sition at the time was not
unpopular throughout New England, and it is needless to say that his
doctrine that the Lord's Supper is not a cause of regeneration and that
communicants should be professing Christians has since (very largely
through the efforts of his pupil Joseph Bellamy) become a standard of
New England Congregationalism.

Edwards with his large family was now thrown upon the world, but offers
of aid quickly came to him. A parish in Scotland could have been
procured, and he was called to a Virginia church. He declined both, to
become in 1750 pastor of the church in Stockbridge and a missionary to
the Housatonic Indians. To the Indians he preached through an
interpreter, and their interests he boldly and successfully defended by
attacking the whites who were using their official position among them
to increase their private fortunes. In Stockbridge he wrote the _Humble
Relation_, also called _Reply to Williams_ (1752), which was an answer
to Solomon Williams (1700-1776), a relative and a bitter opponent of
Edwards as to the qualifications for full communion; and he there
composed the treatises on which his reputation as a philosophical
theologian chiefly rests, the essay on _Original Sin_, the _Dissertation
concerning the Nature of True Virtue_, the _Dissertation concerning the
End for which God created the World_, and the great work on the Will,
written in four months and a half, and published in 1754 under the
title, _An Inquiry into the Modern Prevailing Notions Respecting that
Freedom of the Will which is supposed to be Essential to Moral Agency_.

In 1757, on the death of President Burr, who five years before had
married Edwards's daughter Esther, he reluctantly accepted the
presidency of the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University),
where he was installed on the 16th of February 1758. Almost immediately
afterwards he was inoculated for smallpox, which was raging in Princeton
and vicinity, and, always feeble, he died of the inoculation on the 28th
of March 1758. He was buried in the old cemetery at Princeton. He was
slender and fully six feet tall, and with his oval, gentle, almost
feminine face looked the scholar and the mystic.

_The Edwardean System._--It is difficult to separate Edwards's
philosophy from his theology, except as the former is contained in the
early notes on the Mind, where he says that matter exists only in
idea; that space is God; that minds only are real; that in