een hours of study a day. In the same year
he married Sarah Pierrepont, then aged seventeen, daughter of James
Pierrepont (1659-1714), a founder of Yale, and through her mother
great-granddaughter of Thomas Hooker. Of her piety and almost nun-like
love of God and belief in His personal love for her, Edwards had known
when she was only thirteen, and had written of it with spiritual
enthusiasm; she was of a bright and cheerful disposition, a practical
housekeeper, a model wife and the mother of his twelve children. Solomon
Stoddard died on the 11th of February 1729, leaving to his grandson the
difficult task of the sole ministerial charge of one of the largest and
wealthiest congregations in the colony, and one proud of its morality,
its culture and its reputation.

In 1731 Edwards preached at Boston the "Public Lecture" afterwards
published under the title _God Glorified in Man's Dependence_. This was
his first public attack on Arminianism. The leading thought was God's
absolute sovereignty in the work of redemption: that while it behoved
God to create man holy, it was of His "good pleasure" and "mere and
arbitrary grace" that any man was now made holy, and that God might deny
this grace without any disparagement to any of His perfections. In 1733
a revival of religion began in Northampton, and reached such intensity
in the winter of 1734 and the following spring as to threaten the
business of the town. In six months nearly three hundred were admitted
to the church. The revival gave Edwards an opportunity of studying the
process of conversion in all its phases and varieties, and he recorded
his observations with psychological minuteness and discrimination in _A
Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God in the Conversion of
Many Hundred Souls in Northampton_ (1737). A year later he published
_Discourses on Various Important Subjects_, the five sermons which had
proved most effective in the revival, and of these none, he tells us,
was so immediately effective as that on the _Justice of God in the
Damnation of Sinners_, from the text, "That every mouth may be stopped."
Another sermon, published in 1734, on the _Reality of Spiritual Light_
set forth what he regarded as the inner, moving principle of the
revival, the doctrine of a "special" grace in the immediate and
supernatural divine illumination of the soul. In the spring of 1735 the
movement began to subside and a reaction set in. But the relapse was
brief, and th