T° VI. JONATHAN EDWARDS O come to Andover with a lecture on Jonathan Edwards seems wellnigh an impertinence. Here, where his name has been honored more, if it be possible, than anywhere else in New England, where his life and works have long been familiarly and affectionately studied, where most of his unpublished manuscripts are guarded, there is nothing novel that a lecturer can offer; nor can he expect his knowledge of his theme to compare in thoroughness with that of several of his hearers. Yet the lecturer is reminded that this is a course on Congregationalism, not on unfamiliar Congregationalists; and to treat of the eighteenth century without glancing up, at least for a few moments, at the towering figure of our most original New England theologian, is like shutting out from memory the Presidential Range as one thinks of the White Mountains. Passing along the sandy road that skirts the edge of the low bluff above the level meadowland, that borders the east bank of the Connecticut River, in the town of South Windsor, one sees by the roadside the site where stood, till the beginning of the nineteenth century, the "plain two-story house" in which Jonathan Edwards was born. Though pleasant farming country, there is little in the immediate surroundings to detain the eye; but the blue hills beyond the river to the westward stretch away into the distance as attractively now as they did then when, if tradition is to be trusted, Jonathan's autocratic father, the parish minister, warned a neighbor whose refusal to remove a wide-spreading tree annoyed him, that if this disrespectful conduct was continued he would not baptize that contumacious neighbor's child. Behind the house, to the eastward a few rods, rises a low, tree-covered hill, cutting off the view in that direction, and affording a retreat to which father and son were accustomed to withdraw in pleasant weather for meditation or for prayer.' Here at what is now South Windsor, Timothy Edwards, Jonathan's father, exercised an able, spiritual, and conspicuously learned ministry from 1694 to his death in 1758.' Grandson of William Edwards, an early settler of Hartford, and son of Richard Edwards, a prominent merchant of Hartford, and of his erratic wife, Elisabeth Tuthill,' Timothy Edwards had graduated with distinction from 1 See J. A. Stoughton, Windsor Farmes, p. 46, Hartford, 1883, and H. R. Stiles, History and Genealogies of Ancient Windsor, i., p. 556, Hartford, 1891. The house stood till 1813. 2 Stoughton, ibid., pp. 46, 47. 3 Ibid., passim. 4 See Colonial Records of Connecticut, iv., p. 59; Stoughton, ibid., PP. 39, 69. Harvard College in 1691, and was always a man of marked intellectual power. The considerable list of boys fitted in his home for college' bears witness to his abilities as a teacher, and the judgment of his congregation that he was a more learned man and a more animated preacher than his son, Jonathan,' reflects the esteem in which he was held by the people of his charge. His wife, Jonathan's mother, was a daughter of Solomon Stoddard, of Northampton, the ablest minister of the Connecticut valley when the seventeenth century passed into the eighteenth, and granddaughter of John Warham, the first pastor of Windsor. Into this intellectual, strenuous, and yet cheerful home in this bit of rural New England Jonathan Edwards was born on October 5, 1703. Here he grew up, the fifth among eleven children and the only brother among ten tall sisters. Here he was fitted for college in his father's study, and the intellectual sympathy thus begun between father and son was to be a lifelong bond. Youthful precocity is by no means an infallible prophecy of mature strength, but with Jonathan Edwards the mind received an early development and manifested a grasp that was little less than marvelous at an age when most schoolboys are scarcely emerging from childhood. His observations on nature, 1 For some of these names see Stoughton, Windsor Farmes, pp. 77, 78, 101-103. S. E. Dwight, Life of Pres. Edwards, p. 17. New York, 1830. |