Robert Hall_: He was the greatest of the sons of men.

_Dugald Stewart_: Edwards on the Will never was answered and never will
be answered.

_Encyclopaedia_: One of the greatest metaphysicians of his age.

_Edinburgh Review_: One of the acutest and most powerful of reasoners.

_London Quarterly Review_: His gigantic specimen of theological argument
is as near to perfection as we may expect any human composition to
approach. He unites the sharpness of the scimetar and the strength of
the battle-axe.

_Westminster Review_: From the days of Plato there has been no life of
more simple and imposing grandeur than that of Jonathan Edwards.

_President McCosh, of Princeton_: The greatest thinker that America has
produced.

_Lyman Beecher_: A prince among preachers. In our day there is no man
who comes within a thousand miles of him.

_Griswold's Prose Writers_: The first man of the world during the
second quarter of the eighteenth century.

_Hollister's History of Connecticut_: The most gifted man of the
eighteenth century, perhaps the most profound thinker in the world.

_Moses Coit Tyler_: The most original and acute thinker yet produced in
America.

This is the man whose intellectual life has thrilled in the mental
activity of more than 1,400 men and women of the past century and a
half, and which has not lost its virtue or its power in all these years.

England and Scotland are not wont to sit at our feet even in this day,
and yet they sat at the feet of Jonathan Edwards as in the presence of a
master when he was a mere home missionary, living among the Indians, to
whom he preached every Lord's day.

The birth of fame is always an interesting study. It is easy to play the
part of a rocket if one can sizzle, and flash, and rise suddenly in
darkness, but to take one's place among luminaries and shine with
permanent brilliancy is so rare an experience as to present a
fascinating study.

Jonathan Edwards was twenty-eight years of age, had been the pastor
of a church on the frontier, as Northampton was, for four years without
any notable experience, when he was invited to preach the annual sermon
before the association of ministers at Boston. Never since that day
have Boston and Harvard been more thoroughly the seat of culture and
of intellectual power than then. It was a remarkable event for a young
man of twenty-eight to be invited to come from the Western limit of
civilization and preach the annual sermon bef