Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758)
The Puritan minister Jonathan Edwards once wrote a short treatise entitled “Of Insects,” In it he recorded his observations of spiders as they sailed from tree to tree, and from their behavior he drew the conclusion that everything in God’s universe exists for some purpose. The surprising fact about “Of Insects” is neither that its descriptions of insects are exact nor that its arguments are ingenious, but that Edwards wrote it when he was eleven years old.
Born in East Windsor, Connecticut, in 1703, Edwards entered Yale College at the age of thirteen. Soon he began writing philosophical works on the nature of existence and of the mind. At the age of seventeen he discovered that thunder and lightning no longer terrified him. Indeed, he now found them beautiful--one of the several signs that made him certain he had experienced grace. In his early twenties he married Sarah Pierrepont of New Haven, a woman as otherworldly and absorbed in God as he, and began preaching at one of the leading American churches, in Northampton, Massachusetts.
Edwards’ power as a preacher became evident during the Great Awakening, the revival of religious fervor that swept the American colonies from 1735 to 1742. Suddenly, people all over America began denouncing their sins and dedicating themselves anew to God. During this time Edwards wrote and preached such sermons as “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” which roused his listeners to frenzy. As he depicted the furnace of eternal torturous fire awaiting sinners, members of the congregation began calling out, “What shall I do to be saved? Oh, I am going to Hell--Oh what shall I do for Christ?” One listener wrote that the “shrieks and cries were piercing and amazing”; the “great moaning and crying out” forced Edwards to stop before he finished preaching the sermon. Edwards approved of such outbursts but feared that they might sometimes arise not from sincere religious feeling but from delusion or hysteria. In fact, the Great Awakening did not last long.
Edwards’ passionate conviction brought him fame but also antagonism. As happened to Edward Taylor, his insistence on grace as the essence of religious life displeased many members of his Northampton church.
In 1750 the church dismissed him as minister. He moved to the raw town of Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where he preached to Indians and wrote several of his longest works, works of rigorous logic such as Freedom of the Will (1754) and The Nature of True Virtue (published in 1765). In 1757 he was elected president of Princeton University, but he died just after taking office, from the effects of a smallpox inoculation.
Edwards’ writings remained popular, helping to keep Puritan ideals alive even after Puritanism had vanished. His method of reading nature as a representation of spiritual truth, for instance, survives in the attempts of Henry David Thoreau to read moral meanings in the beans and pickerel at Walden Pond. Edwards’ works endured because he was a great writer, able to express in seemingly simple prose a subtle and complex vision of human life. He and Benjamin Franklin were the first of the American writers to show the Old World that the New World could produce its share of genius.
Source: Hodgins, Francis and Kenneth Silverman, Adventures in American Literature, Hodgins, ( San Francisco: Harcourt Brace Javanovich,, 1980) p. 39.