Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 26:102 (Apr 1869)
Article: Jonathan Edwards
Author: Increase N. Tarbox

BSac 26:102 (April 1869) p. 243

Jonathan Edwards

Rev. Increase N. Tarbox

When a great man comes upon the stage the full sense of his greatness does not ordinarily dawn upon the world till long after his removal from it. Especially is this true when the man belongs, not to the sphere of outward action, but to the realm of pure thought. This is the secret of that obscurity which rests over the early life of many of the great literary and intellectual leaders of the race. Had the generations to which they belonged seen them as we now see them, the minutest particulars of their childhood and youth would have been gathered up and faithfully preserved. When men had become fully awake to the fact that an im-

BSac 26:102 (April 1869) p. 244

mortal bard had been singing to them in the person of Homer, clouds and darkness had so gathered about his origin that different and distant cities could, with some show of reason, contend for the honor of having given him birth. One of the critics of Shakespeare, after reciting the facts, that he was born at Stratford, married and had children there, went to London and lived as play-actor and play-writer, returned to Stratford and died, says: “This is all that is known with any degree of certainty about Shakespeare.” And yet with another we may say: “Out of the cottage in which he was born has gone forth a voice which is the mightiest in modern literature.”

We do not mean to imply that the like obscurity rests over the early life of Jonathan Edwards. The history of the child and of the man is known with a good degree of minuteness. It is true, nevertheless, that New England had no adequate sense of his greatness while he lived. Human life everywhere has its prosaic aspects, and by the men of his own generation, though they acknowledged his general power, he was seen mingled with passing conflicts and rude interests, and often laboring under depression and discomfiture, Though as far removed as any man from what might be called a contentious disposition, there were times in his life when he might with the utmost propriety have used the words of the ancient prophet: “Woe is me, my mother, that thou hast borne me a man of strife and a man of contention to the whole earth.” It was not for the people of his own day to eliminate him from these untoward surroundings, to reach his true individuality, and behold him in his simple and majestic greatness. Though he has now been sleeping in his grave more than a century, the conflicts which he unwittingly set in motion in the great world of thought, are not yet ended. Still, through all these years, a juster conception of what the man really was has been silently growing upon us. In the back-ground of our New England history he moves, a figure of the stateliest proportions. But even yet we do...