A History of American Literature. Boynton Percy Holmes
II, pp. 248–264.
History and Criticism
Tyler, M. C. (See General References.)
Literary Treatment of the Period
Drama
Barker, J. N. Superstition, a Tragedy (1824), in Representative American Plays (edited by A. H. Quinn). 1917.
Longfellow, H. W. The New England Tragedies.
Wilkins, Mary E. Giles Corey, Yeoman.
Essays
Lowell, J. R. Witchcraft. Works, Vol. V.
Whittier, J. G. Charms and Fairy Faith, and Magicians and Witch Folk in Literary Recreations and Miscellanies.
Fiction
Austin, Mrs. J. G. A Nameless Nobleman.
Austin, Mrs. J. G. Dr. Le Baron and his Daughter (sequel).
Cooper, J. F. The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish.
Simms, W. Gilmore. The Yemassee.
Wilkins, Mary E. The Heart’s Highway.
Poetry
Poems of American History (edited by B. E. Stevenson), pp. 71–97.
TOPICS AND PROBLEMS
Read the introduction to the “Magnalia” or a chapter from “Illustrious Providences,” or “The Wonders of the Invisible World,” for evidence of superstition based on Scriptural authority and of vulgar, or folk, superstition.
In the Nation of August 17, 1918, pp. 173–175, there is an article in review of five new books under the title “Spirit Communication.” Establish the differences and the likenesses between the modern attitude and the attitude of the seventeenth century toward “the invisible world.”
Read Fitz-Greene Halleck’s “Connecticut,” stanzas xiii-xxvi, and Whittier’s “The Double-Headed Snake of Newbury,” ll. 71–85, as well as Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (see p. 129 in this volume), for typical literary expressions of aversion to Cotton Mather.
The best method of approaching Samuel Sewall’s Diary is to read some fifty pages – preferably between 1680 and 1710 – for the references to a definite topic. This may best be selected from promising suggestions in the first few pages of reading. If none appears, look for any of the following or others like them: Sunday observance; funerals, weddings, and christenings; the pastor and his people; holidays; parents and children; self-analysis; religious discipline; law and order. Comparisons on a given topic with the entries for the same period in Evelyn or for an equal number of pages in Pepys are fruitful.
A similar approach may be made to Mrs. Knight’s compact and consecutive Journal. Her humor, irreverence, tolerance, independence, timidity, or her use of exaggeration, mock-heroics, Scriptural allusion, personal description, social analysis, are rich in their possibilities.
Read in Andrew Macphail’s “Essays in Puritanism” the essay on John Winthrop, and then the exchange of opinions between Messrs. White and Hackett in the New Republic, May 17, 1919. Do either or both throw light on the chief characters discussed in this chapter?
CHAPTER IV
JONATHAN EDWARDS AND BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
The danger in drawing conclusions about a whole century, as we have been doing, is that the facts may be forced to seem far simpler than they were. It should be kept in mind that these are only certain broad currents of thought, tendencies which were obscured by all sorts of cross waves and chop seas. And it should be mentioned that the Puritan with the greatest mind of them all, Jonathan Edwards, was only a year old when Mrs. Knight made her journey to New York, and that to the end of his life, in 1758, he struggled in vain to keep alive the logic of the old religious doctrines.
He was born in 1703 with a rich heritage from the learned aristocracy. As a youth he showed extraordinary precocity, which appeared in his early excursions into philosophy and natural science and developed further in the unfulfilled promise of religious radicalism.
From my childhood up, my mind had been full of objections against the doctrine of God’s sovereignty, in choosing whom he would to eternal life, and rejecting whom he pleased; leaving them eternally to perish, and be everlastingly tormented in hell. It used to appear like a horrible doctrine to me. But I remember the time very well, when I seemed to be convinced, and fully satisfied, as to this sovereignty of God… I have often, since that first conviction, had quite another kind of sense of God’s sovereignty than I had then. I have often since had not only a conviction, but a delightful conviction. The doctrine has very often appeared exceedingly pleasant, bright, and sweet. Absolute sovereignty is what I love to ascribe to God. But my first conviction was not so.
The first instance that I remember of that sort of inward, sweet delight in God and divine things that I have lived much in since, was on reading those words, 1 Tim. i. 17, Now unto the King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only wise God, be honor and glory for ever and ever, Amen. As I read the words, there came into my soul, and was as it were diffused through it, a sense of the glory of the Divine Being…
Not long after I first began to experience these things, I gave an account to my father of some things that had passed in my mind. I was pretty much affected by the discourse we had together; and when the discourse was ended, I walked abroad alone, in a solitary place in my father’s pasture, for contemplation. And as I was walking there, and looking up on the sky and clouds, there came into my mind so sweet a sense of the glorious majesty and grace of God, that I know not how to express. I seemed to see them both in a sweet conjunction; majesty and meekness joined together; it was a sweet and gentle, and holy majesty; and also a majestic meekness; an awful sweetness; a high, and great, and holy gentleness.
The striking fact about Edwards’s later development, however, is that he passed entirely from poetic mysticism to a championship of the theology of Calvin. His great period of influence was during his pastorate in Northampton, Massachusetts, from 1727 to 1750, and during his following six years at Stockbridge, Massachusetts. He was a preacher of extraordinary power – the more extraordinary because his command of audiences was obtained by the sheer quality of his discourse and not, as in the case of John Cotton and the Mathers, by pulpit presence or flights of eloquence. His sermons were at once irresistible in their logic (provided his auditors were willing to start with his assumptions) and, at the same time, irresistibly cogent in their simple, concrete methods of illustration. His most famous discourse, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” is a complete illustration of his method. Notwithstanding his sincerity and his talents as a preacher his ministerial experience was ended with a tragic downfall. His parishioners could not endure the rigor of his teachings, agreeing perversely with Dr. Johnson’s later dictum on his “Freedom of the Will” – that all theory might be for it but all experience was against it. During his residence in Stockbridge he continued with the writing of discourses which philosophers have agreed at once to applaud and reject. He died in 1758 shortly after his inauguration as president of the College of New Jersey.
His failure lay in the fact that his religion was a religion of logic rather than of faith. It was based on what learned men had theorized out from the Bible, and in a great many cases from the least important passages of the Bible, and it sternly rejected what many other equally learned men had found in the same book. Moreover, it was concerned with life on earth chiefly as a prelude to a future life of reward or punishment. In all the tide of human event which was making the eighteenth century each year more interesting as a matter of present living, men could not go on indefinitely looking everywhere but at life itself. Oliver Wendell Holmes summed up the situation in his “Wonderful ‘One-Hoss Shay’” (see p. 305). This is a pleasant story for children, but a comment on life for grown-ups; and to the grown-ups Holmes addressed his concluding couplet:
End of the wonderful one-hoss shay:
Logic is logic. That’s all I say.
Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) is the man who reflected better