church over issues pertaining to discipline and to the
administration of the sacrament. He is dismissed. He preaches his
"farewell sermon," like Wesley, like Emerson, like Newman, and many
another still unborn. He removes to Stockbridge, then a hamlet in the
wilderness, preaches to the Indians, and writes treatises on theology
and metaphysics, among them the world famous "Freedom of the Will."
In 1757, upon the death of his son-in-law, President Aaron Burr of
Princeton, Edwards is called to the vacant Presidency. He is reluctant
to go, for though he is only fifty-four, his health has never been
robust, and he has his great book on the "History of Redemption" still
to write. But he accepts, finds the smallpox raging in Princeton upon
his arrival in January, 1758, is inoculated, and dies of the disease in
March--his dreams unfulfilled, his life-work once more thwarted. Close
by the tomb of this saint is the tomb of his grandson, Aaron Burr, who
killed Hamilton.

The literary reputation of Jonathan Edwards has turned, like the
vicissitudes of his life, upon factors that could not be foreseen. His
contemporary fame was chiefly as a preacher, and was due to sermons
like those upon "God Glorified in Man's Dependence" and "The Reality of
Spiritual Life," rather than to such discourses as the Enfield sermon,
"Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," which in our own day is the best
known of his deliverances. Legends have grown up around this terrific
Enfield sermon. Its fearful power over its immediate hearers cannot be
gainsaid, and it will long continue to be quoted as an example of the
length to which a Calvinistic logician of genius was compelled by his
own scheme to go. We still see the tall, sweet-faced man, worn by his
daily twelve hours of intense mental toil, leaning on one elbow in the
pulpit and reading from manuscript, without even raising his gentle
voice, those words which smote his congregation into spasms of terror
and which seem to us sheer blasphemy.

Yet the "Farewell Sermon of 1750" gives a more characteristic view of
Edwards's mind and heart, and conveys an ineffaceable impression of
his nobility of soul. His diction, like Wordsworth's, is usually plain
almost to bareness; the formal framework of his discourses is obtruded;
and he hunts objections to their last hiding place with wearisome
pertinacity. Yet his logic is incandescent. Steel sometimes burns to the
touch like this, in the bitter winters of New E