"The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you and is dreadfully provoked.

"You hang by a slender thread, with the flames of divine wrath flashing about it, and ready every moment to singe it and burn it asunder, and you have no interest in any mediator, and nothing to lay hold of to save yourself, nothing to keep off the flames of wrath, nothing of your own, nothing that you have ever done, nothing that you can do to induce God to spare you one moment!"

Even so was the consciousness of guilt of original sin that no man could exculpate by his own works laid upon the third and fourth generations, who had banked the fires of the faith brought to the shores of New England by their Puritan forefathers.

For Edwards was of the Puritan tradition that never suffered either the godly or the ungodly to rest but made all life an unending Sabbath in which the righteous by self-examination and supplication yearned for saintliness and the unrighteous perforce had to listen and be taxed to support the preaching that damned them eternally. And Edwards was in revolt against the consequences of the softening of the ancient rigorous code through the promulgation of the so-called "Half-Way Covenant,” adopted by the Boston Synod in 1660 and upheld by, Solomon Stoddard, his venerable grandfather and colleague in the Northampton pulpit.

Stoddard favored admitting the unconverted to participation in the Lord's Supper, even regarding Holy Communion as a converting ordinance, and urged granting to the unregenerate the right to have their children baptized. His liberalizing influence survived and spread in spite of the reaffirming in 1679 of the original Cam

bridge Platform that laid down the rights, duties and practices for the governance of the united Puritan Church and State, drawing the line of the saved and the unsaved in according the privileges of church membership and civil suffrage but compelling all to attend meeting, be taxed to support both parson and magistrate and be subject to their discipline.

This reinvoking of the Cambridge Platform by what was known as the Reforming Synod, at Boston, in the main called for strict accountability by profession of faith, but most of those added to the rolls of the churches at this time were Half-Way Covenanters who merely renewed their conditional vows and remained content with the privileges thus secured without pressing onward toward "full salvation."

And so it came about that the very evils that the Reforming Synod set itself to check sprang up anew to choke out the "Vine planted in the Wilderness." The listed sins included the decadence of the Sabbath, profanity and irreverent behavior; backbitings, censures and litigations among professing Christians whose godliness declined; pride, extravagance and lustfulness in dress, intemperance and tavern haunting; mixed dancings, gaming and idleness; dishonesty and covetousness; neglect of baptism, church fellowship and means of grace, and, above all, refusal to repent.

Accentuating all this were economic unsettlement with the accumulation of debt, political disruption in such events as the loss of the old charter of Massachusetts, and religious dissension as evidenced by the seizure of the Old South Meeting House in Boston for Episcopal services and the tumult over the witchcraft delusion in Salem. Unquestionably there was a general lapse in public morals and

a spiritual desolation as the combined clerical and magisterial sanctions loosed their grip on New England.

Essentially, the whole downward movement that gathered impetus during the first three decades of the eighteenth century was the utter relaxation of the individual responsibility exacted by the pristine Puritan Church. The generosity of Stoddard's extension of the Half-Way Covenant, paradoxically, left to the Church only the austere formalism which had been a fault of its absolute sway. Personal religious incentive, once compelled, was now neglected till it was almost lost.

Then the prophet came to Northampton, once a stronghold of the theocratic régime and now bearing witness to its decline as the old-time "ingatherings" became feebler and farther apart till the revival power all but died away and none hardly knew what it was to be converted. Amid the gathering shadows of this year of 1727, Jonathan Edwards received his charge. Upon the youth of twentyfour were laid in token of ordination the hands of Solomon Stoddard, his revered grandfather, whose pulpit he was to share for two years before death ended the labors of the patriarch at the age of eighty-six.

Whatever of good was bestowed or whatever of havoc was wrought by the ministry that began this day can be accounted for in the mainsprings of the life of the young preacher who seems to have been anointed for his calling from his birth.

Jonathan was the fifth child and the only son of the family of eleven born to the Reverend Timothy Edwards and the daughter of Solomon Stoddard, "a woman surpassing her husband in native understanding." It was his mother that endowed Jonathan with brains. She was a remarkable woman for her day in that she would not be

hurried into becoming a professor of religion, for, though the wife of a parson, she did not join the Church till Jonathan was twelve years of age.

At this time, however, Jonathan was writing letters to refute the idea of the material nature of the soul. Ever since the age of four he had been continually engaged in looking into his little mind and forming resolutions against faults he discovered lurking there, setting forth once a determination "never to do, be or suffer anything in soul or body but what might tend to the glory of God; to live with all my might while I do live; never to speak anything that is ridiculous or a matter of laughter on the Lord's Day, and frequently to renew the dedication of myself to God.”

Thus the sermons upon which his ancestors had fed nourished the growing prophetic consciousness. All his inherited instincts, training and surrounding conditions molded this young Samuel who so long as he lived was to be "lent to the Lord."

Moreover, the very nature of his work was constantly before him, for East Windsor, Connecticut, the town of his nativity, was shaken throughout his youth by revivals of remarkable power and frequency. Rowelled from the pulpit, the lad was always confronting himself with selfaccusations, with the meaning of human existence and a sense of littleness and sinfulness within it, and with the awful nearness of God, with His wrath and its consequences.

No wonder he became, like so many other evangelists, including Whitefield and Wesley and Asbury, a sort of spiritual hypochondriac. His delicate, nervous constitution, taken with the tendency to asceticism, made him a sort of habitual invalid. His whole life was given to

moral introspection, "counting the spiritual pulse," as his own diary abundantly discloses. His career conforms to this rule which one commentator on revivalists has given:

"A gently complaining and fatigued spirit is that in which evangelical divines are very apt to pass their days.— There is an air of invalidism about most religious biographies."

A portrait of Edwards in his maturity reveals the man and the preacher. The forehead is high and unfurrowed. The eyes are calm and steady, bespeaking patience and resolution. The mouth is prim as that of a maiden lady and just as likely to be positive in the utterance of unswerving convictions.

The essential characteristics mirrored in this countenance were already strongly possessed by the boy of thirteen when he entered Yale College, where he was graduated four years later. Then, after two years of theological study, he preached for eight months in a newly organized church in New York, returning to Yale to be a tutor till the Northampton call came.

By nature religious rather than philosophical, Edwards began his apprenticeship to his grandfather by living alone, studying thirteen hours a day, abstaining from all amusements and any excess of food and rarely visiting the parishioners. After a few months of this stern regimen, a third woman came into his life. First there had been his mother and then his sister Jerusha, seven years his junior and also very devout, to whom he was tenderly attached. Now the Nemesis of Northampton took unto himself a wife.

The bride was Miss Sarah Pierrepont of New Haven, the seventeen-year-old daughter of a professor of moral philosophy at Yale. Her mother was a descendant of