity set round with the customary and the commonplace, and it is only a very discerning eye that can detect at this early period the sure signs of coming greatness. When the time arrives that this lofty reach of intellect is fully recognized, then it is found that the incidents. and memorials of the early age have largely perished, and can never be recalled. If loving kindred and friends had but known whereto this child was to grow how carefully would

these incidents of childhood have been garnered up and kept for future use!

By general consent Jonathan Edwards stands as one of the world's great thinkers, a masterly originator in the realm of ideas. And when we say "by general consent," we are aware that few men comparatively of this living generation have any intimate knowledge of his writings, or the scope and method of his great works. But the verdict of the foremost minds in the old world still more than in the new, assigns him this lofty place. The great divines, philosophers, and scholars of England and Scotland, living in a land of universities and libraries, were the first to discover the towering height of Edwards's genius. It was to them little less than a miracle, to hear a voice like his coming to them across the waters, and out of the depths of this new and half-wilderness land. They knew better than the men on our own shores, the actual reach of philosophic thought, among old and cultivated nations, and they unhesitatingly pronounced Jonathan Edwards one of the leading thinkers of the world. Our own people would hardly have dared to give him the lofty rank assigned him by such men as Sir James Mackintosh, Dr. Thomas Chalmers and many others.

To acknowledge however the masterly greatness of Edwards in the world of thought, it is not necessary that we should accept his opinions in full. No finite intellect is able to grasp all truth. Minds vastly inferior to that of Edwards may come in at a later stage and find out deficiences and mistakes in his work. No man has ever yet been able to free himself from all the prejudices and philosophic tendencies of the particular age in which his lot is cast and plant himself upon the broad platform of the fixed and everlasting.

The greatness of Edwards is seen in that he instinctively took up some of the highest themes that can occupy the human mind;-took them up as one self-moved and born for the purpose, took them up in a manner original to himself and not. as a copyist. He held these themes before his own mind and before the minds of others with a most wonderful force and tenacity. Other thinkers might come in afterwards to modify his system and improve upon his methods. But he was the pioneer breaking through the tangled forests where men had