The Transition in New England Theology

THE religious situation in New England at the death of Jonathan Edwards was marked by a painful tension of thought and feeling which portended some ultimate disruption and catastrophe. The sublimated mysticism of Edwards had proved unsatisfactory or unattainable. The Great Awakening, like a consuming fire, had burned over, as it were, the field of the religious sensibilities, while its residue was a superficial religious dialectic, occupied with endless discussions on the issues raised by Edwards’s theology. The years that elapsed between his death in 1758 and the close of the century were marked by spiritual desolation and inactivity among the churches.

It had been Edwards’s method, in his long controversy with the Arminians, to assert the doctrines of Calvinism in their most extreme form, trusting that when thus presented their logical consistency would be a strong appeal to the human reason. Others who had preceded him in this once famous controversy, notably Richard Baxter, whom in his more striking qualities Edwards greatly resembled, had seen the necessity for compromise or modification. But Edwards refused to make concessions. Like Augustine when dealing with the Pelagians, he first ascertained the exact opposite of the Arminian position, and then enforced it with an unwonted vigor, it almost seemed a relentless hatred. This doctrinaire tendency in Edwards and his followers may be regarded as a survival of the political motive which had forced the Puritans into antagonism to the English nationality ; as if, when England had overthrown their theocratic state, they were determined she should not capture the inner stronghold of their religion.

But Edwards was right in his main contention, — that Arminianism was the solvent of the Calvinistic theology, and must be resisted to the bitter end if Calvinism were to retain its ascendency. The doctrine of decrees, or election and reprobation, the doctrine of original sin, — these became empty formulas if the Arminian principle were true, that the human will, unaffected in its vital character by the fall, free from the dominating control of the divine will, had the power of initiating action, of choosing between good and evil. Arminianism likewise endangered the corner stone of original Calvinism, the principle of the divine sovereignty. It is hard to say now exactly what this doctrine meant, for we have lost in great measure the clue to the religious experience out of which it grew. But it meant this much, at least, — that God elects this one or that one to salvation, without condescending to give reason for his action. Such good reason there might be, some affirmed that there was. But the Calvinist was not only content that God should give no reason ; he preferred that none should be given. He not only made no effort to penetrate the mystery ; he wished it to remain a mystery still, this sovereign action of the Deity, who will not demean himself before man by rendering account or seeking to justify his procedure. With this doctrine Arminianism waged incessant warfare, resolved that in a matter so vital as human salvation the divine mind was accountable to the human, that the reason of God’s action must be known.

But Arminianism is interesting to us for other reasons. It was the reappearance, purified and under a religious guise, of the old humanism which had been ruthlessly stamped out wherever in the sixteenth century the Calvinistic faith had prevailed. Other types of reform there had been. Luther had refused to accept humanism as an ally, although he had not sought its destruction, while his own experience was in a great degree the result of its influence. Zwingli was a humanist, who never disowned its alliance, whose life and theology had been moulded by its spirit. In the Church of England, also, humanism in its purer form had been domiciled since the fifteenth century ; its support had been welcomed in the person and teaching of Erasmus, and Cranmer had felt its influence. The great outburst of humanism at the close of the sixteenth century was identified with the interests of the church no less than with those of the state, and Shakespeare, its greatest representative, had found his grave before the altar of the church at Stratford. Calvinism alone had rejected humanism as incompatible with the will and glory of God.

To tell the story of this conflict in the New England churches is to recite a chapter without a precedent in religious history ; a story, too, not without a touch of tragedy, whose bitter impression still lingers in the consciousness of the New England people. Elsewhere, as in Scotland or England, in Holland or even in Geneva, the spirit of Calvinism was moderated and softened. In New England alone was the attempt made to render it consistent by carrying it out to its logical conclusion, with the result that it reached an appalling severity, and was characterized by a seeming inhumanity which has no parallel in history. By his towering genius and the force of his high character Jonathan Edwards succeeded in rallying the dispirited adherents of the traditional faith and inspiring them with the conviction of success. He reasserted divine sovereignty and original sin with a deeper emphasis ; he seemed to have ground to powder the Arminian doctrine of the freedom of the will ; he offered a theory of virtue as lofty as it was impracticable, which threatened to annihilate the human affections : and he did it all with an air of such supreme mastery of the situation that no one was found, in his own or a later generation, who could compete with him on equal terms. But it is by no means a safe thing to silence one’s opponents without convincing them, for now many were driven to adopt what is called in philosophy the " double standard : ” they were forced to admit that reason could prove things to be true which the heart rejected as false. In this situation, so critical, so dangerous to the interests of true religion, questions also began to be asked to which Edwards’s writings afforded no answer. Over these questions the people were brooding, some in serious mood, others using them as puzzles with which to embarrass their teachers, when Dr. Samuel Hopkins arose to do his peculiar work, to meet these inquiries in the spirit of Edwards’s teaching, and thus develop what was called the Edwardian theology.

Hopkins had been Edwards’s pupil, and in later years was admitted to his intimate friendship. Having graduated at Yale College in 1741, at the age of twenty, he had gone in the following year to reside in Edwards’s house at Northampton, in order, as the custom then was, to his preparation for the ministry. Edwards was a reserved and silent man, not given to forming intimate relationships, but he must have been flattered by the devotion of his pupil. This association with Edwards constitutes the romance of Hopkins’s life. His first parish was at Great Barrington, in Berkshire, and after he had lived there in isolation for several years, Edwards, who had been expelled from Northampton, came to reside in the neighboring town of Stockbridge. Here the two friends — there was a difference of some eighteen years in their ages — labored together in the interest of a reformation of the New England theology. These years at Stockbridge were the most fertile period in Edwards’s literary career. To Hopkins he submitted his writings for examination and criticism. After Edwards’s death, Hopkins studied his manuscripts, edited some of his works, and finally wrote his memoir. No one can read Hopkins’s writings without perceiving how saturated he had become with Edwards’s thought. Whether he is the truest interpreter of Edwards may be doubted, however, for his mind was cast in a different mould. Nor does it appear that Edwards admitted him, after all, to complete intellectual intimacy ; for Hopkins is silent as the grave about Edwards’s more recondite philosophical or theological speculations. Indeed, the two men were so unlike that it may have been the contrast of temperament which lay at the basis of their friendship. For Edwards lived chiefly in another world, and Hopkins was more concerned with the world that now is. Unlike Edwards, Hopkins was no mystic by nature; he had not the poetic, transcendental Edwards’s spirit; where Edwards soared he crawled safely on the ground. His writings are heavy and prosaic ; when he attempts flights of imagination, they have a bizarre quality which borders on the ludicrous. His admiration and love for his teacher, which amounted to hero-worship, may have interfered with his complete mental freedom. For Hopkins would have been better suited with the rising Scotch philosophy, whose basis was in a rugged common sense ; he had no genuine taste for Berkeleyan idealism, in which Edwards was so easily at home, and from which his theology cannot be separated. The attempt of Hopkins to translate a system so refined, so attenuated, so ultra-spiritual, into the common language of life could not be accomplished without affecting its inner quality. That type of the New England theology which is known as Hopkinsianism may be regarded as Hopkins’s personal equation manifested under peculiar circumstances. However this may be, it required great natural independence of character and vigor of mind if Hopkins were to emerge from the shadow of his teacher. It was just these qualities which he possessed, and that in no ordinary degree. And furthermore, he had been taught by Edwards that theology was a progressive science ; that if great improvements had already been made, still greater discoveries remained to be achieved. This principle Hopkins adopted and carried out to the letter. The presumptions of the age, also, were in favor of change and innovation.

But changes in theology cannot be safely made to order. They must express the deepest moods of the soul; they must be rooted in great popular demands, long nourished in secret, the utterances of a people’s heart. It is here that we strike a grave defect of the so-called “ New England theology.” It had too much of a speculative character, as if in the separation of the church from the state hostages need no longer be given to secular affairs, as if the ties had been broken which bind the church to the interests of the life of men in this world. These relations still existed in other countries where Calvinism was allied to the state as the established church. They began to lose their force in New England after the theocracy was overthrown. New England Calvinism set free from prescriptive authority was like a star detached from its orbit which went sounding on its dim and perilous way. Those old divines who spent sixteen hours of every day in their studies, meditating on the problems which Edwards had raised, wearing a place for their feet in the floor beneath their tables, were interesting to themselves, no doubt, and invented ingenious devices. But it was a different thing when they emerged from their seclusion to give the people a taste of their labors. We may praise them for not holding the vicious notion of an exoteric religion for their people and an esoteric religion for themselves. But the result was bad in accustoming their congregations to fruitless logomachies and endless discussions about things in heaven and earth which had no connection with the religious life. Devout souls were entangled in speculations which hurt the simplicity of faith, or fell into difficulties from which there was no release.

It would be a mistake, however, to condemn the whole movement in which these men were engaged as unworthy of our respect or attention. What was an injury to some may have been of benefit to others. They sought to enforce the habit of personal responsible thought on religious issues, which saves men from unthinking acquiescence in tradition or from reliance on priestly authority ; they assumed that there was such a thing as right thinking in theology no less than in philosophy. If they failed to accomplish the purpose at which they aimed, it was not wholly their own fault. The confusion into which they fell, and into which they dragged their hearers, grew out of the attempt to accomplish what was impossible,—to make Calvinism a consistent intellectual system impregnable to assault from the reason. They undertook to do this at a time when the world was moving in an opposite direction. They were unconsciously subject to the very influences which they professed to oppose. Hence it puzzles us to find them breaking down the system which they aimed to defend. We do not know whether to speak of their theology as progressive or as retrogressive. Dr. Hopkins undoubtedly made “ improvements,” as he called them, but there was a certain incongruous quality attaching to his work which sometimes caused it to look two-faced, as if at the same time a reformation and a deformation.

Dr. Hopkins, for example, differed from Edwards in rejecting the dualism in the divine nature between justice and love. From the time of Calvin onward it had been held that love redeems the elect, while justice punishes the reprobates. No greater step could have been taken than to maintain, as Hopkins did, that the essence of Deity was love which extended to universal being. But when it was attempted to incorporate this truth with the tenets of Calvinism, when it appeared that the divine love to universal being was sending to eternal perdition the great majority of those then living, the situation was even worse than before. One could possibly endure that justice should bear the brunt of so awful a necessity, but that the essence of divine love should require it seemed like a caricature and mockery. It was impossible to combine the new statement with the inhumanity of the old system without leading to a result incongruous beyond description. It is evident, however, that Hopkins felt from a distance the coming humanitarianism which was to change the face of human thought. He reveals again this gentler mood in declaring that by far the great majority of men will be saved ; that those who are lost will be but an insignificant fraction of the whole. This humane conclusion was reached by a peculiar process which had no humanity in it. He was looking forward to a millennium, when the present order would be reversed, and this would more than make up for the ages, including his own, in which the majority of each passing generation had been lost. In this Edwards might have agreed with him, for he too made much of the coming of the millennial age ; but still there is this difference between the two men,—that if Edwards thought these things he never said them, and Hopkins did.

Again Hopkins differed from Edwards, and still further disclosed the humaner impulses of his own theology in uttering the conviction that all infants would be saved. He was obliged to depend for the support of this belief, not on Scripture, but on reason, for he found no explicit declaration on this point in the Bible; but it was one of the peculiarities of Hopkins and his school that they regarded inferences from Scripture as having the same high sanction as its express statements. But a doctrine like this, whose basis was in reality a deeper sense of humanity, could not be grafted upon Calvinism without proving a source of profound disturbance to the whole system. It gave rise to inveterate questionings as to the exact time when moral agency in children could be said to begin, when by their own act they repeated the experience of the fall. These inquiries led to restatements and modifications of the doctrine of original sin. They were vehemently agitated in the generation that followed Hopkins, becoming the rock of offense on which his disciples split into hostile schools. Hopkins himself took no part in these discussions. We turn to the questionings of his own age to which he attempted the answer.

The first of these related to the mystery of the existence of evil. Under ordinary circumstances this ancient inquiry has not rested heavily on the religious consciousness. It has been for the most part regarded as a remote speculative issue, which was out of place in the pulpit; relegated, when discussed at all, to the philosopher’s chair. But the school of consistent Calvinists forced the question upon the popular conscience, and also laid upon themselves the responsibility of an answer by their method of dealing with human sinfulness. They used the expression, without fear or hesitation, that God was the author of evil. They affirmed that he not only decreed its existence in a general way, but had actively interested himself in so ordering the divine government that the first man should inevitably sin, and should involve the whole human race along with himself in universal and endless ruin. They not only portrayed in the darkest colors the universality of human sinfulness, but they exaggerated the effects of its action, as if it had so corroded the spiritual capacity that man was distinguished from the brute creation only by his superior intellectual endowment. It is a remark of Coleridge that " to talk of a man being utterly lost to good is absurd, for then he would be a devil at once.” But to Edwards’s mind it had conveyed no absurdity to speak of men — nay, even to address them — as veritable demons, as possessing even in infancy a demoniac nature. Whatever a demon could be imagined as doing or desiring Edwards had attributed to human nature as the crowning evidence of its utter corruption, its destitution of all good. If to this conception of humanity we add that the redemptive forces in human life were represented as so weak that out of the great mass of humanity there are but few who are snatched from the impending misery, we have the peculiar and extraordinary circumstances under which Hopkins discussed the question why sin had been permitted. Had Edwards vouchsafed an answer, he would perhaps have taken refuge in the divine sovereignty which does not condescend to justify the ways of God to men. He was not afraid, in carrying his burdens to that last resort, of weakening his own reverential love for the mystery that upholds and governs the universe. Here again the humaner instincts of Dr. Hopkins may be detected, which, while they do not lead him to deny the premises of his teacher, yet force him, as it were, into an apology for the situation, as if he would like to show that it was not so bad as it seemed. He now appeared as teaching that sin is an occasion of great good to the universe. He did not really show how it was so ; he reasoned that it must be so. He had indeed a suspicion that such a statement coming from the pulpit might be misunderstood. The title of his sermons on the subject contains a qualification: Sin, through Divine Interposition, an Advantage to the Universe, and this no Excuse for Sin or Encouragement to it. But there are some positions which it is difficult to qualify except in mere verbal fashion, and this was one. There is such a thing as good form in theology, and this was very bad form. It is not denied that there may be truth in Hopkins’s statement. It is a commonplace of the religious heart that God overrules the evil that men do, and makes it subserve a righteous end ; but it was improper in the last degree that the Christian pulpit should be devoted to showing that sin was an occasion of great good, for so Dr. Hopkins’s sermons were understood. His treatise on the subject roused against him the hostility of moderate Calvinists and Arminians, as if he had been violating the sanctities of the religious sense. Some, when they read the title, closed the book and would read no further. A certain wag of the time speaks of himself as having tried to act on Hopkins’s principles, yet “ could not quite overcome his scruples, and had a suspicion that all the theologians could say to beget in him a good opinion of sin was a mere device of the father of lies.”

After Jonathan Edwards had maintained, in his Freedom of the Will, with what seemed an invincible argument, that the human will possessed no creative, originating power, that it could not control or change its predominant inclination whether toward good or evil, the question had arisen, How was it possible, then, to make any successful efforts after goodness, or in any way seek to accomplish that inward change which was known as conversion ? This question did not seriously threaten the interests of religion in Edwards’s lifetime. He alludes to it only to condemn it as a trifling evasion. But after his death a controversy arose on this point which lasted for more than half a century. There was indeed but one consistent answer to such an inquiry, if Edwards’s contention was right, — it was impossible for men to do anything to help themselves; they were not to blame if they took no steps in the matter; they must wait until it pleased God to act; it was unnecessary for the preacher to give himself any further trouble about them. Such was the answer returned from the pew to the pulpit, coming not only from indifferent hearers, but also from the more serious-minded. At this very moment, when the effort to make Calvinism consistent had resulted, as it were, in a religious deadlock, there was heard an impressive voice, coming from the inmost recesses of its religious experience, which coincided with and confirmed what Edwards had contemned as the voice of the scorner. It was in the year 1761 that Sandeman came to this country from Scotland with a message on this point which carried the old Calvinism to a degree of consistency not yet attained by the leaders of the New England theology. He came in the spirit of an ancient prophet to reproach the teachers of Calvinism for their inconsistency in holding that while men were utterly depraved they could take any step to effect their conversion. Everything which they did toward this end before the great change was accomplished in them from without was sinful : their prayers for enlightenment were sinful, their Bible-reading, their attendance upon religious services. There was no more probability that they would attain the coveted gift by the strictest attention to “ the means of grace ” than if they totally neglected them.

“ These sentiments,” says a well-informed writer of the time, " were entirely new. As soon as they were published they gave a prodigious shock to all serious men, both ministers and others. Many ministers now refrained from all exhortations to the unregenerate. The perplexing inquiry with sinners was, What have we then to do ? All we do is sin ; to sin is certainly wrong. We ought, therefore, to remain still, doing nothing, until God bestows upon us renewing grace.”

Such was the crisis when Hopkins came forward with his solution of the distressing problem. His method of probing and overcoming the difficulty constitutes the quintessence of the Hopkinsian theology. In the first place, he could not but agree with Sandeman. Honest and faithful in his desire for consistency, he took the step which Sandeman had indicated : he declared that all the strivings of the unregenerate after conversion were sinful, and only increased their guilt. But having demonstrated that God alone can effect the inward change from sin to holiness, that man can contribute in no way, in not the slightest degree, to the result, he suddenly executed a flank movement with such celerity and mystery that it was difficult to trace his route. When we next find him he is in the opposite camp, advocating with moderate Calvinists and Arminians the absolute necessity of the “ use of means,” of prayer and church services, and of exhortations to the unconverted. This strategic movement seems to have been regarded by Hopkins and his friends as a great victory. But no one could explain, not even Hopkins himself, exactly how the victory had been achieved. Now that the dust which obscured the controversy has subsided, we can see what it was that Hopkins had done. He had placed in juxtaposition the divine action and the human action as in some way in necessary combination, so that one could not be without the other. If he had found some organic relation between the two, he would have been entitled to the highest honors in theology, to the gratitude of all who came after him. We may admit that it was something, it was much, that he should have been the first among New England Calvinists to discern that the combination of the human with the divine was the great end to be reached. But this union as he conceived it was mechanical and unreal, and calculated to create for the time being a deeper confusion. What Hopkins had in reality achieved was what the Cartesian philosophy had been driven to do, when the absolute separation between spirit and matter had made it impossible for the one to act upon the other. The theologians who accepted that philosophy brought the separated elements again together by what was known as the doctrine of occasionalism. The means of grace, attendance at church, the study of Scripture, the efforts of prayer, these also become the occasions which the divine will employs on which to work its gracious ends. They contribute nothing to the result, and yet the result cannot be without them. As we look beneath the theory, the divine will still dominates and overpowers the human, reducing it after all to the same nullity as Edwards had done by his fatal logic.

We are sometimes inclined to wonder whether there was anything in these New England theologians which corresponded to what is now familiar as modern doubt. Did they ever react from the teaching of their own spiritual ancestors ? Did they ever feel that the ground beneath them was hollow? Perhaps not in the same way or to the same extent that their descendants have done. But as we study these obscure controversies in which Hopkins was engaged for the greater part of his life, as we note the strange contradictions into which he fell, we cannot avoid the suspicion that what he called making Calvinism consistent was in reality an effort to escape from the toils of a system in which his large soul was cramped and ill at ease. He did not possess the skill or the power to rid himself of his shackles ; or if he did, his want of literary art belies him. He seems to be only more deeply entangled with every effort which he makes to be free. It was this peculiarity in his thought which confused his readers, which annoyed and angered his opponents, and which exposed him also to the charge of insincerity. Indeed, there could be no more glaring contradiction, for example, than to assert in one breath that man was utterly depraved, incompetent to do anything for his salvation; that this depravity consisted in an evil inclination implanted in the soul by divine decree, and that God alone could overcome this inclination; and then to turn about and not only condemn men for possessing this evil inclination, but call upon them to abandon it immediately, to create in themselves at once a new heart, and accuse them of increasing their guilt every moment that they delayed to respond. Dr. Hopkins made no effort to soften or explain away the contradiction. When pushed for some explanation, he replied that the order of society and of all moral government required such a method of dealing with men. Of the hollowness beneath his feet he did not appear to be conscious. He was not dishonest or insincere, but he had grown so accustomed to treat theology as if it were a science merely of words and theorems that he no longer distinguished between the conclusions of his barren dialectic and the demands upon his large spirit of the moral emergencies of life. It almost seems as if he were bound to escape at any hazard from the fearful dilemma in which Edwards’s logic had placed him. It may have been for this reason that he ostensibly adopted the whole Arminian nomenclature of the freedom of the will. When he had taken this step, he felt at liberty to roam about in the preserves of the enemy, borrowing whatever his need required. We complain that he did not see his inconsistency and the confusion it was working; for ordinary people, drilled as they had been in the tenets of Calvinism, could not so easily stultify themselves. But Dr. Hopkins glories in what appears like an escapade, as if it were the greatest of all his victories. He was now able to speak two dialects, while his opponents were confined to one. There is a tone of jubilation and defiance in his writings, as if he would taunt his enemies with their incompetency. At one moment he can affirm absolute decrees with the most rigid Calvinist, and the next go beyond the Arminians in asserting human liberty. You look for him in the one place, and you find he is in the other. He rejoiced in his ability to skip from one platform to the other, and to confound his adversaries who could not account for such versatility. All the time that he was talking like Arminians he meant something very different from what they meant; he had never for a moment accepted their definition of freedom, — that the will can control or reverse its inclination, or choose between good and evil. So far as he believed in freedom of the will, it was in a lower sense, — the freedom which the animal may share with man of following its inclination without hindrance ; a freedom which has no significance for the higher life of the spirit, as it seeks to pass from the things which are of the earth, earthy, to the things which are divine. But the school of new Calvinists could not long pursue such a course with impunity. Language does not naturally lend itself to ambiguity or confusion. Its tendency is toward reality. Those who talk like Arminians must eventually come to think like them ; and this was the fate which in the then distant future befell the school of New England, or consistent Calvinists.

One other point remains to be mentioned, the chief characteristic, perhaps, by which Hopkinsianism, if known at all, is remembered to-day. It was called the doctrine of disinterested benevolence or submission ; or, in common parlance, “ a willingness to be damned for the glory of God.” The reasoning by which this inference was deduced from Hopkins’s idea of Deity is simple and clear. God is to be defined as love for universal being; but since this love requires that some should be assigned to endless perdition, and as no man can tell beforehand in his own case whether it is God’s intention to save him or not, and it is therefore possible that the wellbeing of the universe may require his damnation, every one must make it the test of his own love to God whether he is willing to be damned in case God’s love to the universe should require it.

We have here another illustration of how Hopkins shocked his age, incurring at the same time also ridicule and contempt and execration. To the ordinary view a requirement like this was augmenting the process known as conversion, already intricate and severe, with a burden beyond the power of endurance, whose full significance it was not within the limits of the imagination to conceive. It seemed like calling for an act of spiritual suicide as the condition of spiritual life. The French mystics of the sixteenth century had also spoken of disinterested love; but when they sought to force the soul back upon itself in older to test the inmost quality of its devotion, they had required that a man should love God for himself alone, — not from fear of hell on the one hand, nor from desire of heaven on the other. Let it be supposed that heaven and hell were annihilated, and then let the soul ask itself the supreme question of existence. The mysticism of Hopkins, although not without an affiliation with the French school, went further, and called for the sacrifice of the spiritual life itself as a means of attaining it. There is nothing so extraordinary as this in the whole history of religion. Nevertheless it may have been the necessary process through which Calvinism must pass in order to its emancipation ; for it had preached the doctrine of the endless perdition of the great majority of men with an intensity and persistence without a parallel. The result was what has been called a celestial selfishness ; men were seeking, as the expression went, to get religion in order to escape the suffering of hell. Against this low, degrading tendency, which showed itself on a large scale in the religious revivals of the time, Hopkins was raising an earnest protest in his own behalf no less than that of others. Again, impossible, inconceivable, as was his doctrine of disinterested submission, it may be interpreted as an effort to do the one manly thing under the circumstances. He was not willing to preach that others were to be damned for the glory of God, while he himself had not undergone the same exposure; nay, even had not striven to realize it in his own experience. To the day of his death, it is said, he never felt certain as to his own fate. Compare this attitude with the complacence of other preachers who ranked themselves among the few who would certainly escape the well-nigh universal doom. Viewed in this light, the principle of disinterested submission appears as an almost superhuman effort on the part of a great soul to set himself free from the toils of a false and degrading system. If anything could have softened the inhumanity of the old Calvinism, it was this. And indeed it was the beginning of the end.

The doctrine of disinterested submission became, as it were, the badge of recognition in Hopkinsian circles, and there is testimony on record that it served the purpose for which it was intended. Miss Sedgwick speaks of “that most ennobling doctrine of the Hopkinsian creed, complete self-abnegation, — a total regard and consecration to the glory of the Creator.” Of a certain woman in Newport, converted to the doctrine by Hopkins himself, it is said that “she expressed herself, with tearful surprise, as having been brought into a new world.” A Puritan minister living in Tennessee, who had adopted Hopkinsian principles, made his last will and testament in accordance with this tenet; “ giving his soul to God, to be made, for Christ’s sake, in bounden grace an eternal vessel of mercy in heaven, or in righteous judgment for his sins a vessel of everlasting wrath in hell, just as it seemed good in his sight.”Hopkins, it should be said, never insisted on acquiescence in this formula as an evidence of conversion, though he thought it was desirable evidence, and in his charity believed that it was unconsciously implied in every genuine case of religious faith. Among his followers, it was customary to propound the question to candidates for ordination whether they were willing to be damned for the glory of God ; but it does not appear that any were rejected who found themselves unable to utter what was fast becoming a mere shibboleth of a school. As a technical theological tenet it long ago disappeared, and now finds its place in the museum of religious curiosities.

Toward the close of his life, Dr. Hopkins was disturbed by a formula which was then coming into vogue, — “ The Saviour died for me.” It was among the conventicles of sects which were making inroads on the "standing order” that this phrase became the burden and the refrain of the popular preaching. Dr. Hopkins could not become reconciled to its use, for it seemed to him at variance with the principles of a true theology. In one of his letters he attempted to demonstrate that it was false. It was impossible to know that the divine love went forth to any individual until he had first given evidence of a genuine disinterested love to God. In this we have a suggestive hint of the gulf which divides the Hopkinsian theology from that which has supplanted it. For it is the characteristic of the modern pulpit that it places the burden upon God ; Hopkins placed it upon man. In the modern church it is God who is seeking man; it is man who is passive in the process. In the theology we have been describing it is man who is active, who is making the quest for God with an energy that is almost superhuman, while God, to human vision wholly unconcerned, is awaiting the result. Vast as is the change which has been wrought in religious sentiment, truer to the facts of human experience and the needs of human life as the modern postulate may be, it is yet possible that there is a neglected element of strength in the position which Hopkins spent his life in enforcing. The men who were bred under it, who responded to it, were strong characters, marked by deep devotion to moral principle, which was exhibited in rugged honesty and integrity, and in great, energy of purpose. If Dr. Hopkins were now to enter one of our well - filled modern churches, where the congregation sits indifferent as the message of a divine love to every individual is proclaimed, he might find fresh confirmation for his own teaching. If the divine love is a possession worth securing, it must be attained by effort and continued struggle. To know that one may have it without an effort tends to belittle its value, and to weaken one of the strongest of moral as well as of religious motives.

Dr. Hopkins passed his life shut up to his own reflections, within the narrow precincts of his theological system. He had learned to think vigorously for himself, but he had a strange incapacity for seeing how other people thought. He showed no concern at the great revulsion of feeling which was all around him in his later years. He had no anticipation of a truth to be revealed to the coming generation which would shake the principles to whose advocacy he had devoted his life. It is interesting to note that he came in contact with the two men who, if he had questioned them, might have taught him that there were depths and possibilities in human nature, as well as in the divine love, of which he did not dream. He met that quaint, picturesque old man, John Murray, the first preacher of Universalism in this country, a man to whom justice has not yet been done. They rode for some distance together on their way to Newport, where Murray proposed to preach his offensive doctrine. Hopkins was in his gruffest mood, if we may trust Murray’s account; but there is internal evidence for suspecting that it may have been embroidered. Their conversation, according to Murray’s report, quickly degenerated into a dry dialectic in which each tried to get the better of the other. While Hopkins refused to Murray his pulpit, with the intention of guarding his people against false teaching, yet, in the kindness of his heart, before they parted, he told the modest, desolate stranger of some man in Newport who would find him a place to preach, as well as put him in the way of food and shelter for man and beast.

A peculiar interest attaches to Channing’s connection with Hopkins, both of them reformers in their way, — the one just closing his work, the other not yet come to the consciousness of his mission. Channing was still a youth when the patriarch of a “ new theology,” which was fast becoming old, gave him his blessing. But in this case, also, neither of them seems to have thought the other worth questioning in the interest of some fresh light upon the mystery of human existence. Channing regretted, in later life, that he had not made some record of his conversations with Hopkins, who was inclined to talk freely about himself and his opinions. Had he done so, we might have gained a new conception of Hopkins’s thought as it passed through Channing’s rare and beautiful spirit. We might also have had a deeper insight into Channing’s mind, as he was making the great transition from the theology of the divine sovereignty which had become involved in such inextricable toils to the humanitarianism which found its stronghold in the doctrine of the sacredness of human nature.

It was not as a preacher or pulpit orator that Hopkins won distinction. Judging from the accounts that have come down to us, he appears to have been not only unattractive, but repellent, both in the manner and the substance of his preaching ; though there were occasions when, to use his own language, he “ had his freedom ” to such an extent as to leave a deep impression on his hearers. “He was,” says Dr. Channing, “ the first minister I heard, but I heard him with no profit. His manner was singularly unattractive, . . . and the circumstances attending the service were repulsive. The church had been much injured by the British during the occupancy of the town, and the congregation were too poor to repair it. It had a desolate look, and in winter the rattling of the windows made an impression which time has not worn out. It was literally as cold as a barn. . . . His preaching could be only understood by one who had heard him. His delivery was the worst I ever met with. Such tones never came from any human voice within my hearing. Some of them approached a cracked bell more nearly than anything to which I can compare it. He was the very ideal of a bad delivery. He changed from a high key to a low key, and the reverse, with no apparent reason. With a disposition to bring forward abstract and unpalatable notions, is it wonderful that he did so little in the pulpit? ”

But if he failed as a preacher and parish minister, he was held in honor as a religious teacher and leader. To clergy and to laity he became a spiritual director, solving religious difficulties ; a sort of father confessor, also, to devout women, of whom a band in Boston elected him as their chaplain. The extent of his influence as the leader of a school or “ new departure ” may be roughly estimated by the circumstance that at his death, in 1803, there were said to be no less than one hundred of the New England clergy who accepted the tenets known as Hopkinsian. These constituted a large proportion so far as numbers go ; but they must also have been equal to, if not above, the average of their brethren in intellectual and moral force, for it required courage to be known as an Hopkinsian, as well as strong assimilative powers to receive and retain so difficult a theology.

It was Dr. Hopkins’s misfortune throughout his whole career to incur bitter opposition and to be persistently misrepresented. In the growing disaffection toward Calvinism, he was identified with its most repugnant features, some of which he had striven to modify or eliminate. To the popular imagination he became a theological monstrosity, as if there were nothing too horrible to be thought which he had not uttered. Things were attributed to him which he had never said. No credit was given to him for the attempt to improve and humanize the old faith ; he was thought to have made it worse instead of better. Even the boys in the street poked fun at him. When Dr. Channing, on one occasion, alluded to him in a respectful manner, it caused so much surprise that, in a note appended to his address, he justified his allusion by showing that both as a man and as a theologian Dr. Hopkins had been misrepresented. But it does not appear that this much-abused man took greatly to heart the opposition and calumnies of his age. He was sustained by an unwavering conviction that his system was true; that in his numerous controversies he had got the better of all his foes.

Dr. Hopkins indeed accomplished his earthly pilgrimage under trials and burdens which would have dispirited ordinary men. He was naturally of a despondent temperament, with no rapturous experience of another world, and in this world condemned to poverty and seeming failure. He lived on a meagre salary, whether at Great Barrington or at Newport ; leaving the former place on account of the inability of his parishioners to support him, but quite as much, it may be thought, on account of his obnoxious preaching. On the pittance that was doled out to him at Newport he managed to live, without complaining. His lamentations were reserved for his failures to reach the spiritual ideal he had set before him. Poor as he was, he managed wisely his narrow means, never running in debt, paying in cash for what he bought, even finding a surplus to extend in charity. He lived so much in his thought, and his outward circumstances were so unpropitious, that his manners were rustic and uncouth. He had at one time been spoken of for the presidency of Princeton College, but his way of living and his mode of address were thought not polite enough for that exalted position. He was aware that his peculiarities stood in his way, and in that massive frame — he was upwards of six feet in height and of corresponding proportions — there was the delicate sensitiveness of a woman lest he should embarrass others by his awkwardness and lack of acceptability. There was withal a certain charming naïveté, an outspokenness, which shows itself at times in his writings and conversation. He once told a young man, who wore his ruffles in a half-concealed way in his bosom, that he did not wear ruffles himself, but if he did he should wear them like a man. Altogether the man as such was admirable, even great: it challenges one’s sympathies that he should have been so misunderstood. His personal character cannot be spoken of except in terms of respect and even reverence.

As to his political opinions Hopkins was a Federalist, preaching Thanksgiving and Fast Day sermons in which he made his sympathies apparent. But none of the writings he has left show any appreciation of the deeper significance of the hour in which he was living. His allusions to the American Revolution reveal no consciousness of the thrilling greatness of the moment when a new nation was born into the world. It was, after all, but a side issue compared with his theological controversies. It was not a characteristic of the New England theology, for which he stood, to emphasize the spiritual worth of nationality. In the hostility of the Puritans to the English state, bred among them by religious persecution, there was latent also a bias against the prevailing type of nationality which had been born in the age of the Reformation. It was not a nation, therefore, in the ordinary sense, but a new experiment known as a theocracy, which they had attempted to establish in New England. When that failed them, they looked forward to a millennium as the only hope of renovation for the evils of the time, — a dispensation when all things should be made new. But to nationality as equally with the church a divine institution, through which humanity was accomplishing its high destiny, to this they were indifferent; in the nature of the case it found no treatment in their theology.

But there is one phase of Dr. Hopkins’s life which needs no qualification, where the interpreter or the critic finds his function unnecessary. The preaching of Hopkins may have made no impression on the fashionable town of Newport, where the greater part of his life was spent, but the town made an impression upon him. It was one of the centres of the slave trade, to which also its wealth was largely due. Here Hopkins awoke to the evils of human slavery, and was one of the first leaders in the long crusade which ended in its abolition. So far as the principle at stake was concerned, he did not hold that slavery was a sin in itself or a crime against humanity ; under certain circumstances, he thought it might be tolerated. But defective as his principle may have been, it did not diminish the ardor with which he labored, by his writings as well as by personal efforts, to arouse his age to a sense of a great evil. He was interested in schemes for colonizing and Christianizing Africa by means of converted negroes, while in America he demanded not only the suppression of the traffic in human flesh, but the abolition of slavery altogether as unnecessary and unjustifiable. Nor did he confine himself to schemes of a general character. He took a deep personal interest in the negro population, and especially in a few individuals upon whom he rested great hopes. The members of his own church were forbidden to hold or traffic in slaves. To his efforts the legislation in Rhode Island was largely due which in 1774 forbade the importation of slaves into the colony, and again in 1784 declared that the children of slaves, born after the first of the following March, should be free. These things are remembered now that his theology is forgotten. But if there is any necessary connection between speculative principle and ethical practice, it may be that his great human sympathies were originated and stimulated by his forbidding doctrine of disinterested benevolence ; for, viewed in its essence and apart from its mode of statement, it meant the duty of self-sacrifice for the good of the universe, which was also the glory of God. So Channing regarded it, when he declared that he was " grateful to the stern teacher who had turned his thoughts and heart to the claims of impartial universal benevolence.”

Alexander V. G. Allen.