EDWARDS (JONATHAN), a celebrated Ameri can metaphysician and divine, was born October .5, 1703, at Windsor, in the province of Connecticut. His family had originally emigrated from England in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. His father, Mr Ti mothy Edwards, was a clergyman of great piety and respectability, and by his mother he was grandson of Mr Solomon Stoddard, a noted and zealous di vine of Northampton. Jonathan was accordingly reared in the bosom of Puritanism, and all his ideas were early imbued with the cast of thought, which was native to the stock from which he sprung.. There was something, indeed, not a little singu lar in the prevailing character of religion in Ame rica in those days. A conversion seems to have been a regular era in a man's life, which could be fixed down to a date, as much as his coming of age or being married. A very curious document remains of Jonathan's conversion, the whole steps and progress of which he has detailed for the behoof of his chil dren ; and it is a document which, even amidst all its frequent weakness and extravagance, impresses is with a high sense of the genius and of the worth, of this remarkable man. We cannot avoid giving our readers a little insight into it, especially as it con tains some passages of deep feeling and sensibility, which form a striking contrast to the controversial hardness of his writings. It is full of bursts of ten derness; and, even while the subjects of his earliest meditations were the same dark doctrines, in their most tremendous form, which he afterwards de fended so ably by the help of his mature reason,— amidst all the gloom which naturally surrounds them, they seem to have left upon his mind no sentiments that were not gentle and charitable. At the same time, this document affords us a dis tinct proof, that such doctrines take their origin, in a great measure, in peculiar circumstances of so ciety, or of the individual mind ; and since they were quite as fully impressed upon Edwards, before he was capable of any profound reasoning upon them as afterwards, the presumption is, that his ear ly prepossessions came strongly in aid of his later conclusions.
It was in the midst of these youthful musings, that ht acquired a full and firm persuasion of tenets which we will own scarcely seem to us, to be either so " lovely," or of so " good report," as the more natural sentiments of his unconverted state, which he gave in exchange for them. " I had a variety (says he) of concerns and exercises about my soul from my childhood ; but had two more remark able seasons of awakening, before I met with that change by which I was brought to those new dis positions, and that new sense of things that I have since had. The first time was when I was a boy,
some years before I went to college, at a time of re markable awakening in my father's congregation. I was then very much affected for many months, and concerned about the things of religion," &c. This state of mind, however, rather pasted off;• but, in his last year at college, he was visited by a severe sickness, which made him form many wise and holy resolutions, which he was afterwards for the most part enabled to keep. So far well ; but now follows the grand proof of his conversion: " From my child • hood up," he says, " my mind had been wont to be full of objections against the doctrine of God's sove reignty, in choosing Whom he would to eternal life ; and rejecting whom he pleased, leaving them eternally to perish, and be everlastingly tormented in hell. It used to appear like a horrible doctrine to me. But I remember the time very well, when I seemed to be convinced, and fully satisfied as to this sovereignty of God, and his justice in thus eternally disposing of men according to his sovereign pleasure. But never could give an account how, or by what means, I was thus convinced, not in the least imagining in the time of it, nor a long time after, that there was any influence of God's Spirit in it, but only that now I Saw further, and my reason apprehended the justice and reasonableness of it. However, my mind rested in it, and it put an end to all those cavils and objections that had till then abode with me all the preceding part of my life. And there has been a wonderful alteration in my mind, with respect to the doctrine of God's sovereignty, from that day to this, so that I scarce ever have found so much as the rising of an objection against God's sovereignty in the most absolute sense, in showing mercy to whom he will show mercy, and hardening and eternally damning whom he mill. God's absolute sovereignty and jus tice, with respect to salvation and damnation, is what my mind seems to rest assured of, as much as of any thing that I see with my eyes," &c. This doctrine continued through all Mr Edwards's life, in peculiar favour with him ; and he employs the whole re sources of his dialectics to support it, with a full con viction that he was thereby glorifying God, and per forming an important service to mankind.