JONATHAN EDWARDS, 1703-1758

LIFE AND WRITINGS.--Jonathan Edwards, who ranks among the world's greatest
theologians and metaphysicians, was born in 1703 in East Windsor,
Connecticut. Like Cotton Mather, Edwards was precocious, entering Yale
before he was thirteen. The year previous to his going to college, he wrote
a paper on spiders, showing careful scientific observation and argument.
This paper has been called "one of the rarest specimens of precocious
scientific genius on record." At fourteen, he read Locke's _Essay on the
Human Understanding_, receiving from it, he says, higher pleasure "than the
most greedy miser finds when gathering up handfuls of silver and gold from
some newly discovered treasure." Before he was seventeen, he had graduated
from Yale, and he had become a tutor there before he was twenty-one.

Like Dante, he had a Beatrice. Thinking of her, he wrote this prose hymn of
a maiden's love for the Divine Power:--

"They say there is a young lady in New Haven who is beloved of that great
Being who made and rules the world, and there are certain seasons in
which this great Being, in some way or other invisible, comes to her and
fills her mind with exceeding sweet delight, and that she hardly cares
for anything except to meditate on Him, that she expects after a while to
be received up where He is, to be raised up out of the world and caught
up into heaven, being assured that He loves her too well to let her
remain at a distance from Him always. She will sometimes go about from
place to place singing sweetly, and seems to be always full of joy and
pleasure, and no one knows for what. She loves to be alone, walking in
the fields and groves, and seems to have some one invisible always