The story of Edwards's career has the simplicity and dignity of
tragedy. Born in a parsonage in the quiet Connecticut valley in
1703--the year of John Wesley's birth--he is writing at the age
of ten to disprove the doctrine of the materiality of the soul.
At twelve he is studying "the wondrous way of the working of the
spider," with a precision and enthusiasm which would have made
him a great naturalist. At fourteen he begins his notes on "The
Mind" and on "Natural Science." He is graduated from Yale in
1720, studies theology, and at twenty-four becomes the colleague
of his famous grandfather, Solomon Stoddard, in the church at
Northampton. He marries the beautiful Sarah Pierrepont, whom he
describes in his journal in a prose rhapsody which, like his
mystical rhapsodies on religion in the same youthful period,
glows with a clear unearthly beauty unmatched in any English
prose of that century. For twenty-three years he serves the
Northampton church, and his sermons win him the rank of the
foremost preacher in New England. John Wesley reads at Oxford his
account of the great revival of 1735.
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