d to pity you he will be so far from pitying
you in your doleful case that he will only tread you under foot. . . .
He will crush out your blood and make it fly, and it shall be sprinkled
on his garments so as to stain all his raiment." But Edwards was a
rapt soul, possessed with the love as well as the fear of the God, and
there are passages of sweet and exalted feeling in his _Treatise
Concerning Religious Affections_, 1746. Such is his portrait of Sarah
Pierpont, "a young lady in New Haven," who afterward became his wife
and who "will sometimes go about from place to place singing sweetly,
and no one knows for what. She loves to be alone, walking in the
fields and groves, and seems to have some one invisible always
conversing with her." Edwards's printed works number thirty-six
titles. A complete edition of them in ten volumes was published in
1829 by his great grandson, Sereno Dwight. The memoranda from
Edwards's note-books, quoted by his editor and biographer, exhibit a
remarkable precocity. Even as a school-boy and a college student he
had made deep guesses in physics as well as metaphysics, and, as might
have been predicted of a youth of his philosophical insight and ideal
cast of mind, he had early anticipated Berkeley in denying the
existence of matter. In passing from Mather to Edwards we step from
the seventeenth to the eighteenth century. There is the same
difference between them in style and turn of thought as between Milton
and Locke, or between Fuller and Bryden. The learned digressions, the
witty conceits, the perpetual interlarding of the text with scraps of
Latin, have fallen off, even as the full-bottomed wig and the clerical
gown and bands have been laid aside for the undistinguishing dress of
the modern minister. In Edwards's English all is simple, precise,
direct, and business-like.

Benjamin Franklin (1706-90), who was strictly contemporary with
Edwards, was a contrast to him in every respect. As Edwards represents
the spirituality and other-worldliness of Puritanism, Franklin stands
for the worldly and secular side of American character, and he
illustrates the development of the New England Englishman into the
modern Yankee. Clear rather than subtle, without ideality or romance
or fineness of emotion or poetic lift, intensely practical and
utilitarian, broad-minded, inventive, shrewd, versatile, Franklin's
sturdy figure became typical of his time and his people. He was the
first an