REV. NATHANIEL EMMONS, D. D.

THIS distinguished New England divine has made, if not an era in the theology of our country, yet a permanent and a palpable demonstration in its theological history. There is no way, perhaps, in which we may, with equal facility and pertinence, at the present day, characterize a syllabus of doctrinal and philosophical sentiments in religion, whether we approve or reprove them, as to say that they belong to the system of Emmons.

That several of his normal principles are virtually condemned by mainly all our orthodox divines, by such men as Witherspoon, Dwight, Rice, Alexander, Richards, Stuart, and in Europe by Chalmers, Hall, Watts, Doddridge, Howe, Owen, Baxter, and others, among the illustrious dead; and there by Candlish, Cunningham, Brown, Symington, Cooke, Edgar, Morgan, Harris, Morison, Cumming, Liefchild, James, Jay, Raffles, still alive, with all others of their sympathy and affinity in religion, is a fact most certain, as well as most solemn and most admonitory. It is probable that, among all the faculties of our own theological seminaries, their learned professors would, in the main, unite in rejecting those principles, as equally deleterious and unscriptural, and therefore false. Such schools as New Haven and Princeton, however differing in some theses of metaphysical theology, are remarkably, and with no conspiracy or concert, coincident here. They both reject the system of Emmons; and the former has suffered more misrepresentation and more calumny from masked batteries on that identical account, un

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speakably, than the latter; while in New England it seems to have led the way, with true Christian tenacity and champion daring, in oppugnation and explosion to that system; and to have derived very little recognition or justice of laudation for its original, indomitable, and exemplary demonstrations, to the confusion of its adherents and the triumph of the truth. Palmam qui meruit ferat. In my own profoundest conviction, the whole Church of this country, and especially of New England, owes a deep debt to Dr. Taylor for the matter, and the manner, and the motive of his agency, in his able and steady refutations of all the greater principles of the system of Dr. Emmons. And I am glad to know, and be able here to write it, whatever some may think of it, that such a triumvirate of theological strength and eminence, however differing possibly in other things, as Alexander, Richards, and Taylor, are substantially one in this relation. Dr. Richards, as I have full reason to know, bravely did, and suffered, and periled more, perhaps, than any other man in this relation, and with great success, from his first induction to the chair of theology at Auburn to the end of his useful and devoted life.

On the other hand, Dr. Emmons has qualities as an author that elevate and distinguish him, justly, among the orthodox clergy of this country. He lived to a great age, about ninety-five and a third years old at the time of his death. He was born April 20, O. S. or May 1, N. S. 1745, about three months after Hannah More; and he died September 23, 1840. He commenced his public labors as a preacher, October, 1769, and was soon settled, once only, in the stall, virtually the same, where, after discontinuing his pastoral responsibilities for several years, he died, at Franklin, Norfolk county, Massachusetts. What a pity that we can not always get the good, without an insidious profusion of the evil, in the concrete mass of the works of an author!

From the first of my graver religious impressions, from the

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year 1811 and onward, till I was introduced to the ministry, October, 1816, the works and the views of Emmons surrounded and pervaded me, as making much of the spiritual atmosphere in which I lived, and moved, and had my being. I read his sermons, received them as ne-plus-ultra specimens of metaphysico-philosophical divinity, and admired them even till I began, in professional life, to try their principles, in a practical way, in the solemn work of preaching the gospel. Here I studied more calmly and originally the native sense and the correct interpretation of the Holy Scriptures. To these I felt, more and more, that all theories ought substantively and utterly to be subordinated-and this great principle I feel and love more and more to the present day! Its greatness and its goodness are becoming, with my better educated judgment, increasingly appreciated and avowed. It ought to be the deep religious aim of a preacher to study the truth of Scripture in its own inspired originals, and thence to derive the substance of all his pabulum for the pulpit or the press. God will not allow his ministers to substitute the human wisdom for the divine. It is spiritual adultery, and idolatry, and perfidy in the relations of moral man. Isai. 29: 13, 14. men may be coincidently right; it is, however, very often. deceptive and erroneous; but right or wrong, it is no fitting substitute for the identical word of God. John, 17:17; Pet. 1:21–25; Col. 2:6–9; i. Tim. 6:20, 21. The Scriptures have their circumstances, their incidents, and their ancient, peculiar costumes. They have also their doctrines, their facts, their relations, their connections, their proportions, their styles, their methods, and their glorious harmonies, both in their credenda* and their agenda,t as legitimately af fecting our minds and characters in religion; and to ascertain their native sense, to educe and verify it, to teach and vindicate it, is the grand and noble function of interpreta* Things to be believed. + Things to be done.

highest possible The precept of

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tion, or the hermeneutical science-a science which our great and venerable divines of the former century pre-eminently needed and distinguishingly lacked! Hence their metaphysics, their polemics, their dogmatics, and their inductive and resultant ethics, in religion, became at once the medium and the discoloration of the truth of God in their ministrations— with too few great exceptions.

Of such a man as Emmons, I grieve to say that, while I am yet among his admirers, I view his characteristic doctrines as fundamentally* false and bad-his philosophy as eminently unscriptural, and his system as speciously and deplorably unsound. Their faults and their offenses can not be expiated by the sleep of the sepulchre or the culmination of his general living or posthumous fame. There is a virus in them that pervades them. They have a tendency, an influence, a sympathy, and a drift, as well as a very taking speciousness, of which, if a man, and especially an inexperienced student, is not suitably aware, he may become less a beneficiary than a pervert or a victim.

causes.

His πрwτоv εudoç, or cardinal error, was probably—his views of the divine agency, its nature, its extent, and its final If they who hold those views come not to the extremes of pantheism, fatalism, and idealism, the better result must not be credited to those views, or to their logical acumen and consistency, by whom those views are credited or entertained. Some of those views are here stated, for the proof and verification of which I am responsible. See Emmons's Works, by Dr. Ide, Boston edition, 1842.

1. God is the author of all things, sin especially included. 2. He preserves all things, material and immaterial, by a procreative and incessant act, just as he began the same act by creation.

* This in a sense objective, as related to the revealed system; not subjective, as if judging the spiritual state of a man-which I would never wish to do, even in thought.

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3. Preservation is simply creation continued; mind, matter, acts, entities, attributes, motions, relations, universally included; as procreated incessantly, each of them—or they could never be and continue at all.-IV. 382.

4. It is best, all things considered, that just as much sin as exists, and as will have existed eternally, should exist; and therefore it exists in the measured preference and by the measuring agency of God.

5. However good the universe might be without sin, it is, all things considered, and as a whole, deliberately and infinitely better with it.

6. God intended to introduce it, to this very end; and hence he originated it in fallen angels, and in fallen men, and in every instance, as the necessary means of the greatest possible good, the eternal optimism of the system.

7. Hence our submission should subjectively correspond with this array of objective theophany and glory; and our submission to be in his hand, that he may make us as wicked and as miserable as he sees fit, all things considered, should be at once superlatively joyous and absolutely unconditional; amen, alleluia ! pure piety, heaven on earth begun! this the very thing!

8. If men dislike this, it is all owing-not at all to their wisdom, but only to their selfishness; and so is it none other than impiety and upstart rebellion; yet, for the best ends, it is produced positively, at the time, in them by God himself.

9. Selfishness is the genus generalissimum of all sin; and self-love, or the love of happiness as one's own, is only a modification of the same thing, selfishness and fools only affirm or believe a difference.

10. Disinterested benevolence is the only true virtue, as the grand and the only proper antagonist of selfishness.

Among other aspects of character, I was wont to view Dr. Emmons as a very unique person, and so as an intellectual, moral, and theological curiosity. As previous to this inter