Mrs. Eddy Mentioned Them October 13, 1956 Issue

Jonathan Edwards, 1703-1758

[Mentioned in the Message to The Mother Church for 1901, p. 15]

Jonathan Edwards, theologian and preacher, outwardly lived a comparatively uneventful life within a small geographical compass. Yet the ideas he promulgated provoked violent discussions in his own day and for several decades afterwards.

The son of a clergyman, Edwards grew up in the rural Connecticut town of East Windsor. A precocious child, he entered Yale at the age of thirteen, graduating four years later at the head of his class. Two years of graduate work in theology prepared him for his first post in a small Presbyterian church in New York City. In his twenty-third year he was invited to help his grandfather as assistant pastor in Northampton, Massachusetts, and two years later he became the sole pastor.

Religion was Edwards' main interest. As a boy of ten he wrote on the immateriality of the soul and early busied himself with ontological questions. In one paper he wrote, "Speaking most strictly, there is no proper substance but God Himself." With the adoption in early manhood of Calvinism and its doctrine of predestination, he lost sight of his idealistic philosophy and became preoccupied with the problem of sin. In the autumn of 1734 a series of sermons in which he depicted the horribleness of sin and the torments of hell-fire started a great religious awakening, which spread into nearby towns of both Massachusetts and Connecticut and added three hundred converts to the Northampton church.

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Jonathan Edwards, 1703-1758

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