A History of the American People

parts and learning.' It was part of Edwards' message that knowledge of God was education as
well as revelation, that it was an aesthetic as well as a spiritual experience, and that it heightened
all the senses. Edwards was not a simple evangelist but a major philosopher, whose works fill
many thick volumes. But the core of his message, and certainly the secret of his appeal, then and
now, and to the masses as well as to intellectuals, is that love is the essence of the religious
experience.
In A Treatise Concerning the Religious Affections (1746) Edwards lists in detail the twelve
signs by which true religious love and its false counterfeit can be distinguished, the most
important of which is the ability to detect divine things' bythe beauty of their moral
excellency.' It is from the sense of spiritual beauty' that there arisesall true experimental
knowledge of religion' and, indeed, a whole new world of knowledge."" Through this doctrine of love, Edwards proceeds to liberate the human will by demolishing the old Calvinist doctrine of determinacy and double-predestination. In his The Freedom of the Will (1754) Edwards insists that human beings are free because they act according to their perception and conviction of their own good. That will can be corrupted, of course, leading men and women to find the greatest apparent good in self and other lesser goods rather than in God. But earnest teaching can restore the purity of the will. At all events, all can choose: they are responsible for their choices and God will hold them accountable for it. But nothing is determined in advance-all is to be played for. What Edwards in fact was offering-though he did not live long enough to write his great Summa Theologica, which was to have been called A History of the Work of Redemption-was a framework for life in which free will, good works, purity of conduct, the appreciation of God's world and the enjoyment of its beauties, and the eventual attainment of salvation, all fitted, blended and fused together by the informing and vivifying energy of love. Here was indeed a frontier religion, for persons of all creeds and backgrounds and ethnic origins, native-born Americans and the new arrivals from Europe, united by the desire to do good, lead useful and godly lives, and help others to do the same in the new and splendid country divine providence had given them. Edwards' earliest published sermons were widely read and discussed. What particularly interested fellow-evangelists, in England as well as America, was his remarkable account, A Faithful Narrative (1737), of the conversions his methods brought about in his own parish. One of the Englishmen he thus stirred was John Wesley, over in Georgia in the years 1735-8, to help General Oglethorpe evangelize the colonists and Indians. Another was George Whitefield (1714- 70), also a member of the general's mission. Wesley was the greatest preacher of the 18th century, or certainly the most assiduous, but his preoccupation was mainly with the English poor. Whitefield, however, was a rhetorical and histrionic star of spectacular gifts, who did not trouble himself, as Wesley did, with organization. He simply carried a torch and used it to set alight multitudes. He found America greatly to his taste. In 1740 he made the first continental tour of the colonies, from Savannah in Georgia to Boston in the north, igniting violent sheets of religious flame everywhere. It was Whitefield, the Grand Itinerant as he was known, who caused the Great Awakening to take off. He preached, as he put it himself,with much Flame, Clearness
and Power' and watched hungrily as 'Dagon Falls Daily Before the Ark.' He seems to have
appealed equally to conventional Anglicans, fierce Calvinists, German pietists, Scotch-Irish,
Dutch, even a few Catholics. A German woman who heard him said she had never been so
edified in her life, though she spoke not a word of English. He enjoyed his greatest success in the
Calvinist fortress of Boston, where the established churches did not want him at all. There he