It is a singular thing, that the preaching and the bent of mind of a set of men so intensely practical should have been at the same time intensely speculative.  Nowhere in the world, unless perhaps in Scotland, have merely speculative questions excited the strong and engrossing interest among the common people that they have in New England.  Every man, woman, and child was more or less a theologian.  The minister, while he ground his scythe or sharpened his axe or laid stone-fence, was inwardly grinding and hammering on those problems of existence which are as old as man, and which Christian and heathen have alike pondered.  The Germans call the whole New England theology rationalistic, in distinction from traditional.

There are minds which are capable of receiving certain series of theological propositions without even an effort at comparison,—­without a perception of contradiction or inconsequency,—­without an effort at harmonizing.  Such, however, were not the New England ministers.  With them predestination must be made to harmonize with freewill; the Divine entire efficiency with human freedom; the existence of sin with the Divine benevolence;—­and at it they went with stout hearts, as men work who are not in the habit of being balked in their undertakings.  Hence the Edwardses, the Hopkinses, the Emmonses, with all their various schools and followers, who, leviathan-like, have made the theological deep of New England to boil like a pot, and the agitation of whose course remains to this day.

It is a mark of a shallow mind to scorn these theological wrestlings and surgings; they have had in them something even sublime.  They were always bounded and steadied by the most profound reverence for God and his word; and they have constituted in New England the strong mental discipline needed by a people who were an absolute democracy.  The Sabbath teaching of New England has been a regular intellectual drill as well as a devotional exercise; and if one does not see the advantage of this, let him live awhile in France or Italy, and see the reason why, with all their aspirations after liberty, there is no capability of self-government in the masses; put the tiller of the Campagna, or the vine-dresser of France, beside the theologically trained, keen, thoughtful New England farmer, and see which is best fitted to administer a government.

Another leading characteristic of the New England clergy was their great freedom of original development.  The volumes before us are full of indications of the most racy individuality.  There was no such thing as a clerical mould or pattern; but each minister, particularly in the rural districts, grew and flourished as freely and unconventionally as the apple-trees in his own orchard, and was considered none the worse for that, so long as he bore good fruit of the right sort.  Thus we find among them all stamps and kinds of men,—­men of decorum and ceremony, like Dr. Emmons and President Edwards, and men who, aiming after the real, despised the form, kept no order, and revered no ceremony; yet all flourished in peace, and were allowed to do their work in their own way.