Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 7.djvu/711

E D W A II D S 689 East Windsor, Connecticut, October 5, 1703, He was the only son in a family of eleven children, of whom four were older than himself. Even in his very early years the religious instruction communicated to him by his parents seems to have engaged a large share of his interest, and to have exercised a strong influence on his character. In a state ment of his religious views in youth, he says, " I had a variety of concerns and exercises about my soul from my childhood," and also, " from my childhood up my mind had been full of objections against the doctrine of God s sovereignty " In his eighth or ninth year he experienced, he tells us, " two remarkable seasons of awakening ; " but these objections against the doctrine of God s sovereignty continued to trouble him move or less until about his 17th year, " when," he says, * I seemed to be convinced and fully satisfied as to this sovereignt} of God, and his jus tice in thus eternally disposing of men, according to his sovereign pleasure, but never could give an account how or by what means I was convinced, nor in the least imagined at the time, nor a long time after, that there was any extra ordinary influence of God s Spirit in it." Until he entered college his education was conducted by his father, with the occasional assistance of his elder sisters. At the age of six he began the study of Latin, and in that language, as well as iu Greek and Hebrew, he attained to considerable proficiency. In September 1716 he entered Yale College. He took hisB.A. degree in 1720, but with a view to prepara tion for the ministry he continued his residence at college for two additional years. In 1718 he read Locke on the Human Understanding, and it was from its perusal that his intense passion for abstract thought was first kindled. He declared that it had afforded him " far higher pleasure than the most greedy miser finds when gathering up hand- f uls of silver and gold from some newly discovered treasure." He received licence to preach in 1722, and in August of that year, on the invitation of a number of ministers in New England, he went to preach to the Presbyterians in New York, where he continued eight months. He was in vited by the congregation to continue with them per manently, but on account of doubts as to his future use fulness in that particular sphere, he declined their invitation, and returned to his father s house at East Windsor. Here he prosecuted his studies in theology and metaphysics till June 1724, when he was appointed tutor in Yale College. About this time he completed the series of seventy resolutions begun during his preparation for the ministry, and designed to " regulate his own heart and life." No, 11 of these may be mentioned as specially characteristic: "Resolved, when I think of any theorem in divinity to be solved, immediately to do what I can towards solving it, if circumstances do not hinder." He resigned his tutorship in September 1726, on receiving an invitation from Northampton to become colleague and successor to his grandfather, the Rev. Samuel Stoddard, and in February 1727 he was ordnined to that office. In the following July he was married to Sarah, daughter of the Rev. James Pierrepont, of New Haven. He continued at Northampton till June 22, 1750, when, on account of a dispute that had arisen from an attempt on his part to prohibit some of the younger members of his congregation from perusing certain books, which in his opinion were obscene, he found himself compelled to resign his charge. On learning of his resignation some of his friends in Scotland advised him to settle in that country, and he was also invited to a church in Virginia, but he ac cepted in preference to either invitation the proposals made to him by the " Society in London for Propagating the Gospel in New England, " that he should become missionary to the Housatonnuck Indians, who were settled at Stockbridge, Berkshire Co., Massachusetts. The nature of his work now left him in possession of considerable leisure, of which he made use to such advantage that, within the six years of his residence at Stockbridge, he completed four of his principal treatises, including that on the Freedom of the Will, which was published in 1754. On account of the fame which this work acquired for him he was in 1757 called to succeed President Burr of Princeton College, New Jersey. He was installed February 16, 1758, but was scarcely spared to enter upon the perfor mance of his duties. On account of the prevalence of small-pox in the neighbourhood, he submitted to inocula tion and the disease taking an unfavourable turn, he died on the 28th March. Edwards says of himself that he possessed " a constitution in many respects peculiarly unhappy, attended with flaccid solids, vapid, sizy, and scarce fluids, and a low tide of spirits, often occasioning a kind of childish weakness and contemptibleness of speech, presence, and demeanour." Notwithstanding this unhappy constitu tion, he was throughout life a laborious student, often prosecuting, pen in hand, his arduous metaphysical researches for thirteen hours daily. As an orator he some times held not only the feelings but the intellects of his hearers completely under his sway. The extraordinary influence which he thus exercised was not due to any personal advantages, for even when his oratory was most effective the " contemptibleness of his speech and demeanour " still remained, although it was no longer felt by his hearers, nor to any special excellences of style, for though his language conveyed his meaning without ambiguity, it did so not only without any of thafc peculiar felicity of arrangement which is usually one of the chief elements of successful oratory, but in a bald, even in a lumbering and awkward, manner. His eloquence was simply intense moral earnestness, expressed in the form of what, in more senses than one, might be called " merciless logic." His writings present a very remarkable conjunction of apparently contradictory qualities, a conjunction attribut able partly to a peculiar combination of natural mental characteristics, and partly to a habit of solitariness which rendered him almost completely ignorant of the dominant tendencies of contemporary thought, and placed him almost beyond the reach of any external influences fitted to aid him in freeing himself from the shackles of past systems. The outstanding features of his character were undoubtedly his sense of reverence and his passion for ratiocination. In one respect these two opposite characteristics combined to produce a harmonious result, namely, to impress him vath an almost overwhelming conviction of the claims of duty. His awe of the Supreme Power was in one aspect of such a nature as to seem consistent only with the grossest superstition, but from the very fact that it was the awe of an intellect, within the sphere of logic, so keen and penetrating, it was necessarily a moral awe, an awe which intensified that sense of duty whose requirements his logical faculty revealed with a distinctness which admitted of no fallacy or evasion. It was his overwhelming convic tion of duty which gave to his system, theological, moral, and metaphysical, what unity it possesses. That unity is, however, nothing more than seeming; the positive and negative elements are held apart in different spheres ; if they were brought into contact the necessary result would be an utterly destructive explosion. The basis of his whole system is the " sovereignty of God ; " and of his conviction of God s " sovereignty " he tells us that of how or by what means he arrived at it he could give no account. This mysterious and unaccountable conviction he, however, endeavours to justify by a protracted logical process, with out being at all conscious of any incongruity between means and end. This unconsciousness is due to the fact that the strength of his original conviction prevented him from dis cerning the real difficulties he had to surmount. We have

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