FREEDOM OF THE WILL, a work by Jonathan Edwards. It is an amazing fact that this treatise, undoubtedly the greatest contribu tion of America to metaphysical thought, was written within a period of four months, while the author was a missionary to the Indians in a frontier settlement. But the work is amaz ing for other reasons also. Its power of close argumentation was reckoned by so able a critic as Sir James Mackintosh as "perhaps un matched, certainly unsurpassed.° The reputa tion of its awful audacity still haunts the minds of men who know no metaphysics and recite no creeds. Properly to understand the book, however, it is necessary to go back to Edwards' youth, and to read his romantic outpourings on the beauty of holiness, the serene delights of the gardens of faith, and the fragrance of the love of God. These things still underlie the terrible logic of the later treatise, though con cealed from superficial gaze by the unfortunate results of his reforming zeal and by his long developed habit of controversy. To Edwards the Arminian theology of the day—which held that man is free to choose between good and evil and owes his salvation to his own choice as well as to the grace of God — was a manner of trifling with the tremendous issues of sin and of slighting the supreme prerogative of Deity.
It is to make a mockery of sin, he argued, to suppose that men would deliberately and knowingly choose evil and pain in place of good and happiness; man's freedom is confined to his ability to carry out his inclinations, but his so-called will is nothing more an his inevitable inclination toward that whicIr at the moment of action seems to him best. In the same way it is to derogate from God's majesty to look for any cause in the world outside of His om nipotent will. Hence the inclinations of men, as they must have a cause, are traced back to their source in God, whom Edwards does not hesitate to call athe author of sin," though, as he insists, "for wise, holy and most excellent ends.° It is of course a manifest injustice to reduce Edwards' vast argument, a veritable megalotherium of metaphysics, to so puny a compass. More than that, any prospective reader should he warned that the spirit and intention of Edwards cannot be judged from this treatise alone, but must be gathered from the whole range of his works.