Jonathan Edwards

 

Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758)

Jonathan Edwards (October 5, 1703 – March 22, 1758) was an American revivalist preacher, philosopher, and Congregationalist theologian. A leading figure of the American Enlightenment, Edwards is widely regarded as one of America's most important and original philosophical theologians. Edwards' theological work is broad in scope but rooted in the paedobaptist (baptism of infants) Puritan heritage as exemplified in the Westminster and Savoy Confessions of Faith. Recent studies have emphasized how thoroughly Edwards grounded his life's work on conceptions of beauty, harmony, and ethical fittingness, and how central the Age of Enlightenment was to his mindset. Edwards played a critical role in shaping the First Great Awakening and oversaw some of the first revivals in 1733–35 at his church in Northampton, Massachusetts. His theological work gave rise to a distinct school of theology known as New England theology.

Edwards delivered the sermon "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God", a classic of early American literature, during another revival in 1741, following George Whitefield's tour of the Thirteen Colonies. Edwards is well known for his many books, such as The End for Which God Created the World and The Life of David Brainerd, which inspired thousands of missionaries throughout the 19th century, and Religious Affections which many Calvinist Evangelicals still read today. Edwards died from a smallpox inoculation shortly after beginning the presidency at the College of New Jersey in Princeton.

Jonathan Edwards was born on October 5, 1703, the only son of Timothy Edwards (1668–1759), a minister at East Windsor, Connecticut (modern-day South Windsor), who supplemented his salary by tutoring boys for college. His mother, Esther Stoddard, daughter of Rev. Solomon Stoddard of Northampton, Massachusetts, seems to have been a woman of unusual mental gifts and independence of character. Jonathan was the fifth of 11 children. Timothy Edwards held at least one person in enslavement in the Edwards' household, a black man named Ansars. Jonathan was prepared for college by his father and elder sisters, all of whom received an excellent education. His sister Esther, the eldest, wrote a semi-humorous tract on the immateriality of the soul, which has often mistakenly attributed to Jonathan.

He entered Yale College in 1716 at just under the age of 13. In the following year, he became acquainted with John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding, which influenced him profoundly. During his college studies, he kept notebooks labeled "The Mind," "Natural Science" (containing a discussion of the atomic theory), "The Scriptures" and "Miscellanies," had a grand plan for a work on natural and mental philosophy, and drew up rules for its composition. He was interested in natural history and, as a precocious 11-year-old, had observed and written an essay detailing the ballooning behavior of some spiders. Edwards edited this text later to match the burgeoning genre of scientific literature, and his "The Flying Spider" fit easily into the contemporary scholarship on spiders. Although he studied theology for two years after his graduation from Yale, Edwards continued to be interested in science. Although many European scientists and American clergymen found the implications of science pushing them towards deism, Edwards believed the natural world was evidence of God's masterful design. Throughout his life, Edwards often went into the woods as a favorite place to pray and worship in the beauty and solace of nature.

Edwards was fascinated by the discoveries of Isaac Newton and other scientists of this time period. Before he was called to full-time ministry work in Northampton, he wrote on diverse topics in natural philosophy, including light and optics, in addition to spiders. While he worried about those of his contemporaries who seemed preoccupied by materialism and faith in reason alone, he considered the laws of nature to be derived from God and demonstrating his wisdom and care. Edwards's written sermons and theological treatises emphasize the beauty of God and the role of aesthetics in the spiritual life. He is thought to anticipate a 20th-century current of theological aesthetics, represented by figures such as Hans Urs von Balthasar.

In 1722 to 1723, he was for eight months an un-ordained "supply" pastor (a clergyman employed to preach and minister in a church for a definite time but not settled as a pastor) of a small Presbyterian church on William Street in New York City. The church invited him to remain, but he declined the call. After spending two months in study at home, in 1724–1726, he was one of the two tutors at Yale tasked with leading the college in the absence of a rector. Yale's previous rector, Timothy Cutler, lost his position when he defected to the Anglican Church. After two years, he had not been replaced.

He partially recorded the years 1720 to 1726 in his diary and in his resolutions for his conduct which he drew up at this time. He had long been an eager seeker after salvation and was not fully satisfied as to his own conversion until an experience in his last year in college, when he lost his feeling that the election of some to salvation and of others to eternal damnation was "a horrible doctrine," and reckoned it "exceedingly pleasant, bright and sweet." He now took a great and new joy in taking in the beauties of nature and delighted in the allegorical interpretation of the Song of Solomon. Balancing these mystic joys is the stern tone of his Resolutions, in which he is almost ascetic in his eagerness to live earnestly and soberly, to waste no time, to maintain the strictest temperance in eating and drinking.

On February 15, 1727, Edwards was ordained minister at Northampton and assistant to his grandfather Solomon Stoddard, a noted minister. He was a scholar-pastor, not a visiting pastor, his rule being 13 hours of study per day. In the same year, he married Sarah Pierpont. Then 17, Sarah was from a notable New England clerical family: her father was James Pierpont (1659–1714), a founder of Yale College; and her mother was the granddaughter of Thomas Hooker. Sarah's spiritual devotion was without peer, and her relationship with God had long proved an inspiration to Edwards. He first remarked on her great piety when she was 13 years old. She was of a bright and cheerful disposition, a practical housekeeper, a model wife, and the mother of his 11 children, who included Esther Edwards.[9] Edwards held to complementarian views of marriage and gender roles.

Solomon Stoddard died on February 11, 1729, leaving to his grandson the challenging task of the sole ministerial charge of one of the largest and wealthiest congregations in the colony. Its members were proud of its morality, its culture and its reputation. Summing up Edwards' influences during his younger years, scholar John E. Smith writes, "By thus meditating between Berkeley on the one hand and Locke, Descartes, and Hobbes on the other, the young Edwards hoped to rescue Christianity from the deadweight of rationalism and the paralyzing inertia of skepticism."

On July 8, 1731, Edwards preached in Boston the "Public Lecture," afterwards published under the title "God Glorified in the Work of Redemption, by the Greatness of Man's Dependence upon Him, in the Whole of It," which was his first public attack on Arminianism. The emphasis of the lecture was on God's absolute sovereignty in the work of salvation: that while it behooved God to create man pure and without sin, it was of his "good pleasure" and "mere and arbitrary grace" for him to grant any person the faith necessary to incline him or her toward holiness, and that God might deny this grace without any disparagement to any of his character. In 1733, a spiritual revival began in Northampton and reached such an intensity in the winter of 1734 and the following spring that it threatened the business of the town. In six months, nearly 300 of 1,100 youths were admitted to the church.

The revival gave Edwards an opportunity to study the process of conversion in all its phases and varieties, and he recorded his observations with psychological minuteness and discrimination in A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God in the Conversion of Many Hundred Souls in Northampton (1737). A year later, he published Discourses on Various Important Subjects, the five sermons which had proved most effective in the revival. Of these, none was so immediately effective as that on The Justice of God in the Damnation of Sinners, from the text, "That every mouth may be stopped." Another sermon, published in 1734, A Divine and Supernatural Light, Immediately Imparted to the Soul by the Spirit of God, set forth what he regarded as the inner, moving principle of the revival, the doctrine of a special grace in the immediate, and supernatural divine illumination of the soul.

 

By 1735, the revival had spread and appeared independently across the Connecticut River Valley and as far as New Jersey. However, criticism of the revival began, and many New Englanders feared that Edwards had led his flock into fanaticism.

Over the summer of 1735, religious fervor took a dark turn. Many New Englanders were affected by the revivals but not converted and became convinced of their inexorable damnation. Edwards wrote that "multitudes" felt urged—by Satan—to take their own lives. At least two people committed suicide in the depths of their spiritual distress, one from Edwards's own congregation—his uncle Joseph Hawley II. It is not known if any others took their own lives, but the "suicide craze" effectively ended the first wave of revival, except in some parts of Connecticut.

Despite these setbacks and the cooling of religious fervor, word of the Northampton revival and Edwards's leadership role had spread as far as England and Scotland. It was at this time that Edwards became acquainted with George Whitefield, who was traveling the Thirteen Colonies on a revival tour in 1739–40. The two men may not have agreed completely on every detail. Whitefield was far more comfortable with the strongly emotional elements of revival than Edwards was, but they were both passionate about preaching the Gospel. They worked together to orchestrate Whitefield's trip, first through Boston and then to Northampton. When Whitefield preached at Edwards's church in Northampton, he reminded them of the revival they had undergone just a few years before. This deeply touched Edwards, who wept throughout the entire service, and much of the congregation too was moved.

Revivals began to spring up again, and Edwards preached his most famous sermon, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, in Enfield, Connecticut, in 1741. Though this sermon has been widely reprinted as an example of "fire and brimstone" preaching in the colonial revivals, that characterization is not in keeping with descriptions of Edward's actual preaching style. Edwards did not shout or speak loudly, but talked in a quiet, emotive voice. He moved his audience slowly from point to point, towards an inexorable conclusion: they were lost without the grace of God. While most 21st-century readers notice the damnation looming in such a sermon text, historian George Marsden reminds us that Edwards was not preaching anything new or surprising: "Edwards could take for granted... that a New England audience knew well the Gospel remedy. The problem was getting them to seek it."

The movement met with opposition from conservative Congregationalist ministers. In 1741, Edwards published in the defense of revivals The Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God, dealing particularly with the phenomena most criticized: the swoonings, outcries, and convulsions. These "bodily effects," he insisted, were not distinguishing marks of the work of the Spirit of God one way or another. So bitter was the feeling against the revival in some churches that in 1742 he felt moved to write a second apology, Thoughts on the Revival in New England, where his main argument concerned the great moral improvement of the country. In the same pamphlet he defends an appeal to the emotions and advocates preaching terror when necessary, even to children, who in God's sight "are young vipers... if not Christ's."

He considered "bodily effects" incidental to the real work of God. But his own mystic devotion and the experiences of his wife during the Awakening (which he recounts in detail) make him think that the divine visitation usually overpowers the body, a view in support of which he quotes Scripture. In reply to Edwards, Charles Chauncy wrote Seasonable Thoughts on the State of Religion in New England in 1743 and anonymously penned The Late Religious Commotions in New England Considered in the same year. In these works, he urged conduct as the sole test of conversion. The general convention of Congregational ministers in the Province of Massachusetts Bay seemed to agree, protesting "against disorders in practice which have of late obtained in various parts of the land." Despite Edwards's able pamphlet, the impression had become widespread that "bodily effects" were recognized by the promoters of the Great Awakening as the true tests of conversion.

To offset this feeling, during the years 1742 and 1743, Edwards preached at Northampton a series of sermons published under the title of Religious Affections (1746), a restatement in a more philosophical and general tone of his ideas as to "distinguishing marks." In 1747, he joined the movement started in Scotland called the "concert in prayer," and in the same year published An Humble Attempt to Promote Explicit Agreement and Visible Union of God's People in Extraordinary Prayer for the Revival of Religion and the Advancement of Christ's Kingdom on Earth. In 1749, he published a memoir of David Brainerd, who had lived with his family for several months and had died at Northampton in 1747. Brainerd had been constantly attended by Edwards's daughter Jerusha, to whom he was rumored to have been engaged to be married,[32] though there is no surviving evidence of this. While elaborating his theories of conversion, Edwards used Brainerd and his ministry as a case study, making extensive notes of his conversions and confessions.

In 1748, there had come a crisis in his relations with his congregation. The Half-Way Covenant, adopted by the synods of 1657 and 1662, had made baptism alone the condition to the civil privileges of church membership, but not of participation in the sacrament of the Lord's Supper. Stoddard had been even more liberal, holding that the Lord's Supper was a converting ordinance and that baptism was a sufficient title to all the privileges of the church.

As early as 1744, Edwards, in his sermons on Religious Affections, had plainly intimated his dislike of this practice. In the same year, he had published in a church meeting the names of certain young people, members of the church, who were suspected of reading improper books, and also the names of those who were to be called as witnesses in the case. It has often been reported that the witnesses and accused were not distinguished on this list, and so the entire congregation was in an uproar. However, Patricia Tracy's research has cast doubt on this version of the events, noting that in the list he read from, the names were distinguished. Those involved were eventually disciplined for disrespect to the investigators rather than for the original incident. In any case, the incident further deteriorated the relationship between Edwards and the congregation.

Edwards's preaching became unpopular. For four years, no candidate presented himself for admission to the church, and when one eventually did, in 1748, he was met with Edwards's formal tests as expressed in the Distinguishing Marks and later in Qualifications for Full Communion, 1749. The candidate refused to submit to them, the church backed him, and the break between the church and Edwards was complete. Even permission to discuss his views in the pulpit was refused. He was allowed to present his views on Thursday afternoons. His sermons were well attended by visitors but not his own congregation. A council was convened to decide the communion matter between the minister and his people. The congregation chose half the council, and Edwards was allowed to select the other half of the council. His congregation, however, limited his selection to one county where most of the ministers were against him. The ecclesiastical council voted by 10 to 9 that the pastoral relation be dissolved.

The church members, by a vote of more than 200 to 23, ratified the action of the council, and finally a town meeting voted that Edwards should not be allowed to occupy the Northampton pulpit, though he continued to live in the town and preach in the church by the request of the congregation until October 1751. In his "Farewell Sermon" he preached from 2 Corinthians 1:14 and directed the thoughts of his people to that far future when the minister and his people would stand before God. In a letter to Scotland after his dismissal, he expresses his preference for Presbyterian to congregational polity. His position at the time was not unpopular throughout New England. His doctrine that the Lord's Supper is not a cause of regeneration and that communicants should be professing Protestants has since (largely through the efforts of his pupil Joseph Bellamy) become a standard of New England Congregationalism.

Edwards was in high demand. A parish in Scotland could have been procured,[further explanation needed] and he was called to a Virginia church. He declined both to become pastor in 1751 of the church in Stockbridge, Massachusetts and a missionary to the Housatonic Indians, taking over for the recently deceased John Sergeant. To the Indians, he preached through an interpreter, and their interests he boldly and successfully defended, by attacking the whites who were using their official positions among them to increase their private fortunes. During this time, he got to know Judge Joseph Dwight who was trustee of the Indian Schools. In Stockbridge, he wrote the Humble Relation, also called Reply to Williams (1752), which was an answer to Solomon Williams, a relative and a bitter opponent of Edwards as to the qualifications for full communion. He composed the treatises on which his reputation as a philosophical theologian chiefly rests, the essay on Original Sin, the Dissertation Concerning the Nature of True Virtue, the Dissertation Concerning the End for which God created the World, and the great work on the Will, written in four and a half months and published in 1754 under the title, An Inquiry into the Modern Prevailing Notions Respecting that Freedom of the Will which is supposed to be Essential to Moral Agency.

Aaron Burr, Sr., Edwards' son-in-law, died in 1757 (he had married Esther Edwards five years before, and they had made Edwards the grandfather of Aaron Burr, later U.S. vice president). Edwards felt himself in "the decline of life", and inadequate to the office, but was persuaded to replace Burr as president of the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University). He was installed on February 16, 1758. He gave weekly essay assignments in theology to the senior class.

Edwards was involved with slavery during his lifetime. Beginning in June 1731, he pushed a young black teenager named Venus who was kidnapped in Africa and whom he purchased; a boy named Titus; and a woman named Leah. In a 1741 pamphlet, Edwards defended the institution for those who were debtors, war captives, or were born enslaved in North America, but rejected the Atlantic slave trade.

Attention to this fact became prominent during the 2010s and 2020s. Responses have ranged from condemnation to the view that he was a man of his time. Other commentators have sought to maintain what they see as valuable in Edwards' theology, while deploring his involvement in slavery.

Almost immediately after becoming president of the College of New Jersey, Edwards, a staunch supporter of smallpox inoculations, decided to get inoculated in order to encourage others to do the same. Never having been in robust health, he died because of the inoculation on March 22, 1758. Edwards left behind eleven children (three sons and eight daughters). The grave of Edwards is located in Princeton Cemetery. Written in Latin, the long emotional epitaph inscription on the horizontal gravestone eulogizes his life and career and laments the great loss of his passing. It draws from the classical tradition in extolling the virtues of the deceased and directly inviting the passerby to pause and mourn.

The followers of Jonathan Edwards and his disciples came to be known as the New Light Calvinist ministers. Prominent disciples included the New Divinity school's Samuel Hopkins, Joseph Bellamy, Jonathan Edwards Jr., and Gideon Hawley. Through a practice of apprentice ministers living in the homes of older ministers, they eventually filled many pastorates in the New England area. Many of Jonathan and Sarah Edwards's descendants became prominent citizens in the United States, including Burr and college presidents Timothy Dwight, Jonathan Edwards Jr. and Merrill Edwards Gates. Jonathan and Sarah Edwards were also ancestors of Edith Roosevelt, the writer O. Henry, the publisher Frank Nelson Doubleday, and the writer Robert Lowell.[citation needed] The eminence of many descendants of Edwards led some Progressive Era scholars to view him as proof of eugenics. His descendants have had a disproportionate effect upon American culture: his biographer George Marsden notes that "the Edwards family produced scores of clergymen, thirteen presidents of higher learning, sixty-five professors, and many other persons of notable achievements."

Edwards's writings and beliefs continue to influence individuals and groups to this day. Early American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions missionaries were influenced by Edwards's writings, as is evidenced in reports in the ABCFM's journal "The Missionary Herald," and beginning with Perry Miller's seminal work, Edwards enjoyed a renaissance among scholars after the end of the Second World War. The Banner of Truth Trust and other publishers continue to reprint Edwards's works, and most of his major works are now available through the series published by Yale University Press, which has spanned three decades and supplies critical introductions by the editor of each volume. Yale has also established the Jonathan Edwards Project online. Author and teacher, Elisabeth Woodbridge Morris, memorialized him, her paternal ancestor (3rd great grandfather) in two books, The Jonathan Papers (1912), and More Jonathan Papers (1915). In 1933, he became the namesake of Jonathan Edwards College, the first of the 12 residential colleges of Yale, and The Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale University was founded to provide scholarly information about Edwards' writings. Edwards is remembered today as a teacher and missionary by the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America on March 22. The contemporary poet Susan Howe frequently describes the composition of Edwards' manuscripts and notebooks held at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library in several of her books of poetry and prose, including Souls of the Labadie Tract, 2007 and That This, 2010. She notes how some of Edwards' notebooks were hand sewn from silk paper that his sisters and wife used for making fans. Howe also argues in My Emily Dickinson that Emily Dickinson was formatively influenced by Edwards's writings, and that she "took both his legend and his learning, tore them free from his own humorlessness and the dead weight of doctrinaire Calvinism, then applied the freshness of his perception to the dead weight of American poetry as she knew it."

A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections is a publication written in 1746 by Jonathan Edwards describing his philosophy about the process of Christian conversion in Northampton, Massachusetts, during the First Great Awakening, which emanated from Edwards' congregation starting in 1734. "Religious Affections" remains popular and modern-day evangelists and writers such as Tim Keller and John Piper often refer to this and other Edwards works as models for their ministry.

Edwards wrote the Treatise to explain how true religious conversion to Christianity occurs. Edwards describes how emotion and intellect both play a role, but "converting grace" is what causes Christians to "awaken" to see that forgiveness is available to all who have faith that Jesus' sacrifice atones for all sins. This salvation is not possible through believers' imperfect good works which are simply evidence of faith, only through Christ's sacrifice which is free to all. Edwards describes the importance of testing new faith and discerning whether it is legitimate. He lays out twelve tests of true conversion, including ways of measuring allegedly fruitful works.

In his preface, he believed that Satan prevailed against revivals of religion in America by quenching the love and spoiling the joy, especially in the recent revival, the Great Wakening in the 1730s and 1740s. He thinks this prevailing by Satan will continue until the people of God learn to distinguish between true and false religion, between affections and experiences that are saving and those that are only for appearances and are thus counterfeit. He sees people working wickedness under a notion of doing the work of God, but in the process sin without restraint and with zeal, bringing the friends of religion, unaware of the destructive nature of their activity, to do the work of the enemy by destroying true religion more effectively than an open enemy can do, scattering the flock of Christ by setting the flock against each other. Thus, he wants to consider in what true religion consists of. He says that his purpose in this book is to show the nature and signs of the gracious operations of the Spirit of God, by which such operations distinguish themselves from things that are not of a saving nature.

Part One considers the nature of the affections and their importance in religion. He distinguishes in the soul between the mind, which shows itself in perception, speculation, and understanding, and the heart that shows itself in our not living as uninterested spectator of our world and thus that toward which we are inclined to like or dislike, approve or disapprove, and is thus intricately connected with the will. He proposes that true religion consists in the affections. We see this in the Bible when it calls upon us to love God with all the heart, bringing a liveliness and power to true religion. Such true religion is practice, recognizing that human action springs from that toward which the will is inclined, and thus from the heart. Take away love and hate, hope and fear, and humanity would be motionless. Coveting, ambition, love of pleasure, derive from worldly affections while love divine things derive from religious affections. Many hear the word of God, but it does not touch their affection, their heart and will. Love of God and neighbor, which is the sum of all true religion, hatred of evil, fear of God, hope in the promises of God, and joy in the Spirit, compassion, mercy, zeal, are the exercise of holy affections. Prayer, singing, sacraments, and preaching have the purpose of stirring in participants holy affection. Thus, it is not surprising that sin arises from a hard heart. Edwards will then draw some inferences from the principle. The fact that some people who display holy affection fall into error of the mind does not mean we should dismiss the importance of holy affection, for their affections were false. We need to discern the difference between false affection and those that derive from the Spirit. Our worldly interests arouse our affections, but it seems rare that divine interests arouse our affections toward spiritual things. The Lord is the one worthy of our admiration and love. The Lord shows this in the most affecting manner, shining in all its luster, in the face of the Incarnate, infinitely loving, meek, compassionate, and dying redeemer. His virtues of humility, patience, meekness, submission, obedience, love, and compassion are exhibited in a manner the most tending to move our affections. In his greatest trial, in his last sufferings that he endured from his tender love and mercy toward us. His suffering also revealed the hateful nature of our sins and their dreadful effects in the most affecting way possible. His suffering revealed the hatred the Father has for sin and the divine justice and punishment of that sin.

Part Two considers the aspects of religious affection that are not signs of the gracious working of God upon the heart. High affection is not such a sign. High affection is testified to in scripture, but its manifestation is not a sign of true religion. Bodily manifestations are not such a sign. The knowledge which the saints have of God’s beauty and glory in this world, and those holy affections that arise from it, are of the same nature and kind with what the saints are the subjects of in heaven, differing only in degree and circumstances. What God gives them here, is a foretaste of heavenly happiness, and an earnest of their future inheritance. Talking fluently, fervently, and abundantly of religious matters is not such a sign. That such affections may derive from the Spirit or from one’s own personal development is not a sign either way. Religious affections that come to the mind from a remarkable text of scripture is not a sign either way of a holy affection. The devil can abuse scripture as well. The appearance of love in holy affection is not a sign either way of a saving affection. Having many affections together is not a sign of genuine affection, for there are counterfeits to all religious affections. Comfort and joy following in a certain order is not such a sign. Spending much time in religion and the external duty of worship is not a sign of holy affection. Persons disposed to glorify and praise God with their mouths is no sure sign of holy affection. Abundant confidence is not such a sign. One who relates such affections in a way that affects others is no sure sign of true religion. 

Part Three discusses the genuine signs of gracious and holy affection arise from spiritual, supernatural, and divine influences and operations upon the heart. He draws a contrast, based upon Pauline writings, between the spiritual or sanctified person and the carnal or unsanctified person. The term “spiritual” relates to be born of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit dwells within such persons and produces holiness as an effect. This Spirit bears witness to our spirits that we are children of God. The first objective ground of gracious affection is the excellence and amiable nature of divine things. Holy affections have their foundation in the moral excellence, the beauty and sweetness, of divine things. Gracious affections arise from a rightly enlightened mind and that spiritually apprehends divine things. Conviction of the reality and certainty of divine things, especially the certainty of participating in divine glory, attend gracious affections. Evangelical humiliations attend gracious affections. It leads to self-denial. It leads to an appreciation of the vast difference between oneself and the infinite nature of God. Thus, high religious affection and discovery hide in them the corruption of their hearts. True religion recognizes that whatever love one may have in one’s heart is small in comparison to what it could be. Such a person is more likely to see their own failing than the failing of others. Gracious affections are also attended with a change of nature: born again, becoming new creatures, renewed in the spirit of the mind, dying to sin, living to righteousness, putting off the old person and putting on the new person, and partakers of the divine nature. If there is no remarkable and abiding change in a person, then the testimony of conversion is vain. [I must confess that when I look back upon what I view as my conversion at ten years of age, I do not see much change. If a change has occurred, it has been steadily over the years.] Truly gracious affections give birth to and promote a spirit of love, meekness, quietness, forgiveness, and mercy, as shown in Christ. Gracious affection softens the heart with a tenderness of the human spirit. Truly gracious affection leads to a beautiful symmetry and proportion. The higher gracious affections are raised the more the longing of the soul for spiritual attainment increases. Gracious and holy affections display their fruit in Christian practice. Christian practice, which consists in a holy life, a sanctified life, is a sign of the sincerity of the professing Christian before others. Such Christian practice is a sign to the conscience of the person, in which he considers the witness of the Spirit with our human spirit. [He can sound much like John Wesley on this point.]

He concludes that the fruit of the Spirit are the religious affections, love being the chief affection, and that all other fruit (or Christian virtues) flow from this. "Love is the chief of the affections, and as it were the fountain of them." (p. 76, Banner of Truth Edition). He further says, "for it was not by men's having the gifts of the Spirit (referring to spiritual gifts), but by their having the virtues of the Spirit, that they were called spiritual." (p. 127). This is how you can distinguish between carnal people and spiritual people. Carnal people do not produce the fruit of the Spirit, but spiritual people do. So it was with Christ. "All the virtues of the Lamb of God, His humility, patience, meekness, submission, obedience, love and compassion, are exhibited to our view in a manner the most tending to move our affections of any that can be imagined." (p. 53).