diverted. And then to show how God, who does this, must be necessarily Omniscient, and know every the least thing, that must happen through Eternity." "To observe, in a proper place, that, since Creation is the first causing of such resistance [that is, the resistance of matter, or solidity], and Upholding is the causing of it successively; therefore the same person, who created, upholds and governs; whence we may learn who it is that sustains this noble fabrick of glorious bodies-and to expatiate much upon it." Edwards' progression from science and philosophy to theology was in no sense a desertion: the three subjects possessed him side by side, theology perhaps first in time as first in eminence among his intellectual passions. He had always a vision of some central Cause or Order from which all phenomena, all substance, proceeded, in which, indeed, phenomena and substance had their only existence. As scientist and philosopher he moved among the foothills of the Mount of Vision, always conscious that the Mount was there; but when, at about eighteen or nineteen, he underwent his great conviction of its presence, he saw such glories at its summit that he never quite recovered from that light. His progress may be traced in the surviving pages of his Diary begun 18 December, 1722. On that day was made the thirtyfifth of the seventy Resolutions which so singularly complement the thirteen Precepts of Franklin-the never suppressed mysticism of the age asserting itself against its predominant commonsense. Edwards differs from Franklin not so much in his more lively or more guilty sense of sin as in his feeling that the true end of man is to be achieved by rapture. Day after day, his Diary shows, he reproached himself because he could not always keep ecstatic but repeatedly descended to temporal concerns and became "dull, dry and dead." He did indeed, like Franklin, make vows of temperance and industry, but his temperance means asceticism, and his industry, passionate toil. "Resolved," he says in his sixth Resolution, "To live with all my might, while I do live." We think of Thoreau, wanting "to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life"-or of Pater, wanting "to burn always with this hard gemlike flame." And yet Edwards, proud and vivid a youth as Thoreau or Pater, at twenty submitted himself utterly to the old God of New Eng

land. On Saturday, 12 January, 1723, he made his solemn dedication. "I have been before God," he wrote that morning, "and have given myself, all that I am, and have, to God; so that I am not, in any respect, my own. I can challenge no right to this understanding, this will, these affections, which are in me. Neither have I any right to this body, or any of its members-no right to this tongue, these hands, these feet; no right to these senses, these eyes, these ears, this smell, or this taste." Of course he had "dull, dry and dead" hours thereafter, but he never again turned back. He had taken the great step of his life; he had given up once for all the secular aspirations which might have hindered him in his career as the last High Priest of American Calvinism. He threw in his fortunes with those of Connecticut's ancient creed, and that in the very year in which Franklin, vexed and at outs with Boston, left New England finally behind him for an ampler scene and regions more tolerant.

The divergence between them after 1723 will appear from a comparison of their two courtships, which may be said to have begun in that year. At least, it was then,

as all the world knows, that Deborah Read stood in her father's door in Market Street and watched her future husband march by with his three great penny rolls. And it was then that Jonathan Edwards set down on a blank leaf what he had heard of a certain New Haven girl, Sarah Pierrepont, in words more eloquent than any he is known to have used before. Perhaps the comparison is not wholly fair, for Edwards wrote in his fervent youth, and Franklin only many cool years later when he was great enough to have autobiography demanded of him. But at least no one will seriously doubt that Benjamin chose Deborah with circumspection and very deliberately wooed and wed her; or that Jonathan was impelled to Sarah (how nicely Biblical the four names!) by an exquisite and impetuous passion, testified to not only by his mystical account of her but by the letter in which he urged her to a speedy marriage. "Patience is commonly esteemed a virtue," he says, "but in this case I may almost regard it as a vice." The two wives proved both of them faithful and competent and affectionate. So much is sure, though they do indeed now shine for us with borrowed light-Mrs. Franklin homely and pru

dent like her husband, though without his wit; and Mrs. Edwards mystical and rapturous like her husband, though without the inhumanity which went with his ardor for abstract doctrines. We may question which of them seems really more pathetic: Franklin's "good old wife” waiting patiently, at times lonesomely, in Philadelphia through the many years in which her great husband moved gloriously about in Europe; or Edwards' exquisite companion trying to lift herself, apparently under his injunctions, to the plane of rapture on which she could endure it, for the glory of God, even "if the feeling and conduct of my husband were to be changed from tenderness and affection, to extreme hatred and cruelty, and that every day," or if "God should employ some other instrument than Mr. Edwards in advancing the work of grace in Northampton."

Having left the more or less common path of their boyhood, Edwards and Franklin as writers walked very different paths. Although the New England sermon of 1730 had lost some of its terrors, particularly its heroic dimensions and immense anathemas, and had fallen to meaner levels, it was a proved instrument for the hand that could wield it. Edwards had therefore little to invent; he entered his career working in an established tradition. What he contributed was a new flame of belief. His conversion had come through mystic vision, through revelation. He spoke with the certainty and authority of one who had met God face to face. It was the echoes of his preaching at Northampton, where he entered upon a full pastorate as successor to his grandfather Solomon Stoddard in 1729, that won him in 1731 an invitation to deliver a "public lecture" in Boston, and he there caught the ear of New England with his first great sermon, God Glorified in Man's Dependence. Edwards' doctrine was not new, but his eloquence was, his confidence was. Against the democratic notions which had latterly so crept into Zion that even Jehovah's sovr ereign power and right had yielded something to human dignity, Edwards spoke out. God was infinitely master, and man infinitely slave. The root of Edwards' argument lay without doubt in those hours of illumination which had taught him the enormous majesty of God. True, he had learned it then through beauty, singing to

himself verses from the Canticles and rejoicing in the electric shock of thunder. But, like all mystics, he had to speak the dialect of the world when he came from his trance; and the dialect of Edwards' world was Calvinism. We need not too curiously inquire how he had translated his vision into the "delightful conviction," "the exceeding pleasant, bright, and sweet" doctrine of predestination, for Edwards himself was never quite explicit about all the steps of his translation. What we do find important is what New England at the time found important: that out of the forests of Hampshire County had come a beautiful young saint to lift up a decaying doctrine, to renew a waning cause. And nothing was more natural than that, two years later, Edwards in The Reality of Spiritual Light, preached at Northampton, should vindicate his authority by asserting the existence of a “Spiritual and Divine Light, immediately imparted to the soul by God, of a different nature from any that is obtained by natural means.” He challenged the march of reason as he had already challenged the march of democracy, seeing in them, now that he had become so totally a theologian, only insurrection and error.

Franklin was with the insurrectionists, keeping a shop in Philadelphia, and following, as printer, the trade which of all trades perhaps most promotes democracy, if not reason. He had studied Addison, and, too direct of vision to become a mere literary imitator, had brought something of Addison's deft, urbane raillery to the provincial subjects which engaged his pen. In Boston Franklin had made fun of Harvard and ridiculed the New England funeral elegies of his youth; in London he had gone speculating with the Deists; in Philadelphia he united raillery with speculation, and added the neverstumbling commonsense which was to be his most memorable quality. Of course Pennsylvania in that day could no more support a mere man of letters than could Massachusetts, and indeed Franklin was so far from being such a person that he never regarded his writing as anything but a useful tool for his projects and his philanthropies. But his pen was repeatedly in his hand. He followed the Dogood papers of 1722 with the Busybody papers which appeared in 1728-29 for no graver purpose than to point out the follies and blunders and

unreasonableness of his fellow citizens: of the woman who pestered a shopkeeper by prolonged visits; of the many "honest Artificers" who wasted innumerable hours in the search for treasure, "buried by Pyrates, and others in old Times." To his Pennsylvania Gazette he contributed, beginning with 1730, various pieces without reading which we can now form a correct estimate neither of Franklin's observation and judgment and comic force and point nor of the community in which he soon became the most eminent citizen. No doubt he was something of an enfant terrible: witness his impudent Apology for Printers, which ruffled the Philadelphia clergy, and the robust Speech of Polly Baker in defence of her illegal fecundity. Doubtless, too, his Dialogues between Philocles and Horatio on the subject of pain and pleasure seemed pretty care-free to the orthodox. But in the main Franklin pleased his entire public. He could be gross or refined, homely or elegant, prudent or altruistic; he was a lover and a defender of both wit and virtue. He lacked, indeed, the mystical radiance of Edwards, but in what community may a man not thrive without that! Over against the subtlest sentence Edwards ever wrote may be set the sentence of Franklin, itself sublime in its way, in which he commented upon a proposed tax: "In matters of general concern to the people, and especially where burthens are to be laid upon them, it is of use to consider, as well what they will be apt to think and say, as what they ought to think." Edwards exceeded Franklin no further in experience of God and the deeper soul of man than he was exceeded by him in experience of daily realities and human behavior; Franklin could not have written the Personal Narrative nor Edwards The Way to Wealth.

Nothing better exhibits the Franklin of colonial days than the successive issues of Poor Richard. Of course Franklin did not originate the idea: a real Richard Saunders had long edited in England The Apollo Angelicanus and the name of the chief English comic almanac was Poor Robin. But Robin and Richard left all their foreign baggage behind them when they crossed the Atlantic to be combined and reincarnated in Poor Richard. It was his intense reality which commended him to those who saw in him a fellow-citizen. He uttered