In summing up the religious history of New England, it would be just and proper to show the agency of the Mathers, father and son, in the witchcraft delusion.  It would be quite fair to plead in their behalf the common beliefs of their time.  It would be an extenuation of their acts that, not many years before, the great and good magistrate, Sir Matthew Hale, had sanctioned the conviction of prisoners accused of witchcraft.  To fall back on the errors of the time is very proper when we are trying our predecessors in foro conscientace:  The houses they dwelt in may have had some weak or decayed beams and rafters, but they served for their shelter, at any rate.  It is quite another matter when those rotten timbers are used in holding up the roofs over our own heads.  Still more, if one of our ancestors built on an unsafe or an unwholesome foundation, the best thing we can do is to leave it and persuade others to leave it if we can.  And if we refer to him as a precedent, it must be as a warning and not as a guide.

Such was the reason of the present writer’s taking up the writings of Jonathan Edwards for examination in a recent essay.  The “Edwardsian” theology is still recognized as a power in and beyond the denomination to which he belonged.  One or more churches bear his name, and it is thrown into the scale of theological belief as if it added great strength to the party which claims him.  That he was a man of extraordinary endowments and deep spiritual nature was not questioned, nor that he was a most acute reasoner, who could unfold a proposition into its consequences as patiently, as convincingly, as a palaeontologist extorts its confession from a fossil fragment.  But it was maintained that so many dehumanizing ideas were mixed up with his conceptions of man, and so many diabolizing attributes embodied in his imagination of the Deity, that his system of beliefs was tainted throughout by them, and that the fact of his being so remarkable a logician recoiled on the premises which pointed his inexorable syllogisms to such revolting conclusions.  When he presents us a God, in whose sight children, with certain not too frequent exceptions, “are young vipers, and are infinitely more hateful than vipers;” when he gives the most frightful detailed description of infinite and endless tortures which it drives men and women mad to think of prepared for “the bulk of mankind;” when he cruelly pictures a future in which parents are to sing hallelujahs of praise as they see their children driven into the furnace, where they are to lie “roasting” forever,—­we have a right to say that the man who held such beliefs and indulged in such imaginations and expressions is a burden and not a support in reference to the creed with which his name is associated.  What heathenism has ever approached the horrors of this conception of human destiny?  It is not an abuse of language to apply to such a system of beliefs the name of Christian pessimism.