God—who "himself," Edwards reminds us, "is in effect being in general." Secondary virtue cannot make us happy (to put the point in terms intelligible to the modern mind). It cannot overcome our resentment of the world's imperfections. It cannot solve the "problem of evil." It cannot explain why we should be expected to love life when it is full of pain and suffering, heartbreakingly short, and bounded on either side by darkness. Only "repentance" and "consent" can do that: such is Edwards's answer to the eighteenth-century "pursuit of happiness." ^*

It was an answer, of course, that eighteenth-century rationalists were hardly prepared to accept, or even to understand. Equating goodness with church attendance, observance of the laws, and respect for the rights of others, they found it hard to grasp the central point of Edwards's theology—that goodness lay not so much in outward conduct as in proper "affections," a good "temper," a loving and trustful "propensity of the heart." In the sixteenth century, the doctrine of "justification by faith" had appealed to those who rebelled against Catholic formalism and cor-

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But if inner peace is the issue, then it will be objected that Edwards's "angelic" morality, though it may not be irrelevant to all human concerns, remains irrelevant to social and political concerns. From a political point of view, we need to know what makes it possible for human beings to live together without cutting each other's throats, not what makes them happy. It was not Edwards, however, but Thomas Jefferson, that exemplar of eighteenth-century enlightenment, who introduced the question of happiness into our founding political charter, the Declaration of Independence. If it can be shown that Edwards had a deeper understanding of happiness than Jefferson did, that judgment has political implications of great importance. Perry Miller presumably had something like this in mind when he compared Edwards to another illustrious contemporary, Benjamin Franklin, and observed that "although our civilization has chosen to wander in the more genial meadows to which Franklin beckoned it, there come periods, either through disaster or through self-knowledge, when applied science and Benjamin Franklin's The Way to Wealth seem not a sufficient philosophy of national life." Is it necessary to belabor the point that our own times, the closing decades of the twentieth century, are such a period?

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