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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
- Sprache: Englisch
In "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God and Other Sermons," Jonathan Edwards delivers a series of impassioned sermons that exemplify the fervor of the First Great Awakening. Through vivid imagery and emotional appeals, Edwards navigates themes of sin, salvation, and the dire consequences of moral negligence. His rhetorical style'—marked by a careful blend of fear and hope'—forces listeners to confront their spiritual status, making the text a profound exploration of early American Puritan theology while anchoring itself within the broader context of 18th-century Evangelicalism. This collection not only showcases Edwards' masterful oratory but also serves as a crucial document reflecting the anxieties and religious fervor of colonial America. Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758), an influential preacher and theologian, was deeply embedded in the religious currents of his time, which shaped his understanding of human depravity and divine wrath. A prominent figure in New England's Puritan tradition, Edwards' personal experiences with faith and his rigorous education provided the foundation for his theological convictions. His work emerged during a time of spiritual awakening, prompting him to reach out to a society rife with moral ambiguity. For readers seeking to understand the nexus of sin and grace within early American Christianity, this collection is indispensable. Edwards' compelling prose invites both scholarly inquiry and personal reflection, making it a significant text for theologians, historians, and anyone interested in the emotional and spiritual landscapes of early America. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - The Author Biography highlights personal milestones and literary influences that shape the entire body of writing. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God and Other Sermons
Table of Contents
Introduction
This collection gathers a focused selection of sermons by Jonathan Edwards, presenting a coherent portrait of his pastoral vocation and theological vision during the era often called the Great Awakening. Its purpose is not to be exhaustive but to provide a representative arc of Edwards’s homiletic work, from evangelistic urgency to pastoral consolation and communal reflection. By assembling widely read pieces alongside important occasional sermons, the volume introduces new readers to a central voice in American religious history and offers seasoned readers a concise, thematically integrated set. The aim is to show how Edwards’s preaching joined rigorous doctrine to the lived realities of eighteenth-century congregational life.
The texts here are sermons—public addresses rooted in Scripture, shaped for oral delivery, and subsequently circulated in print. They include doctrinal expositions designed to clarify core beliefs, evangelistic appeals intended to awaken conscience and faith, and occasional pieces framed by particular moments in a congregation’s life, such as funerals and a pastoral leave-taking. As literary artifacts, they are homiletic prose rather than treatises, though they often function like compact theological essays. The collection closes with notes that supply essential context, references, and brief clarifications, aiding readers who approach these works from historical, theological, or literary perspectives.
Taken together, these sermons are unified by Edwards’s sustained emphasis on the sovereignty of God, the moral seriousness of human life, and the necessity of spiritual renewal. They display a style that marries close biblical exposition to carefully staged argument and vivid imagery. Throughout, Edwards seeks not merely to inform but to press truth upon the conscience, cultivating what he viewed as authentic religious affections rather than surface emotion. Their enduring significance lies in their capacity to illuminate a formative moment in American public religion and to model a rhetoric that is at once analytical, pastoral, and urgently addressed to hearers’ ultimate good.
Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God stands here as a touchstone of eighteenth-century evangelical preaching. Delivered amid a season of revival, it confronts hearers with the gravity of divine justice and the immediacy of moral decision, while directing them toward the offered mercy of God. The sermon’s stark images and tightly reasoned appeals exemplify Edwards’s ability to move from scriptural text to searching application. Its long reception history in classrooms and anthologies reflects not only its theological content but its rhetorical force, which has shaped discussions of American oratory, religious psychology, and the dynamics of spiritual awakening.
God Glorified in Man’s Dependence is an early published sermon that articulates a central thread in Edwards’s thought: salvation as the work of divine grace from beginning to end. By underscoring human need and the sufficiency of Christ, it places humility and gratitude at the heart of Christian life. The sermon’s structure—text, doctrine, and uses—exemplifies his method of guiding hearers from exposition to practical implications. In the balance of conviction and comfort, it offers a theological grammar for much that follows in the collection, orienting readers to the God-centered focus that animates Edwards’s preaching and pastoral counsel.
The Reality of Spiritual Light addresses how people genuinely know divine things. Edwards distinguishes between merely notional apprehension and a transformed perception granted by God’s Spirit, emphasizing the experiential dimension of religious understanding without abandoning intellectual clarity. The sermon shows his aptitude for explaining complex ideas in accessible forms, using familiar analogies and careful reasoning to invite hearers into a lived apprehension of truth. Its concern for the inward springs of faith complements the more public urgency of revival preaching, presenting piety as illumination that changes how one sees, values, and loves, rather than as assent to propositions alone.
Ruth’s Resolution draws from a narrative of loyalty and turning to God’s people, using the biblical account to encourage decisive commitment in the face of uncertainty. Edwards highlights the moral and spiritual clarity of choosing a path aligned with God’s covenant community, not as a momentary impulse but as a settled direction for life. The sermon is pastoral in tone, addressing the pressures that pull hearers in competing directions and urging constancy rooted in conviction. It illustrates how Edwards reads Scripture both historically and practically, inviting listeners to see their own crossroads mirrored in a familiar, instructive story.
The Many Mansions offers hope by contemplating the promise of dwelling with Christ. It is oriented toward consolation, particularly for those considering loss and the future life. Without indulging speculation, Edwards directs attention to the sufficiency of divine presence and the assurance that the life to come meets the diverse needs and capacities of God’s people. The tone is steady and pastoral, aiming to comfort rather than to alarm. In the broader set, this sermon provides a counterweight to more urgent calls, reminding readers that Edwards’s vision of reality includes not only judgment but abiding consolation grounded in God’s promises.
A Strong Rod Broken and Withered takes an image from prophetic Scripture to interpret the communal shock of losing a prominent figure. Edwards uses the occasion to reflect on providence, the fragility of human strength, and the responsibilities that remain for a people after the passing of a leader. The sermon’s civic resonance illustrates how eighteenth-century preaching addressed public as well as personal concerns, weaving moral exhortation with communal memory. It stands as a case study in pastoral leadership in times of disruption, urging sober assessment, renewed dependence on God, and a recommitment to shared duties in the wake of loss.
Farewell Sermon marks Edwards’s parting from the congregation he had long served, and it bears the imprint of pastoral gravity. The message attends to mutual obligations, the enduring authority of Scripture over personal grievance, and the hope that God’s purposes transcend immediate conflicts. Rather than rehearsing disputes, Edwards calls for charity, humility, and perseverance in faith. The tone is both searching and restrained, seeking to bless hearers even as institutional bonds loosen. In the collection, this sermon frames the preacher not only as theologian and exhorter but as caretaker of souls at a moment of communal transition.
Stylistically, these sermons share a disciplined architecture: an opening text, a doctrinal statement carefully distilled from it, and applications tailored to conscience and conduct. Edwards’s hallmarks include sustained argument, a precise yet unadorned prose, and imagery that clarifies rather than distracts. He appeals to reason and affections together, assuming that truth should be understood and felt. The sermons are saturated with Scripture and attentive to pastoral situation, whether revival, bereavement, civic concern, or congregational change. This combination of exegetical rigor, moral seriousness, and rhetorical economy explains both their immediate efficacy and their lasting place in American letters.
As a whole, the volume introduces a preacher-theologian whose work has shaped American religious thought and public discourse. The selection highlights range—awakening, instruction, consolation, lament, and departure—yet retains a coherent center in the glory of God and the transformation of the human heart. Readers will find in these sermons a window onto the religious culture of eighteenth-century New England and a set of arguments that continue to provoke reflection. The accompanying notes offer concise historical and textual guidance, encouraging careful reading. The hope is that these pages will prompt thoughtful engagement with enduring questions of truth, judgment, grace, and hope.
Author Biography
Jonathan Edwards was an American theologian, philosopher, and Congregational minister who helped shape the First Great Awakening in the British colonies during the mid-eighteenth century. Combining rigorous Calvinist commitments with a careful engagement with Enlightenment ideas, he became one of the most influential voices in early American letters. His sermons and treatises probed conversion, the will, virtue, beauty, and God’s glory, circulating widely in the Atlantic world. Across preaching, pastoral leadership, and scholarship, Edwards sought to unite devotion and intellect, arguing that true religion transforms the affections as well as the mind. His work continues to interest historians, theologians, philosophers, and literary critics studying rhetoric and religious experience.
Raised in colonial New England, Edwards pursued advanced study at Yale College, where he absorbed a classical curriculum and encountered emerging scientific and philosophical currents. He read figures associated with the Enlightenment, including John Locke and Isaac Newton, while remaining deeply shaped by Reformed theology and Puritan devotional practice. Early notebooks reveal disciplined habits of observation and argument that informed his later preaching. The intellectual milieu of New England Congregationalism furnished him with scholastic tools, yet he adapted them to pastoral aims. This educational foundation, straddling inherited orthodoxy and new learning, underwrote his lifelong effort to articulate a coherent account of religious experience and moral agency.
Edwards’s early pastoral career in western Massachusetts became nationally visible when a period of unusual religious concern touched his congregation in the mid-1730s. He narrated those events in A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God, a report that circulated in Britain and the colonies and helped build networks among revival-minded ministers. During the broader awakenings of the early 1740s, he preached with striking imaginative force, most famously in the sermon Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. That sermon’s vivid language and urgent calls to repentance exemplified his rhetorical gifts, but he also insisted that durable spiritual change must be authenticated by ongoing, transformative love for God.
Edwards wrote major treatises to analyze and test such claims. A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections weighed the signs of genuine piety, stressing that holy affections arise from a spiritual sense of divine beauty. Freedom of the Will defended a sophisticated, compatibilist account of moral agency within a theocentric universe. His reflections on creation and goodness culminated in works later published as The End for Which God Created the World and The Nature of True Virtue, alongside a defense of Original Sin. Drawing on Lockean psychology and contemporary science, he proposed a metaphysics of continual divine activity that sought to honor both empirical insight and classical Christian doctrine.
The prominence that revival brought also heightened tensions within his parish. Longstanding differences over church discipline and admission to the Lord’s Supper grew sharper as he pressed for communicant standards focused on credible conversion. Many in Northampton favored more inclusive practices that had taken root in New England over previous decades. The dispute broadened into questions about pastoral authority and covenantal identity, and after extended controversy he was dismissed from the pulpit. Though a personal setback, the episode clarified his pastoral priorities and turned his energies toward writing projects that elaborated his positions while addressing broader debates over enthusiasm, discernment, and the fruits of spiritual renewal.
Edwards then served in a frontier town as a missionary pastor to Native Americans and as a minister to English settlers, a setting that afforded both challenges and scholarly time. There he completed or revised several mature works, including his treatise on the will and extended reflections on virtue and God’s ultimate ends. Late in the decade, he accepted the presidency of the College of New Jersey, an institution devoted to training ministers and civic leaders. He died soon after assuming that role, following complications related to a smallpox inoculation, leaving a substantial body of manuscripts that friends and later editors prepared for publication.
Edwards’s legacy has proved durable and contested. Evangelicals have found in him a profound theologian of grace, affections, and revival, while philosophers read his analyses of freedom and moral motivation alongside early modern figures. Literary scholars examine the artistry of his imagery and the strategies of persuasion in sermons that still appear in anthologies. Modern critical editions, notably the multi-volume Yale Edition of his works, have expanded access to unpublished notebooks and sermons, spurring new lines of research. Today he is read both as a product of his colonial moment and as a thinker whose arguments continue to provoke reflection on faith, reason, and desire.
Historical Context
Jonathan Edwards’s sermons emerged within the volatile spiritual and civic world of eighteenth‑century New England, where Congregational churches inherited Puritan covenantal ideals while navigating imperial expansion, market change, and Enlightenment thought. From the Connecticut River Valley to Boston and the Atlantic press networks, ministers used fast days, election sermons, and catechetical instruction to interpret droughts, wars, and epidemics in providential terms. The transatlantic revivals later called the First Great Awakening, spanning roughly 1739 to 1742, intensified this rhetoric, as itinerants crossed colonial borders and printed accounts circulated rapidly. The works gathered here speak out of that wider movement rather than from isolated parish occasions.
Edwards was born 5 October 1703 in East Windsor, Connecticut, to the Reverend Timothy Edwards and Esther Stoddard Edwards, linking him by family to Solomon Stoddard of Northampton. Trained at Yale College in New Haven, he earned the B.A. in 1720 and the M.A. in 1722, and served as a tutor from 1724 to 1726 during reforms that brought Newtonian science and John Locke into the curriculum. His early notebooks, including the “Resolutions” of 1722–1723 and philosophical miscellanies, reveal a synthesis of rigorous piety and empirical psychology. Those habits of self‑examination and metaphysical reflection suffuse his pulpit voice across the sermons in this volume.
In 1726 Edwards became assistant to his grandfather Solomon Stoddard at Northampton, Massachusetts, one of the most populous towns in the Connecticut Valley. Ordained in 1727 and installed as sole pastor upon Stoddard’s death in 1729, he preached to a community shaped by kin networks, small‑scale farming, and seasonal labor. A wave of conversions in 1734–1735 followed his preaching on justification by faith, drawing visitors from nearby towns such as Hatfield and Springfield. Printed narratives of the work, sent to Boston and then to Britain, introduced Edwards to a transatlantic readership. The sermons here resonate with that pastoral laboratory of disciplined inquiry and revival urgency.
Edwards first entered the Boston print world with God Glorified in Man’s Dependence, preached at the Thursday Lecture in 1731. Publishers Samuel Kneeland and Timothy Green helped move his arguments against rising Arminian tendencies into coffeehouses and parlors from King Street to the wharves. The Thursday Lecture itself, a civic religious institution dating to the seventeenth century, functioned as a colonial public sphere where merchants, artisans, and magistrates mingled. In that setting Edwards’s emphasis on divine sovereignty, grace, and Christ’s mediatorial work framed themes that recur throughout this collection. Later sermons drew on that same print infrastructure to address a widening Atlantic audience.
The transatlantic surge of revivalism intensified after the arrival of George Whitefield in 1740 and the tours of Gilbert Tennent. Edwards hosted Whitefield at Northampton and corresponded with Scottish ministers about the phenomena they observed. In that climate he delivered Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God at Enfield, Connecticut, on 8 July 1741, employing Deuteronomy 32:35 to dramatize human frailty before a holy God. Listeners’ reactions were reported widely, and the sermon was printed in Boston and London. The episode exemplifies how local preaching became a shared colonial experience, shaping the atmosphere in which the other sermons in this volume were heard.
Not all ministers welcomed revival methods. Boston’s Charles Chauncy criticized bodily agitations and itinerancy in pamphlets culminating in Seasonable Thoughts on the State of Religion in 1743. Connecticut’s legislature passed acts in 1742 restricting unauthorized preachers, while Yale’s authorities sought to regulate student enthusiasm, famously expelling David Brainerd in 1742. These conflicts forced Edwards to articulate tests for genuine piety and to defend intense preaching without conceding to disorder. The resulting stress between parish order and evangelical zeal forms the social backdrop of exhortations and consolations across this collection, from doctrinal expositions to sermons preached in moments of collective mourning.
Edwards’s mature preaching filtered revival energy through a theology of the affections, insisting that true religion consists in a supernatural sense of the divine excellency. He elaborated these themes publicly in The Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God in 1741 and in A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections in 1746, both born of pastoral observation at Northampton. Sermons such as those on spiritual light, dependence, and the believer’s hope rely on this framework, joining rigorous exegesis with close attention to the psychology of conversion. That synthesis addresses both skeptical critics and ardent converts, anchoring fervor in disciplined, biblically ordered experience.
The Connecticut Valley towns that heard Edwards were cohesive yet fractious. Extended families shared meadow rights and pews, but disputes over seating, land, and militia rank could inflame public worship. In 1744 a scandal involving young men circulating an indecent manual led Edwards to name offenders from the pulpit, a move that hardened opposition among influential households. The tensions reveal why warnings against spiritual complacency and calls to resolute discipleship, themes embedded in several sermons here, carried civic implications. His preaching cannot be separated from the customs of court days, training bands, tavern sociability, and the rituals of fasts and thanksgivings.
Late in the 1740s Edwards broke with the Stoddardian practice of open admission to the Lord’s Supper, which had treated the ordinance as a converting means. Against the Half‑Way tradition and local expectations, he argued in An Humble Inquiry in 1749 that communicants must credibly profess saving faith. Northampton’s church and town, accustomed for decades to broader terms, resisted. After months of examinations and council meetings, the church voted in June 1750 to dismiss him. His farewell sermon, delivered that summer, displays the sober pastoral tone of an embattled minister urging mutual charity. Its ethos pervades the collection’s balance of warning and consolation.
Funeral sermons in New England doubled as civic assessments. When Colonel John Stoddard, Hampshire County magistrate, militia leader, and Edwards’s kinsman, died in 1748 during King George’s War (1744–1748), Edwards preached A Strong Rod Broken and Withered from Ezekiel 19:12. Stoddard had negotiated with Native communities, organized frontier defense, and represented the valley at the General Court in Boston. The sermon’s imagery and appeals locate pastoral speech within provincial politics, acknowledging how military losses and leadership transitions unsettled congregations. The collection’s elegiac tones draw from that milieu in which Scripture interpreted the careers of magistrates as well as the lives of parishioners.
New Englanders faced recurrent epidemics, childbirth mortality, and frontier violence. Consolatory preaching on John 14:2, invoking the “many mansions” prepared by Christ, met the needs of households who buried children and parents within a few yards of the meetinghouse. Edwards’s funeral addresses modeled a rhetoric of hope that complemented his calls to repentance, often printed for family use and wider edification. The balance of terror and tenderness, visible across this volume, reflects that pastoral task. In a society woven of kin bonds and neighboring farms, the promise of heavenly dwelling places anchored grief while maintaining the urgency of present obedience and watchfulness.
After his dismissal, Edwards accepted a call in 1751 to the frontier mission town of Stockbridge in western Massachusetts, where he preached to English settlers and to Mohican and Housatonnuck families first gathered by missionary John Sergeant. Sponsored by the Boston commissioners of the Society in London for Propagating the Gospel in New England, the work was entangled with land disputes involving local elites. Amid translation and school administration, Edwards composed major theological treatises, including Freedom of the Will (1754) and Original Sin (published 1758). The sermons in this collection thus stand beside a period of intense authorship shaped by cross‑cultural ministry and imperial borderlands.
Edwards’s ministry was sustained by correspondence with Scottish evangelicals such as John Erskine of Edinburgh, who promoted his books and supplied news of revivals at Cambuslang and Kilsyth in 1742 under ministers like William McCulloch and James Robe. Their proposal for concerted times of prayer inspired Edwards’s An Humble Attempt in 1747, urging transatlantic agreement in petitions for the kingdom’s advance. This network ensured that sermons preached in Massachusetts circulated in Glasgow and London, and that critiques from Britain shaped New England debates. The collection reflects a preacher conscious of an international audience yet attentive to the peculiarities of his towns.
Yale’s early eighteenth‑century reforms introduced Edwards to the natural philosophy of Isaac Newton and the epistemology of John Locke. He adapted Lockean language of ideas and sense perception to argue for a divine and supernatural light, granting the regenerate a new sense of Christ’s beauty. Rather than retreating from Enlightenment inquiry, he reframed it within a theocentric metaphysics that prized coherence, harmony, and the ends of God in creation. The sermons here use imagery of light, sweetness, and proportion that repurposes empirical habits for spiritual ends, illustrating how colonial orthodoxy could engage, and not merely reject, contemporary intellectual movements.
Edwards’s marriage to Sarah Pierpont in 1727 joined him to a New Haven clerical dynasty. Sarah, daughter of the Reverend James Pierpont, embodied the experiential piety celebrated in revival narratives, and her spiritual journals influenced Edwards’s portrayals of gracious affections. Their Northampton parsonage was a site of intensive catechesis, musical devotion, and hospitality to itinerants. Through their daughter Esther’s marriage to President Aaron Burr, Sr., of the College of New Jersey, the family’s web extended to Princeton, and their grandson Aaron Burr, Jr., entered national politics. Household rhythms and kin alliances shaped the pastoral counsel and communal concerns reflected throughout these sermons.
In late 1757 the trustees of the College of New Jersey invited Edwards to succeed his son‑in‑law Aaron Burr, Sr., as president. He arrived in Princeton in February 1758, submitted to smallpox inoculation then common among clergy and physicians, and died there on 22 March 1758 at Nassau Hall from complications, leaving unfinished manuscripts on the end for which God created the world and on true virtue. Sarah died later that year while traveling. The stark brevity of this final chapter, well known to colonial readers, lent gravity to Edwards’s earlier consolations and warnings, inflecting how subsequent editions of his sermons were received.
The sermons gathered here traveled through numerous colonial and British editions, often with prefatory essays and notes that framed them for new audiences. After 1758 the so‑called New Divinity, led by pupils such as Joseph Bellamy and Samuel Hopkins, systematized Edwards’s emphases on sovereignty, affections, and disinterested benevolence. His works influenced transatlantic evangelicalism from Scotland to the Carolinas and shaped later awakenings. Nineteenth‑century anthologies distilled memorable passages, especially from Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, while modern scholarship situates the entire oeuvre within social history and print culture. These historical layers inform how this collection’s Introduction and Notes contextualize the sermons.
Synopsis (Selection)
Introduction
Sets the sermons in the context of New England Puritanism and the First Great Awakening, outlining Edwards’s aims, methods, and major themes of divine sovereignty, human sin, conversion, and pastoral ministry.
Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God
Warns unconverted sinners of the imminent danger of God’s wrath and the fragility of their condition, urging immediate repentance and faith in Christ.
God Glorified in Man’s Dependence
Argues that every part of salvation is wholly of God, so that human dependence magnifies divine grace and excludes all boasting.
The Reality of Spiritual Light
Explains the nature of a divine and supernatural light imparted by the Holy Spirit, distinguishing it from mere intellectual assent and noting its transformative effects.
Ruth’s Resolution
Uses Ruth’s commitment as a model for decisive conversion, calling hearers to leave sin and firmly align with God and His people.
The Many Mansions
Offers comfort from Christ’s promise of many dwellings in the Father’s house, teaching heavenly consolation and varied degrees of glory to encourage perseverance.
A Strong Rod Broken and Withered
Marks the loss of a prominent leader as a judgment that calls for humility and repentance, reflecting on God’s sovereignty in public affairs.
Farewell Sermon
A pastoral valediction that exhorts mutual charity, self-examination, and faithfulness, and counsels the congregation in selecting a godly minister.
Notes
Editorial annotations that clarify historical context, Scripture references, theological terms, and textual variations.
Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God and Other Sermons
Introduction
Jonathan Edwards was born October 5, 1703, in what is now South Windsor, Conn., a part of the parish then known as “Windsor Farmes.” His father, the Rev. Timothy Edwards, the minister of the parish, a Harvard graduate, was reputed a man of superior ability and polished manners, a lover of learning as well as of religion; in addition to his pastoral duties, he fitted young men for college, and his liberal views of education appear in the fact that he made his daughters pursue the same studies these youths did. His mother, a daughter of the Rev. Solomon Stoddard, the minister of Northampton, is said to have resembled her distinguished father in strength of character and to have surpassed her husband in the native vigor of her mind. As regards remoter ancestry and their intellectual and moral qualities, Edwards seems also to have been well born; an exception, however, must be made of the eccentric and possibly insane grandmother on his father’s side, whose outrageous conduct led to her divorce.1
Brought up the only son in a family of ten daughters, apart from all distracting influences, in an atmosphere of religion and serious study in the home, amid natural surroundings of meadows, woods, and low-lying distant hills singularly conducive to a life of contemplation, the boy early developed that absorbing interest in the things of the spirit, and that astonishing acuteness of intellect which are the most prominent characteristics of his genius. While a mere child he spent much of his time in religious exercises and in conversation on religious matters with other boys, with some of whom he joined to build a booth in a retired spot in a swamp for secret prayer; he had besides several other such places for prayer in the woods to which he was wont to retire. His mind also dwelt much on the doctrines he was taught, especially on the doctrine of God’s sovereignty in election, against which he at that time violently rebelled. When only ten years of age he wrote a short, quaint, somewhat humorous little tract on the immortality of the soul; at about twelve he composed a remarkably accurate and ingenious paper on the habits of the “flying spider.”
He entered the Collegiate School of Connecticut at Saybrook—afterwards Yale College—at thirteen, and in 1720, shortly before his seventeenth birthday, graduated at New Haven with the valedictory. In his Sophomore year he made the acquaintance of Locke’s Essay on the Human Understanding—a work which left a permanent impress on his thinking. He read it, he says, with a far higher pleasure “than the most greedy miser finds when gathering up handfuls of silver and gold from some newly-discovered treasure.” Under its influence he began a series of Notes on the Mind, with a view to a comprehensive treatise on mental philosophy. He also began, possibly somewhat later, a series of Notes on Natural Science, with reference to a similar work on natural philosophy. It is in these early writings that we find the outlines of an idealistic theory which resembles, but was probably not at all derived from, that of Berkeley, and which seems to have remained a determining factor in his speculations to the last.2
After graduating he continued to reside for two years in New Haven, studying for the ministry. From August, 1722, till the following April he supplied the pulpit of a small Presbyterian congregation in New York, but declined the invitation to remain as their minister. After returning to his father’s home in Windsor, he received at least two other calls, one of which he seems to have accepted.3 In September, 1723, he went to New Haven to receive his Master’s degree, was appointed a tutor at the college, entered upon the active duties of that office in June, 1724, and continued in the same till September, 1726, when he resigned his tutorship to become colleague-pastor with his grandfather Stoddard in the church at Northampton.
