It was begun in 1673, nine years earlier than the
first entry in Mather's "Diary," and it ends in 1729, while
Mather's closes in 1724. As a picture of everyday happenings in
New England, Sewall's "Diary" is as far superior to Mather's as
Pepys's "Diary" is to George Fox's "Journal" in painting the
England of the Restoration. Samuel Sewall was an admirably solid
figure, keen, forceful, honest. Most readers of his "Diary"
believe that he really was in luck when he was rejected by the
Widow Winthrop on that fateful November day when his eye
noted--in spite of his infatuation--that "her dress was not so
clean as sometime it had been. Jehovah Jireh!"
One pictures Cotton Mather as looking instinctively backward to
the Heroic Age of New England with pious nervous exaltation, and
Samuel Sewall as doing the day's work uprightly without taking
anxious thought of either past or future. But Jonathan Edwards is
set apart from these and other men. He is a lonely seeker after
spiritual perfection, in quest of that city "far on the world's
rim," as Masefield says of it, the city whose builder and maker
is God.
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