University of Virginia Library

23. CHAPTER XXIII.
VIEWS OF DIVINE GOVERNMENT.

We have said before, what we now repeat, that
it is impossible to write a story of New England
life and manners for superficial thought or shallow
feeling. They who would fully understand the
springs which moved the characters with whom
we now associate must go down with us to the
very depths.

Never was there a community where the roots
of common life shot down so deeply, and were so
intensely grappled around things sublime and eternal.
The founders of it were a body of confessors
and martyrs, who turned their backs on the
whole glory of the visible, to found in the wilderness
a republic of which the God of Heaven and
Earth should be the sovereign power. For the
first hundred years grew this community, shut out
by a fathomless ocean from the existing world,
and divided by an antagonism not less deep
from all the reigning ideas of nominal Christendom.

In a community thus unworldly must have
arisen a mode of thought, energetic, original, and
sublime. The leaders of thought and feeling were
the ministry, and we boldly assert that the spectacle
of the early ministry of New England was
one to which the world gives no parallel. Living
an intense, earnest, practical life, mostly tilling the
earth with their own hands, they yet carried on
the most startling and original religious investigations
with a simplicity that might have been
deemed audacious, were it not so reverential. All
old issues relating to government, religion, ritual,
and forms of church organization having for them
passed away, they went straight to the heart of
things, and boldly confronted the problem of universal
being. They had come out from the world
as witnesses to the most solemn and sacred of
human rights. They had accustomed themselves
boldly to challenge and dispute all sham pretensions
and idolatries of past ages, — to question
the right of kings in the State, and of prelates in
the Church; and now they turned the same bold
inquiries towards the Eternal Throne, and threw
down their glove in the lists as authorized defenders
of every mystery in the Eternal Government.
The task they proposed to themselves was that
of reconciling the most tremendous facts of sin
and evil, present and eternal, with those conceptions
of Infinite Power and Benevolence which

their own strong and generous natures enabled
them so vividly to realize. In the intervals of
planting and harvesting, they were busy with the
toils of adjusting the laws of a universe. Solemnly
simple, they made long journeys in their
old one-horse chaises, to settle with each other
some nice point of celestial jurisprudence, and to
compare their maps of the Infinite. Their letters
to each other form a literature altogether unique.
Hopkins sends to Edwards the younger his scheme
of the universe, in which he starts with the proposition,
that God is infinitely above all obligations
of any kind to his creatures. Edwards replies
with the brusque comment, — “This is wrong;
God has no more right to injure a creature than
a creature has to injure God;” and each probably
about that time preached a sermon on his
own views, which was discussed by every farmer,
in intervals of plough and hoe, by every woman
and girl, at loom, spinning-wheel, or wash-tub.
New England was one vast sea, surging from
depths to heights with thought and discussion on
the most insoluble of mysteries. And it is to be
added, that no man or woman accepted any theory
or speculation simply as theory or speculation;
all was profoundly real and vital, — a foundation
on which actual life was based with intensest
earnestness.

The views of human existence which resulted

from this course of training were gloomy enough
to oppress any heart which did not rise above
them by triumphant faith or sink below them by
brutish insensibility; for they included every moral
problem of natural or revealed religion, divested
of all those softening poetries and tender draperies
which forms, ceremonies, and rituals had
thrown around them in other parts and ages of
Christendom. The human race, without exception,
coming into existence “under God's wrath and
curse,” with a nature so fatally disordered, that,
although perfect free agents, men were infallibly
certain to do nothing to Divine acceptance until
regenerated by the supernatural aid of God's Spirit,
— this aid being given only to a certain decreed
number of the human race, the rest, with
enough free agency to make them responsible, but
without this indispensable assistance exposed to
the malignant assaults of evil spirits versed in
every art of temptation, were sure to fall hopelessly
into perdition. The standard of what constituted
a true regeneration, as presented in such
treatises as Edwards on the Affections, and others of
the times, made this change to be something so high,
disinterested, and superhuman, so removed from all
natural and common habits and feelings, that the
most earnest and devoted, whose whole life had
been a constant travail of endeavor, a tissue of
almost unearthly disinterestedness, often lived and
died with only a glimmering hope of its attainment.

According to any views then entertained of the
evidences of a true regeneration, the number of
the whole human race who could be supposed as
yet to have received this grace was so small, that,
as to any numerical valuation, it must have been
expressed as an infinitesimal. Dr. Hopkins in many
places distinctly recognizes the fact, that the greater
part of the human race, up to his time, had
been eternally lost, — and boldly assumes the ground,
that this amount of sin and suffering, being the
best and most necessary means of the greatest
final amount of happiness, was not merely permitted,
but distinctly chosen, decreed, and provided
for, as essential in the schemes of Infinite Benevolence.
He held that this decree not only permitted
each individual act of sin, but also took measures
to make it certain, though, by an exercise of
infinite skill, it accomplished this result without
violating human free agency.

The preaching of those times was animated by
an unflinching consistency which never shrank
from carrying an idea to its remotest logical verge
The sufferings of the lost were not kept from
view, but proclaimed with a terrible power. Dr.
Hopkins boldly asserts, that “all the use which
God will have for them is to suffer; this is all the
end they can answer; therefore all their faculties

and their whole capacities, will be employed and
used for this end...... The body can by
omnipotence be made capable of suffering the
greatest imaginable pain, without producing dissolution,
or abating the least degree of life or sensibility......
One way in which God will
show his power in punishing the wicked will be
in strengthening and upholding their bodies and
souls in torments which otherwise would be intolerable.”

The sermons preached by President Edwards on
this subject are so terrific in their refined poetry
of torture, that very few persons of quick sensibility
could read them through without agony; and
it is related, that, when, in those calm and tender
tones which never rose to passionate enunciation,
he read these discourses, the house was often filled
with shrieks and wailings, and that a brother
minister once laid hold of his skirts, exclaiming, in
an involuntary agony, “Oh! Mr. Edwards! Mr.
Edwards! is God not a God of mercy?”

Not that these men were indifferent or insensible
to the dread words they spoke; their whole
lives and deportment bore thrilling witness to their
sincerity. Edwards set apart special days of fasting,
in view of the dreadful doom of the lost, in
which he was wont to walk the floor, weeping and
wringing his hands. Hopkins fasted every Saturday.
David Brainerd gave up every refinement of

civilized life to weep and pray at the feet of hardened
savages, if by any means he might save one.
All, by lives of eminent purity and earnestness, gave
awful weight and sanction to their words.

If we add to this statement the fact, that it was
always proposed to every inquiring soul, as an evidence
of regeneration, that it should truly and
heartily accept all the ways of God thus declared
right and lovely, and from the heart submit to Him
as the only just and good, it will be seen what
materials of tremendous internal conflict and agitation
were all the while working in every bosom.
Almost all the histories of religious experience of
those times relate paroxysms of opposition to God
and fierce rebellion, expressed in language which
appalls the very soul, — followed, at length, by
mysterious elevations of faith and reactions of
confiding love, the result of Divine interposition,
which carried the soul far above the region of the
intellect, into that of direct spiritual intuition.

President Edwards records that he was once in
this state of enmity, — that the facts of the Divine
administration seemed horrible to him, — and
that this opposition was overcome by no course of
reasoning, but by an “inward and sweet sense,”
which came to him once when walking alone in
the fields, and, looking up into the blue sky, he
saw the blending of the Divine majesty with a
calm, sweet, and almost infinite meekness.

The piety which grew up under such a system
was, of necessity, energetic, — it was the uprousing
of the whole energy of the human soul, pierced
and wrenched and probed from her lowest depths
to her topmost heights with every awful life-force
possible to existence. He whose faith in God
came clear through these terrible tests would be
sure never to know greater ones. He might certainly
challenge earth or heaven, things present or
things to come, to swerve him from this grand allegiance.

But it is to be conceded, that these systems, so
admirable in relation to the energy, earnestness,
and acuteness of their authors, when received as
absolute truth, and as a basis of actual life, had,
on minds of a certain class, the effect of a slow
poison, producing life-habits of morbid action very
different from any which ever followed the simple
reading of the Bible. They differ from the New
Testament as the living embrace of a friend does
from his lifeless body, mapped out under the knife
of the anatomical demonstrator; — every nerve and
muscle is there, but to a sensitive spirit there is the
very chill of death in the analysis.

All systems that deal with the infinite are, besides,
exposed to danger from small, unsuspected
admixtures of human error, which become deadly
when carried to such vast results. The smallest
speck of earth's dust, in the focus of an infinite

lens, appears magnified among the heavenly orbs
as a frightful monster.

Thus it happened, that, while strong spirits
walked, palm-crowned, with victorious hymns, along
these sublime paths, feebler and more sensitive
ones lay along the track, bleeding away in life-long
despair. Fearful to them were the shadows
that lay over the cradle and the grave. The
mother clasped her babe to her bosom, and looked
with shuddering to the awful coming trial of free
agency, with its terrible responsibilities and risks;
and, as she thought of the infinite chances against
her beloved, almost wished it might die in infancy.
But when the stroke of death came, and some
young, thoughtless head was laid suddenly low,
who can say what silent anguish of loving hearts
sounded the dread depths of eternity with the
awful question, Where?

In no other time or place of Christendom have
so fearful issues been presented to the mind.
Some church interposed its protecting shield; the
Christian born and baptized child was supposed
in some wise rescued from the curse of the fall,
and related to the great redemption, — to be a
member of Christ's family, and, if ever so sinful,
still infolded in some vague sphere of hope and
protection. Augustine solaced the dread anxieties
of trembling love by prayers offered for the dead,
in times when the Church above and on earth

presented itself to the eye of the mourner as a
great assembly with one accord lifting interceding
hands for the parted soul.

But the clear logic and intense individualism
of New England deepened the problems of the
Augustinian faith, while they swept away all those
softening provisions so earnestly clasped to the
throbbing heart of that great poet of theology.
No rite, no form, no paternal relation, no faith or
prayer of church, earthly or heavenly, interposed
the slightest shield between the trembling spirit
and Eternal Justice. The individual entered eternity
alone, as if he had no interceding relation in
the universe.

This, then, was the awful dread which was constantly
underlying life. This it was which caused
the tolling bell in green hollows and lonely dells
to be a sound which shook the soul and searched
the heart with fearful questions. And this it was
that was lying with mountain weight on the soul
of the mother, too keenly agonized to feel that
doubt in such a case was any less a torture than
the most dreadful certainty.

Hers was a nature more reasoning than creative
and poetic; and whatever she believed bound
her mind in strictest chains to its logical results.
She delighted in the regions of mathematical
knowledge, and walked them as a native home,
but the commerce with abstract certainties fitted

her mind still more to be stiffened and enchained
by glacial reasonings, in regions where spiritual
intuitions are as necessary as wings to birds.

Mary was by nature of the class who never
reason abstractly, whose intellections all begin in
the heart, which sends them colored with its warm
life-tint to the brain. Her perceptions of the same
subjects were as different from Mrs. Marvyn's as
his who revels only in color from his who is busy
with the dry details of mere outline. The one
mind was arranged like a map, and the other like
a picture. In all the system which had been explained
to her, her mind selected points on which
it seized with intense sympathy, which it dwelt
upon and expanded till all else fell away. The
sublimity of disinterested benevolence, — the harmony
and order of a system tending in its final
results to infinite happiness, — the goodness of
God, — the love of a self-sacrificing Redeemer, —
were all so many glorious pictures, which she revolved
in her mind with small care for their logical
relations.

Mrs. Marvyn had never, in all the course of
their intimacy, opened her mouth to Mary on the
subject of religion. It was not an uncommon incident
of those times for persons of great elevation
and purity of character to be familiarly known
and spoken of as living under a cloud of religious
gloom; and it was simply regarded as one more

mysterious instance of the workings of that infinite
decree which denied to them the special illumination
of the Spirit.

When Mrs. Marvyn had drawn Mary with her
into her room, she seemed like a person almost in
frenzy. She shut and bolted the door, drew her
to the foot of the bed, and, throwing her arms
round her, rested her hot and throbbing forehead
on her shoulder. She pressed her thin hand over
her eyes, and then, suddenly drawing back, looked
her in the face as one resolved to speak something
long suppressed. Her soft brown eyes had
a flash of despairing wildness in them, like that
of a hunted animal turning in its death-struggle
on its pursuer.

“Mary,” she said, “I can't help it, — don't mind
what I say, but I must speak or die! Mary, I
cannot, will not, be resigned! — it is all hard,
unjust, cruel! — to all eternity I will say so! To
me there is no goodness, no justice, no mercy in
anything! Life seems to me the most tremendous
doom that can be inflicted on a helpless being!
What had we done, that it should be sent upon
us? Why were we made to love so, to hope so,
— our hearts so full of feeling, and all the laws
of Nature marching over us, — never stopping for
our agony? Why, we can suffer so in this life
that we had better never have been born!

“But, Mary, think what a moment life is! think

of those awful ages of eternity! and then think
of all God's power and knowledge used on the
lost to make them suffer! think that all but the
merest fragment of mankind have gone into this,
— are in it now! The number of the elect is so
small we can scarce count them for anything!
Think what noble minds, what warm, generous
hearts, what splendid natures are wrecked and
thrown away by thousands and tens of thousands!
How we love each other! how our hearts weave
into each other! how more than glad we should
be to die for each other! And all this ends —
O God, how must it end? — Mary! it isn't my
sorrow only! What right have I to mourn? Is
my son any better than any other mother's son?
Thousands of thousands, whose mothers loved
them as I love mine, are gone there! — Oh, my
wedding-day! Why did they rejoice? Brides
should wear mourning, — the bells should toll for
every wedding; every new family is built over this
awful pit of despair, and only one in a thousand
escapes!”

Pale, aghast, horror-stricken, Mary stood dumb,
as one who in the dark and storm sees by the
sudden glare of lightning a chasm yawning under
foot. It was amazement and dimness of anguish;
— the dreadful words struck on the very centre
where her soul rested. She felt as if the point
of a wedge were being driven between her life

and her life's life, — between her and her God.
She clasped her hands instinctively on her bosom,
as if to hold there some cherished image, and said,
in a piercing voice of supplication, “My God! my
God! oh, where art Thou?”

Mrs. Marvyn walked up and down the room
with a vivid spot of red in each cheek, and a
baleful fire in her eyes, talking in rapid soliloquy,
scarcely regarding her listener, absorbed in her own
enkindled thoughts.

“Dr. Hopkins says that this is all best, — better
than it would have been in any other possible
way, — that God chose it because it was for a
greater final good, — that He not only chose it,
but took means to make it certain, — that He ordains
every sin, and does all that is necessary to
make it certain, — that He creates the vessels of
wrath and fits them for destruction, and that He
has an infinite knowledge by which He can do it
without violating their free agency. — So much
the worse! What a use of infinite knowledge!
What if men should do so? What if a father
should take means to make it certain that his
poor little child should be an abandoned wretch,
without violating his free agency? So much the
worse, I say! — They say He does this so that
He may show to all eternity, by their example,
the evil nature of sin and its consequences! This
is all that the greater part of the human race

have been used for yet; and it is all right, because
an overplus of infinite happiness is yet to
be wrought out by it! — It is not right! No possible
amount of good to ever so many can make
it right to deprave ever so few; — happiness and
misery cannot be measured so! I never can think
it right, — never! — Yet they say our salvation
depends on our loving God, — loving Him better
than ourselves, — loving Him better than our dearest
friends. — It is impossible! — it is contrary to
the laws of my nature! I can never love God!
I can never praise Him! — I am lost! lost!
lost! And what is worse, I cannot redeem my
friends! Oh, I could suffer forever, — how willingly!
— if I could save him! — But oh, eternity,
eternity! Frightful, unspeakable woe! No end!
— no bottom! — no shore! — no hope! — O God!
O God!”

Mrs. Marvyn's eyes grew wilder, — she walked
the floor, wringing her hands, — and her words,
mingled with shrieks and moans, became whirling
and confused, as when in autumn a storm drives
the leaves in dizzy mazes.

Mary was alarmed, — the ecstacy of despair was
just verging on insanity. She rushed out and
called Mr. Marvyn.

“Oh! come in! do! quick! — I'm afraid her
mind is going!” she said.

“It is what I feared,” he said, rising from where

he sat reading his great Bible, with an air of
heartbroken dejection. “Since she heard this news,
she has not slept nor shed a tear. The Lord hath
covered us with a cloud in the day of his fierce
anger.”

He came into the room, and tried to take his
wife into his arms. She pushed him violently
back, her eyes glistening with a fierce light.
“Leave me alone!” she said, — “I am a lost
spirit!”

These words were uttered in a shriek that went
through Mary's heart like an arrow.

At this moment, Candace, who had been anxiously
listening at the door for an hour past, suddenly
burst into the room.

“Lor' bress ye, Squire Marvyn, we won't hab
her goin' on dis yer way,” she said. “Do talk
gospel to her, can't ye? — ef you can't, I will.

“Come, ye poor little lamb,” she said, walking
straight up to Mrs. Marvyn, “come to ole Candace!”
— and with that she gathered the pale form
to her bosom, and sat down and began rocking
her, as if she had been a babe. “Honey, darlin',
ye a'n't right, — dar's a drefful mistake somewhar,”
she said. “Why, de Lord a'n't like what ye
tink, — He loves ye, honey! Why, jes' feel how I
loves ye, — poor ole black Candace, — an' I a'n't
better'n Him as made me! Who was it wore de
crown o' thorns, lamb? — who was it sweat great

drops o' blood? — who was it said, `Father, forgive
dem'? Say, honey! — wasn't it de Lord dat
made ye? — Dar, dar, now ye'r' cryin'! — cry away,
and ease yer poor little heart! He died for Mass'r
Jim, — loved him and died for him, — jes' give up
his sweet, precious body and soul for him on de
cross! Laws, jes' leave him in Jesus's hands!
Why, honey, dar's de very print o' de nails in
his hands now!”

The flood-gates were rent; and healing sobs and
tears shook the frail form, as a faded lily shakes
under the soft rains of summer. All in the room
wept together.

“Now, honey,” said Candace, after a pause of
some minutes, “I knows our Doctor's a mighty
good man, an' larned, — an' in fair weather I ha'n't
no 'bjection to yer hearin' all about dese yer great
an' mighty tings he's got to say. But, honey, dey
won't do for you now; sick folks mus'n't hab
strong meat; an' times like dese, dar jest a'n't but
one ting to come to, an' dat ar's Jesus. Jes' come
right down to whar poor ole black Candace has
to stay allers, — it's a good place, darlin'! Look
right at Jesus. Tell ye, honey, ye can't live no
other way now. Don't ye 'member how He looked
on His mother, when she stood faintin' an' tremblin'
under de cross, jes' like you? He knows all
about mothers' hearts; He won't break yours. It
was jes' 'cause He know'd we'd come into straits

like dis yer, dat he went through all dese tings, —
Him, de Lord o' Glory! Is dis Him you was a-talkin'
about? — Him you can't love? Look at
Him, an' see ef you can't. Look an' see what
He is! — don't ask no questions, and don't go to
no reasonin's, — jes' look at Him, hangin' dar, so
sweet and patient, on de cross! All dey could do
couldn't stop his lovin' 'em; he prayed for 'em
wid all de breath he had. Dar's a God you can
love, a'n't dar? Candace loves Him, — poor, ole,
foolish, black, wicked Candace, — and she knows
He loves her,” — and here Candace broke down
into torrents of weeping.

They laid the mother, faint and weary, on her
bed, and beneath the shadow of that suffering
cross came down a healing sleep on those weary
eyelids.

“Honey,” said Candace, mysteriously, after she
had drawn Mary out of the room, “don't ye go
for to troublin' yer mind wid dis yer. I'm clar
Mass'r James is one o' de 'lect; and I'm clar dar's
consid'able more o' de 'lect dan people tink. Why,
Jesus didn't die for nothin', — all dat love a'n't
gwine to be wasted. De 'lect is more'n you or I
knows, honey! Dar's de Spirit, — He'll give it to
'em; and ef Mass'r James is called an' took, depend
upon it de Lord has got him ready, — course
He has, — so don't ye go to layin' on your poor
heart what no mortal creetur can live under;

'cause, as we's got to live in dis yer world, it's
quite clar de Lord must ha' fixed it so we can;
and ef tings was as some folks suppose, why, we
couldn't live, and dar wouldn't be no sense in
anyting dat goes on.”

The sudden shock of these scenes was followed,
in Mrs. Marvyn's case, by a low, lingering fever.
Her room was darkened, and she lay on her bed,
a pale, suffering form, with scarcely the ability to
raise her hand. The shimmering twilight of the
sick-room fell on white napkins, spread over stands,
where constantly appeared new vials, big and little,
as the physician made his daily visit, and
prescribed now this drug and now that, for a
wound that had struck through the soul.

Mary remained many days at the white house,
because, to the invalid, no step, no voice, no hand
was like hers. We see her there now, as she sits
in the glimmering by the bed-curtains, — her head
a little drooped, as droops a snowdrop over a
grave; — one ray of light from a round hole in
the closed shutters falls on her smooth-parted hair,
her small hands are clasped on her knees, her
mouth has lines of sad compression, and in her
eyes are infinite questionings.