y many
infallible signs, not excluding those "times of refreshing" in which the
simultaneous earnestness of many souls compels the general attention.
Even in Northampton, where the doctrine of the venerable Stoddard as to
the conditions of communion has been thought to be the low-water mark of
church vitality, not less than five such "harvest seasons" were within
recent memory. It was to this parish in a country town on the frontier
of civilization, but the most important in Massachusetts outside of
Boston, that there came, in the year 1727, to serve as colleague to his
aged grandfather, Pastor Stoddard, a young man whose wonderful
intellectual and spiritual gifts had from his childhood awakened the
pious hopes of all who had known him, and who was destined in his future
career to be recognized as the most illustrious of the saints and
doctors of the American church. The authentic facts of the boyhood of
Jonathan Edwards read like the myths that adorn the legendary Lives of
the Saints. As an undergraduate of Yale College, before the age of
seventeen, his reflections on the mysteries of God, and the universe,
and the human mind, were such as even yet command the attention and
respect of students of philosophy. He remained at New Haven two years
after graduation, for the further study of theology, and then spent
eight months in charge of the newly organized Presbyterian church in New
York.[156:1] After this he spent two years as tutor at Yale,--"one of
the pillar tutors, and the glory of the college,"--at the critical
period after the defection of Rector Cutler to the Church of
England.[156:2] From this position he was called in 1726, at the age of
twenty-three, to the church at Northampton. There he was ordained
February 15, 1727, and thither a few months later he brought his
"espoused saint," Sarah Pierpont, consummate flower of Puritan
womanhood, thenceforth the companion not only of his pastoral cares and
sorrows, but of his seraphic contemplations of divine things.

The intensely earnest sermons, the holy life, and the loving prayers of
one of the greatest preachers in the history of the church were not long
in bearing abundant fruit. In a time of spiritual and moral depression,
when the world, the flesh, and the devil seemed to be gaining against
the gospel, sometime in the year 1733 signs began to be visible of
yielding to the power of God's Word. The frivolous or wanton frolics of
the youth began to be exchanged f