III. ECLIPSE
While Edwards during the last years of his short life
was attempting a philosophical formulation of religious
enlightenment, his associates in the New Light move-
ment were dragging him back into the theological
polemics of Calvinism. He was compelled by their
polemics to write The Great Christian Doctrine of
Original Sin Defended (1758—published posthu-
mously). His closest colleague, Joseph Bellamy of
Bethlehem, Conn., published in 1750 True Religion
delineated; or experimental Religion, as distinguished
from Formality on the one hand, and Enthusiasm on
the other, set in a scriptural and rational Light. This
was followed in 1758 by his four sermons, including
The Wisdom of God in the Permission of Sin. Bellamy
explained that God “permitted,” without “causing,” sin
in the universe because it was to the ultimate “advan-
tage” of mankind. Edwards had maintained that God
permitted sin to enter for the sake of his own glory,
and Samuel Hopkins maintained only that sin is an
“advantage to the universe.” Both Bellamy and
Hopkins became involved in a desperate attempt to
defend the “moral government” or justice of God, and
this led them to assert not only God's “disinterested
benevolence” but also his “disinterested malice toward
sin.” They were then compelled by the insistent pro-
tests of several kinds of liberals to try to defend the
endless punishment of infants. Edwards had hoped to
let the doctrine that “infinite sin” leads to “infinite
punishment” remain an abstract conception of justice.
But now the Edwardeans were pushed into defending
the endless torture of innocent infants. The more they
wrote on this subject the more incredible they became.
They were pushed into other absurdities on the
subject of the Church Covenant. Edwards had sug-
gested, without getting into a theological argument,
that the Covenant of Grace was more essential to
religion than the “external” covenant of the Church.
His followers, however, insisted on enforcing the
Puritan rules of strict communion, making regeneration
a prerequisite. This revived the old problem of distin-
guishing “visible” from “invisible” saints, and the
question whether men's “natural” moral strivings and
“exercises” toward salvation could be interpreted as
“gracious affections.” Nathanael Emmons of Franklin,
Mass. became hopelessly involved in the problem, so
that he did not know how to distinguish between those
who profess apparent holiness and those who are
apparently but not professedly really holy, or those
who neither appear nor profess to be holy but really
are holy. The most significant predicament into which
the New Light theologians drifted was their tendency
to portray human nature as thoroughly damnable in
order to give the whole “glory” to the Divine Light.
Edwards had approved of the “moral sense” theory
of the Scottish Enlightenment and agreed that self-love
could generate a disinterested benevolence under the
guidance of prudent judgment, but he insisted that such
social benevolence is only an “image” of true virtue
and pure love. But his theologically entangled and
wrangling followers were forced by an increasing lib-
eral opposition to make caricatures both of human
nature and of supernatural light. By 1833, after a
protracted debate between Nathaniel Taylor and
Bennett Tyler, the theologies of both New Sides and
Old Sides Presbyterians had become so absurd to others
that the whole issue was labelled “strictly contro-
versial” and the enlightenment went into eclipse.
