impression of his nobility of soul. His diction, like
Wordsworth's, is usually plain almost to bareness; the formal
framework of his discourses is obtruded; and he hunts objections
to their last hiding place with wearisome pertinacity. Yet his
logic is incandescent. Steel sometimes burns to the touch like
this, in the bitter winters of New England, and one wonders
whether Edwards's brain was not of ice, so pitiless does it seem.
His treatise denying the freedom of the will has given him a
European reputation comparable with that enjoyed by Franklin in
science and Jefferson in political propaganda. It was really a
polemic demonstrating the sovereignty of God, rather than pure
theology or metaphysics. Edwards goes beyond Augustine and Calvin
in asserting the arbitrary will of the Most High and in "denying
to the human will any self-determining power." He has been
refuted by events and tendencies, such as the growth of
historical criticism and the widespread acceptance of the
doctrine of evolution, rather than by the might of any single
antagonist. So, too, the Dred Scott decision of Chief Justice
Taney, holding that the slave was not a citizen, was not so much
answered by opponents as it was superseded by the arbitrament of
war. But the idealism of this lonely thinker has entered deeply
and permanently into the spiritual life of his countrymen, and he
will continue to be read by a few of those who still read Plato
and Dante.

"My mother grieves," wrote Benjamin Franklin to his father in
1738, "that one of her sons is an Arian, another an Arminian.
What an Arminian or an Arian is, I cannot say that I very well
know. The truth is I make such distinctions very little my
study." To understand Franklin's indifference to such