med from the neighbouring churches, decided
by a majority of one that he should be dismissed if his people desired
it; and the people voted for his dismissal by a majority of more than
200 to 20 (i. 69).

Edwards was thus a martyr to his severe sense of discipline. His
admirers have lamented over the sentence by which the ablest of American
thinkers was banished in a kind of disgrace. Impartial readers will be
inclined to suspect that those who suffered under so rigorous a
spiritual ruler had perhaps some reason on their side. However that may
be, and I do not presume to have any opinion upon a question involving
such complex ecclesiastical disputes, the result to literature was
fortunate. In 1751 Edwards was appointed to a mission for Indians,
founded at Stockbridge, in the remotest corner of Massachusetts, where a
few remnants of the aborigines were settled on a township granted by the
colony. There were great hopes, we are told, of the probable influence
of the mission, which were destined to frustration from accidental
causes. The hopes can hardly have rested on the character of the
preacher. It is difficult to imagine a more grotesque relation between a
minister and his congregation than that which must have subsisted
between Edwards and his barbarous flock. He had remarked pathetically in
one of his writings on the very poor prospect open to the Houssatunnuck
Indians, if their salvation depended on the study of the evidences of
Christianity (iv. 245). And if Edwards preached upon the topics of which
his mind was fullest, their case would have been still harder. For it
was in the remote solitudes of this retired corner that he gave himself
up to those abstruse meditations on free-will and original sin which
form the substance of his chief writings. A sermon in the Houssatunnuck
language, if Edwards ever acquired that tongue, upon predestination, the
differences between the Arminian and the Calvinist schemes, Liberty of
Indifference, and other such doctrines, would hardly be an improving
performance. If, however, his labours in this department 'were attended
with no remarkable visible success' (i. 83), he thought deeply and wrote
much. The publication of his treatise on the Freedom of the Will
followed in 1754, and upon the strength of the reputation which it won
for him, he was appointed President of New Jersey College in the end of
1757, only to die of small-pox in the following March. His death cut
short some con