A History of American Literature

60 The Colonial and Revolutionary Periods

the flames of divine wrath flashing about it,” that are “ready every moment to ...

burn it asunder,” consigning all those who hang there to “a great furnace of wrath, a

wide and bottomless pit, full of fire and wrath.” The other alternative, of conversions

and salvation, is figured, for example, in Edwards’s description in 1723 of the woman

who became his wife, Sarah Pierrepoint. Like so many of Edwards’s writings – or, for

that matter, work by others inspired by the Puritan belief that material facts are

spiritual signs – it is at once intimate and symbolic. This is, at once, his own dear

beloved and an emblem of any redeemed soul in communion with God. “The Son

of God created the world for this very end,” Edwards wrote elsewhere, in “Covenant

of Redemption: ‘Excellency of Christ,’ ” “to communicate Himself in an image of His

own excellency.” “By this we may discover the beauty of many of those metaphors

and similes, which to an unphilosophical person do seem uncouth,” he infers; since

everywhere in nature we may consequently behold emblems, “the emanations of the

sweet benevolence of Jesus Christ.” That belief in the spiritual and symbolic nature

of the perceived world animates Edwards’s writing. So does his fervent belief that all

existence, natural and moral, depends on God, and his equally fervent conviction

that all human faculties, including reason, must be placed in the service of faith in

Him. It is all this that makes the writing, and Edwards himself, so typical of his time

in some ways and, in others, so extraordinarily exceptional.

Toward the Revolution

It is possible to see Jonathan Edwards as a distillation of one side of the Puritan

inheritance: that is, the spiritual, even mystical strain in Puritan thought that empha-

sized the inner life, the pursuit of personal redemption, and the ineffable character

of God’s grace. In which case, it is equally possible to see Edwards’s great contempo-

rary, Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790), as a distillation and development of another

side: that tendency in Puritanism that stressed the outer life, hard work and good

conduct, and the freedom of the individual will. Another way of putting it is to say

that Franklin embodied the new spirit of America, emerging in part out of Puritanism

and in part out of the Enlightenment, that was coming to dominate the culture. And

he knew it. That is clear from his account of his own life in his most famous work,

the Autobiography, which he worked on at four different times (1771, 1784, 1788,

1788–1789), revised extensively but left unfinished at the time of his death; an

American edition was published in 1818, but the first complete edition of what

he had written only appeared nearly a hundred years after his death, in 1867.

Uncompleted though it is, the Autobiography nevertheless has a narrative unity. It is

divided into three sections: first, Franklin’s youth and early manhood in Boston and

Philadelphia; second, Franklin’s youthful attempts to achieve what he terms “moral

perfection”; and third, Franklin’s use of the principles discovered in the first section

and enumerated in the second to enable him to rise to prosperity and success as a

scientist, politician, and philanthropist. Throughout all three sections, Franklin is

keen to present his life as exemplary and typical: proof positive that anyone can

make it, especially in America, “the Land of Labour” where “a general happy

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