Selected Sermons of Jonathan Edwards

New York THE MACMILLAN COMPANY LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., LTD. 1904
All rights reserved
Copyright, 1904, By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
Set up and electrotyped. Published June, 1904.
Norwood Press J. S. Cushing & Co.—Berwick & Smith Co. Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.

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.”
The spiritual history of Edwards in these years of growth from youth to early manhood is recorded by his own hand in a narrative of personal experiences written at a later date for his own use, in fragments of a diary, and in a series of resolutions which he drew up for the conduct of his own life. These documents, which were first published by his biographer and descendant, Sereno E. Dwight, in 1829, throw a flood of light on Edwards’s character and temperament, and serve to explain much in his life which would otherwise be obscure. He tells us in his narrative how the childish delight in the exercises of religion before referred to gradually declined; how at length “he turned like a dog to his vomit, and went on in the ways of sin;” then how, after much conflict of soul, he experienced toward the end of his college course a genuine conversion, issuing in a new life and, in the course of time, a deep and delightful sense of God’s sovereignty, the excellency of Christ, and the beauty of holiness. There is possibly some exaggeration in Edwards’s description of this lapse and this recovery, but it was at least a very real experience to him, and it doubtless contributed to the emphasis which he afterwards put on conversion in his preaching. His own state after this decisive change was at times one of mystic rapture—“a calm, sweet abstraction of soul from all the concerns of this world; and sometimes a kind of vision, or fixed ideas and imaginations, of being alone in the mountains or some solitary wilderness, far from all mankind, sweetly conversing with Christ and wrapped and swallowed up in God.” His diary is the record of a soul straining in its flight. He watches the fluctuations of his moods with almost morbid intensity, and yet in a way by no means merely conventional, and with a singular absence of sentimentality, so evidently sincere and, in a sense, objective are his observations. Of his seventy Resolutions, all written before he was twenty, the following may be taken as a specimen: it is the language of a mind as truly original as religious, and is eminently characteristic. “On the supposition that there never was to be but one individual in the world, at any one time, who was properly a complete Christian, in all respects of a right stamp, having Christianity always shining in its true lustre, and appearing excellent and lovely, from whatever part and under whatever character viewed, Resolved : To act just as I would do, if I strove with all my might to be that one, who should live in my time.” And he did so act; these resolutions were not empty, they really determined his life.