Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry Walcott Boynton, Reader's History of American Literature

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[20]

Jonathan Edwards.

Jonathan Edwards was born, the son of a Connecticut minister, in 1703. He took his degree at Yale in 1720, and thereafter became college tutor, minister at Northampton, missionary to the Stockbridge Indians, and finally president of Princeton College. He died in 1758. As a child he showed ability in mental science and divinity. At twelve he displayed the acuteness and courtesy in speculative controversy which were to be his lifelong characteristics. Until he had fairly entered the ministry he manifested just as keen interest and intelligence in other fields. At seventeen he had somehow evolved a system of idealistic philosophy much like that which Berkeley was to make famous a few years later. In physics and astronomy, also, he had, before the end of his tutorship at Yale, recorded speculative theories very far in advance of his time. Yet at twenty-four he deliberately cast all this intellectual activity behind him, to devote himself for the rest of his life to the championship of a rigid and belated system of theology. The doctrines that in the handling of Wigglesworth and Mather had often been grotesque, became terrific when