With him the fundamental ontological verity is 'that God and Real Existence are the same," 'that God is" and that "there is none else." Created spirits are "emanations" or "communi cations" of his Being. What other conception then for him is possible, but that they, too, like material things, consist in God's distinguishing Thought and stable Will? Edwards seems to have had no occasion to refer in his later writings to the idealistic the ory of matter so pronounced in these notes of his youth. But there is no reason for thinking that he abandoned a view so congruous with his general philosophical position. Other of his most distinctive teachings are here already expressed or indicated. Here, for example, is the doctrine that the will, which is regarded as identical with inclination so far as the latter has respect to the mind's immediate actions, is al ways determined by motives inherent in the mind's apprehension of the greatest apparent good. Here, too, are the doctrines that "ex cellency" consists in "the consent of being to being)); that virtue, or the excellency of minds, consists in "love to being"; that the type of this excellency is God's mutual love of himself in the eternal process of the Trinity; that God's love to himself "includes in it, or rather is the same as, a love to everything, as they are all communications of himself"; and that, since God is "universal Being," true virtue in finite minds consists in love to him. These are the positions elaborated in the treatises on the (Will' and on the 'Nature of True Virtue' and in the recently (1903) published essay on the Tr in i ty. ) And the most speculative of Edwards' works, the treatise on (God's End in Creation,' is essentially but an application to a special problem of the conceptions here ad vanced concerning the nature of God as "uni versal Being" and as "Love," of finite spirits as "emanations," "communications" or "creations" in his likeness and of the sensible world as in its order and harmony, a "shadow" of his excellency.
Edwards then remained two years in New Haven studying for the ministry. He then preached for several months to a small Pres byterian church in New York. But he again returned to New Haven, took his master's de gree, and for two years (1724-26) was tutor in the college. He had declined several invita tions to a settlement in the ministry and seemed definitely committed to the academic career, for which by training and intellectual gifts he was eminently qualified, when the call came to him from the church in Northampton, Mass., to become the colleague of the venerable Solo mon Stoddard, his grandfather. He was in stalled at Northampton, 15 Feb. 1727. A few months later he married Sarah Pierrepont, of New Haven, then 17, of whom four years be fore he had written an admiring description, celebrated as one of the most perfect and charming of its kind in literature.
The moral and religious development of Ed wards up to this period was as remarkable for richness of experience and intensity of spiritual energy as was his intellectual development for originality, acuteness and speculative power. In a "narrative of personal experience," written for his own use, we have the intimate record of his religious life from its early beginnings, when as a boy he built with other boys a booth in a swamp for daily prayer and had other places for his own devotions besides, through its de cline and revival — his "conversion," it has been called, though, as he notes with some misgiving in his diary, he was never converted in the man ner traditionally expected — to its culmination in a state of settled conviction, with great in ward delight in the truth and beauty of the objects of religious faith, including at times marked exaltation of sentiment and something akin to ecstasy. His diary, in which, after the
fashion of the time, he watches, with almost morbid intensity, the daily fluctuations of his spiritual state, tells the same story for a part of the period. And in his 70 'Resolutions' we have a most striking expression of the lofty moral purposes of his life and of the ideas which actually governed it. For example: "To live with all my might while I do live"; "when I think of any theorem in divinity to be solved, immediately to do what I can toward solving it, if circumstances do not hinder"; "never, henceforward, till I die, to act as if I were any way my own, but entirely and altogether God's"; "on the supposition that there never was to be but one individual in the world, at any one time, who was properly a complete Christian, in all respects of a right stamp, hav ing Christianity always shining in its true lus tre, and appearing excellent and lovely, from whatever part and under whatever character viewed: resolved, to act just as I would do, if I strove with all my might to be that one, who should live in my time." It is the combina tion of this rare emotional susceptibility, this high reverence and moral enthusiasm, this strict, unrelaxing conscientiousness, with ex traordinary subtlety and perspicacity of intellect and an unrivaled capacity for logical analysis and abstract reasoning that gives to Edwards his distinction and is the secret of his power.
On the death of Mr. Stoddard in 1729, Ed wards, then 25, became sole pastor of the church in Northampton, which was reputed the largest and wealthiest in the colony outside of Boston. In 1731 he preached in the "public lecture" in Boston the sermon, "God Glorified in Man's Dependence," with which he achieved a notable success. The sermon is an eloquent and impressive proclamation of one of the most fundamental articles of his creed, the doctrine of God's "absolute in the work of salvation: it was a prophet's call to the Puri tan churches to return to the old high Calvin istic faith. The counterpart to it is the sermon, published in 1734, on the (Reality of Spiritual Light,' which proclaims the mystical principle of a supernatural illumination directly imparted and experienced. The emphasis on religious ex perience becomes still more pronounced in the two great revivals with which the fame of Ed wards as a preacher is especially associated. He wrote the story of the earlier revival, that of 1735 in Northampton, in his (Narrative of Sur prising Conversions' (1736), with confident, even exultant, assurance; the excesses of the "Great Awakening" of 1740-42, more extensive and tumultuous, led him to reflect on the differ ence between a genuine and a false experience ((Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God,' 1741), and then to an apologetic de fense of the movement against the objections of its opponents ((Thoughts on the Revival,' 1742). It was in the height of the excitement that he preached in Enfield, Conn., his sermon on 'Sinners in the Hands of an Angry (1741), the extreme representative of a type not uncommon with him, indeed, yet not the most common nor the most representative even in his revival preaching (consult for example, the sermons 'Justification by Faith,' etc., 1738). More noteworthy and far more original was the treatise on the 'Religious Affections' (1746), in which the distinctively new note in Edwards, the new emphasis on subjective experience, re ceives its fullest systematic expression.