Edwards, JONATHAN, was born at East Windsor, Conn., 5th Oct. 1703, only son of Timothy Edwards, clergyman there for more than sixty years. The boy, precocious alike in learning and piety, graduated at Yale College in 1720; his doubts had given way to 'an inward sweet delight in God.' After acting as tutor at Yale from 1724 to 1726, he was ordained in 1727 colleague to his maternal grandfather, Solomon Stoddard, in his ministry at Northampton, Mass. Two years later the death of the latter left him alone, and here for nearly twenty-four years he laboured with remarkable earnestness, guiding his flock through the excitement of a revival begun by the preaching of George Whitefield in 1740. The happiness of his ministry was after seventeen years broken by a bitter dispute with his people about the circulation of immoral books, and about returning to the earlier Congregational rule of refusing to admit to communion persons not consciously converted. Edwards supported the more rigid views, and was obliged to resign his ministry in 1750. He next laboured as missionary to the Housatonnick Indians in Massachusetts until 1758, when he was called to succeed his son-in-law,
President Burr, of Princeton College, but died of smallpox only thirty-four days after his installation, 22d March 1758. Edwards is still America's most original thinker in metaphysics, and his treatise on the Freedom of the Will (1754) has never been superseded (see WILL). He was a rigid Calvinist in theology, but his heart was warmed with a piety of rare saintliness and elevation. His other works include Original Sin (1758), True Nature of Christian Virtue (1788), and Dissertation on the End for which God created the World (1789). The most notable adherents of his school were Samuel Hopkins (q.v.); his son, Jonathan Edwards; Joseph Bellamy of Connecticut (1719-90); Nathaniel Emmons (1745-1840); Timothy Dwight (q.v.); and Leonard Woods, professor at Andover—almost all of whom wrote copiously. There have been many editions, more or less complete, of the works of Edwards, that by Dwight (with a biography, New York, 1829-30) being in 10 vols. This edition was republished at London in 2 vols. by Henry Rogers in 1834 and in 1860. See Leslie Stephen's Hours in a Library (2d series, 1876).—JONATHAN EDWARDS, second son of the preceding, was born in Northampton, Mass., 26th May 1745, and was educated at the College of New Jersey; he became tutor at Princeton, and in 1769 pastor at White Haven, Conn. Here he laboured with all his father's energy till dismissed by his congregation in 1795 on the plea of their inability to support a minister. Next year he was called to the church at Colebrooke, Conn., and in 1799 to the president's chair of the new college at Schenectady, New York; but here he died 1st August 1801. His ablest work is an exposition of his father's theory of the will—A Dissertation concerning Liberty and Necessity (1797). See the Life by Allen (1889).