Good writing, by contrast, is “simple, natural, nervous, diffuse, sublime,” according to Jacob. Out of that list of attributes, “simple” and “natural” were the most important ones to him. He admiringly cited the writing in the Old Testament: “The thoughts are natural, & the choice of words is natural.” He also praised Demosthenes and Cicero, who managed to be eloquent and persuasive without giving the “appearance of art & study, or of affectation.” Effective writers, Jacob strongly felt, take care to “accommodate to the capacities of the hearers. This is a most important Rule of Eloquence.” The implications for the minister trying to win over souls to Jesus Christ were obvious. Sermons “ought to be plain & simple,” Jacob advised; regular English was much more effective than relying on “dead languages.” When delivering these sermons, the “Speaker ought generally, if not always to appear calm, composed, & without any emotion at all.”12
This was not surprising advice coming from someone who considered himself a poor public speaker. Yet in another sense it was surprising, considering how much Jacob admired Whitefield and Tennent. The powerful, emotional preaching of the leading awakeners had moved him profoundly, and he was recruited to Hanover to serve as an evangelical minister. Instead, Green’s views reflected his careful study of the ancients; the treatises of his contemporaries, especially Jonathan Edwards; and the rhetoric of the Enlightenment. Simple was best; calm reason was more persuasive than fervid outbursts. Jacob’s Harvard coursework taught him that a good sermon should be built around four parts—invention, the process by which the speaker determines the subject matter; arrangement, by which the speaker places his argument in proper order; style, the determination of the proper language to use; and delivery, by which the speaker decides what voice and body language to employ.13
Jacob’s writing and preaching style was far closer to Edwards than to the classic rhetoricians or to the Great Awakeners. Green rejected the two extremes in sermonizing—he found his “rationalist” peers too elitist, too learned, too argumentative, but he was not comfortable with the evangelical style of Whitefield and others that stressed emotion and the ability to deliver a sermon extemporaneously. Instead, Green found a kindred spirit in the famed minister from Northampton, Massachusetts. Edwards sought a middle ground in preaching that merged sound thinking and emotion. Edwards wanted to win over the “head” by going through the “heart.” To achieve this task he relied on vivid natural imagery that appealed to the emotions. Edwards at times was almost mystical in his use of language, stressing the beauty of nature and the wondrous ways of God.14
Jacob’s search for the middle ground is evident in his daybooks. He evinced little patience for college-educated ministers, who he said were more interested in showing off their education than in imparting sound evangelical principles to his listeners. He stressed that the careful minister should avoid excessive emotionalism, but he went on to say that emotionalism has its place in good writing and sermonizing. “We must be careful to set on the proper considerations before the Mind in the natural order; i.e., we must put first the plainest, & then the more complex, views of things”—all with an eye toward awakening the emotions in hearers. To pull off this feat, Jacob stressed, “a speaker must feel the emotions in himself.” He likened the process to a “contagion”; when the speaker feels warm emotion, he can pass it along to his audience. But if the speaker feels a “coldness,” he will cut a “very sorry figure” and fail to move his listeners.15
The most important aspect of Green’s education during this period was his study of Jonathan Edwards. It was Edwards who quieted his mind on Calvinism and enabled him to solve the key riddle about predestination—why should anyone act morally? As Green put it in his autobiography, Edwards did the most to “bring me off from all the notions that bordered on Arminianism,” the idea that man could achieve salvation on his own, that he had the free will to change his own fate. This doctrine, derived from the teachings of Jacob Arminius in the sixteenth century, threatened all that Calvinism stood for. The attack was serious enough that Green was tormented by questions about man’s culpability in sin and his ability to reform his ways. The role of free will only baffled him further during these early years. In 1744, Green hesitantly decided “that I think a man may be a free agent without having any power to believe, for a man may act freely and chuse to do one thing without being able to do the contrary to it, so a sinner may act freely in chusing to go on in sin without being able to chuse holiness.”16
Looking for better answers, Green read Edwards’s writings intently, especially his renowned Freedom of the Will and his Inquiry Concerning Qualifications for the Sacraments. Edwards had several concerns in these tracts. With the Enlightenment and “rational” religion advancing methodically in the mid-eighteenth century, he wanted to counter the attacks on Calvinism, especially by answering those critics who said that John Calvin’s rigid theological system built on the doctrine of predestination undermined a person’s moral responsibility. Edwards carefully set out to reconcile free will (the notion that individuals are free to do as they please) with Calvinism (the idea that an omniscient God controls all). Edwards reconciled the seemingly irreconcilable by distinguishing between natural necessity and moral necessity. An all-powerful but loving God governs through the latter—in his greatness he grants individuals the power to choose within the limits that God has decreed. As one recent biographer of Edwards explained, God “created intelligent beings who were free to choose what they wanted in the most significant ways possible in a God-governed universe. Their choices were fully their own, and they were morally responsible for their choices.”17
Green was impressed with this line of argument, and he came to believe that Calvinism’s critics were the inconsistent ones. Green noted in his autobiography that most skeptics were “partly Calvinists, and partly Arminians.” An intellectual muddle, in other words: the skeptics “dare not look the Calvinistic principles through, follow them to their source, and receive them with all their consequences. . . . They believe the perfections of God, and that he foreknew all things,” yet they were unwilling to accept that God controlled all.18
Green fleshed out his Edwardsean insights in a series of sermons and tracts that he published in the 1760s, beginning with a published sermon in 1764 on baptism and culminating in 1770 with a short pamphlet that summarized his views. Like Edwards, Green rested his theories on one sturdy foundation: God is all-powerful, loving, and good. In staking his claim for God’s greatness, Green again acknowledged the conundrums that it created: if God is so powerful and good, why does he permit evil? If he is so loving, how can he be so cruel as to save some sinners but not others? And if God truly controls all, then are not humans powerless to achieve salvation? And are they not blameless for current or past sins?19
Unlike the confused explanation he gave in 1744, he answered these perplexing questions in the 1750s and later by constructing an Edwardsean defense, distinguishing between what he termed natural inability and spiritual inability. The difference between the two concepts was great, Jacob asserted. “Natural Inability, is the Want of Power or Faculty to do what Persons have a Will to do, what they choose and desire to do,” he explained. “A Man that has lost his Hands cannot do the Work that others do, tho’ he might wish and desire to. . . . The Man without Hands . . . [is] under a natural Inability.” By contrast, spiritual inability involved a conscious choice by the individual to do good—or ill. For the sinner, “the Motives to do good and avoid evil, have no considerable Weight with him. His wicked Disposition overcomes the Motives to good. . . . The Sinner is not blind and deaf like him that is without sight and hearing; the Sinner has Eyes to see, and ears to hear, and an understanding by which he may consider, but he has no Heart to read, hear or consider.”20
Green well knew that skeptics would accept this as only a partial explanation, that they would counter with the observation “That Persons have not Power to alter their bad Will and Inclination; and that they cannot help being of such a bad Heart and Temper” (Green’s emphasis). To answer such objections, Green drew on Edwards’s concept of the will. “If any Person has a Will to love God or Holiness,” Green explained, “there is then Nothing in the