It is precisely this claim on the universe that Edwards wants us to surrender. Our human concerns, our "private affections," are

so far from containing the sum of universal being ... that [they] contain but an infinitely small part of it. The reason why men are so ready to take these private affections for true virtue, is the narrowness of their views: and above all, that they are so ready to leave the divine Being out of their view, ... or to regard him in their thoughts as though he did not properly belong to the system of real existence, but was a kind of shadowy, imaginary being.

Note once again that Edwards's attack is directed not against ordinary selfishness but against our expectation of happiness, our assumption that happiness belongs to us as a God-given right. Selfishness, universally condemned, is hardly worth condemning all over again. Self-love, moreover, is not unambiguously a bad thing, measured on the scale of purely human values. It can flower into family feeling, patriotism, even into an exalted form of universal benevolence. Self-love can inspire people with a "benevolent affection limited to a party, or to the nation in general, ... or the public community to which they belong, [even to one] as large as the Roman empire was of old." Self-love can extrapolate itself into "benevolence towards the whole world of mankind, or even all created sensible natures throughout the universe."

Edwards's point—a difficult point, to be sure—is not that men lack brotherly love but that "benevolence," if it leaves out God, still falls short of true virtue. A universal love of mankind, indeed, is the most dangerous of all forms of self-love, since it is so easily confused with the love of "being in general." "The larger the number is, to which that private affection extends, the more apt men are, through the narrowness of their sight, to mistake it for true virtue; because then the private system appears to have more of the image of the universal." ^*

____________________

*	The same reasoning later led Orestes Brownson to condemn philanthropy as the work of the devil. Here is another reason to prefer local attachments to an abstract love of mankind: they are less easily confused with true virtue.

-254-