the "Diary," and those remarkable illustrations of precocity, theNotes on the Mind and on Natural Science"; and with one slight exception, it contains none of his correspondence.

As might be expected, the largest item in the inventory of his mature productions is an immense number of sermons between eleven and twelve hundred, of varying degrees of completeness-more than one-third, that is, of the whole. number which would have been required, at the rate of two a week, for the thirty years of his career as an ordained. minister.

Such an amount of material gives of course the means of tracing very fully the author's sermonizing habits.

For manuscript he used folds of paper stitched together, of a convenient size to be laid in a small preaching Bible or held directly in one hand while resting the elbow on the desk, the size of the paper ranging from three to four inches in width and from four to six in length.

In date of composition, the sermons fall naturally into four groups.

There are, first, about fifty, undated, of uniform size and appearance, which from the handwriting and other indications undoubtedly belong to the earliest years of his ministry, some probably antedating even his settlement at Northampton.

Next come about five hundred, on pages of a smaller size, usually written out in full, or approximately so, and mostly with the month and year in which they were first preached."

Then, about 1741, he gets more into the habit of using outlines instead of fully written sermons, and we have about three hundred and fifty specimens of this sort, prepared in the last decade of his Northampton pastorate, quite a number of which were repeated in Stockbridge; while there is also a fourth group, on still another size and shape of paper, of about one hundred and seventy-five briefer outlines of sermons prepared for the Mohawks at Stockbridge, in which the themes. are evidently much more simply treated.

Supplementary to the sermons is an interesting volume of a hundred and fifty pages, apparently begun about 1738, and

1 What Dr. Dwight, in his Life (pp. 41, 42, 702, 703), calls the cover page to the "Notes on Natural Science" is, however, here.

2 Edwards adopted this custom of noting the date in 1733.

filled with plans of discourses and the enumeration of texts from which the writer proposed to preach, with the doctrines deducible from them. A study of this volume only deepens the impression that preaching was a matter of great joy to Edwards, and that the change from Northampton to Stockbridge, where there was next to no need for this kind. of preparation, was painful for this reason also, that it removed an incentive to a specially attractive exercise of mental power. Everything so far enumerated is unpublished; but besides these there is a group of about fifty sermons, more or less fully written out, which appear in Edwards's printed works. These have a special interest, in the case of those which he himself sent to the press, as showing how much the original manuscript was elaborated in delivery or in printing.

For instance, here is one of his most famous sermons, "Sinners in the hands of an angry God," which was, as appears from the margin, prepared for his own people in June, 1741, and was preached with such startling effect the following month at Enfield. The tradition is that in the delivery this was closely read from the manuscript; but the original shows that the discourse was not entirely written out, so that the tradition is hardly to be relied on. To show the degree of expansion which the author used in print, I quote the locus classicus which more perhaps than any other passage represents Edwards to the popular mind:

--

"The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire; he is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight; you are ten thousand times more abominable in his eyes, than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours. You have offended him infinitely more than ever a stubborn rebel did his prince; and yet it is nothing but his hand that holds you from falling into the fire every moment."

The corresponding passage in the original manuscript is :

"You are over the pit of hell in Gods hand very much as one holds a spider or some loathsome Insect over the fire & 'tis nothing but for God to let you go & you fall in."

1 In the collection is another earlier (undated) sermon from the same text, with a different line of argument.

There is rather an unusual proportion of "occasional sermons," on Fasts, Thanksgivings, Deaths, Quarterly Lectures, Contribution Lectures, Society Meetings, Private Meetings, Children's Meetings, etc.

The few specimens of distinctive preaching to children are expositions of texts which our degenerate days would consider strong meat for such a purpose. One, for example, is from 2 Kings ii. 23, 24: "And he went up from thence unto Bethel and as he was going up by the way, there came forth little children out of the city, and mocked him, and said unto him, Go up, thou bald head; go up, thou bald head. And he turned back, and looked on them, and cursed them in the name of the Lord. And there came forth two she bears out of the wood, and tare forty and two children of them." And a second is from Matthew x. 37: "He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me." I ought to add that the doctrine inculcated in these cases seems less hard than the texts.

In such a long series of sermons there cannot fail to be some that connect themselves with striking events in the preacher's life. Such are, to mention only a few, the one preached from Job xiv: 2, on the Sabbath after the death of his second daughter, Jerusha, who was betrothed to David Brainerd, though this was strictly an old sermon, preached seven years before "at a private meeting of young people after Billy Sheldon's Death," and now provided with a new "application." There is one of peculiar interest from Jeremiah xxiii. 29, preached in April, 1749, just at the height of the fierce controversy which ended the speaker's Northampton career; and another, one of the very latest which he preached there, before his dismission, the text of which, Isaiah xxxii. 17, 18, is suggestive of the peaceable spirit which he strove to inculcate. There is also one of the latest (from Luke xxi. 36) to his Indian flock at Stockbridge.

There is at least one,1 and I think more, marked as preached at Northampton during his residence in Stockbridge, and similarly in the book of plans of sermons there are in the same period at least three notes of texts and doctrines marked as designed for Northampton, though it is commonly said that he never occupied his old pulpit after his dismission.

1 From 2 Cor. iv. 6. Preached in May, 1755.

Among the general impressions about the way in which he did his work as a preacher, one of the first is, as already intimated, that he found sermon-writing very easy and very enjoyable. And besides the spontaneity and copiousness of it, there is about his ordinary style great simplicity and directness, and if I may so say, a certain unexpected freshness and modernness, not at all the impression of aridity and remorseless logic which one might have looked for. In fact, the impression of the manuscripts as a whole is to make Edwards seem very human, with much more of the yearning and pleading attitude of a devout pastor than the aloofness and absorption of an abstract metaphysician.

The spelling throughout is almost unexceptionable, far better than in the ordinary clerical manuscript of his century. The handwriting is minute and often illegible, but intentionally so, as only meant for his own eye; what he writes for others is plain enough. He used a shorthand of his own devising (remarkable mainly for its obscurity) in some of his early manuscripts, and continued to use it to a limited extent, chiefly in brief memoranda on his sermons and seemingly for economy of space rather than for concealment of thought.

Down to the time when he adopted the habit of using outlines rather than fully written sermons, he was fairly particular in having good paper, evenly cut and folded. But during the latter half of his ministry it is the exception to find his notes written on fresh, unused paper. He utilized scraps of all obtainable sorts, bills; family and business letters; physicians' prescriptions; marriage publishments; requests for prayers and for thanksgivings in the meeting-house; children's copy-books; fly-leaves, title-pages, and margins of books; proof-sheets; circulars; proclamations; subscription papers for his own books; and most frequently of all, scraps of the thin soft paper said to have been used by his wife and daughters in making fans.

To illustrate, we find employed as sermon paper several specimens of Mrs. Edwards's letters and several of his own. Thus, from a sermon preached in May, 1743, on Ephesians iv. 15, 16, the following to his wife is rescued :

LEBANON at Mr. Metcalf's, March 25, 1743. DEAR SPOUSE, -I recieved this morning by Mr Potwine the short Letter you sent me, with the Books, papers &c-for which I thank

:

you. By this I would inform you that I have been considerably amiss since I came from home; riding in such tempestuous weather increased my cold, and almost overcame me. But am now a little better. I faild of seeing Mr Wheelock as I came down, and so had no opportunity to agree with him about the alteration of the time of my absence from home but intended notwithstanding to have gone home next week. But many ministers have been urging me to go to New-London, but I refused unless a number of them would go with me: and last night Mr Meacham, Mr Williams & Mr Pumroy agreed to go down with me the next week, to endeavour to reclaim the People there from their Errours. So that I believe I shall not be at home till the week after next. Give my Love to my Children & Mr Wheelock. Br. & Sister Metcalf give their Love to you & the Children. Remember me in your Prayers. I am my dearest Companion.

Your affectionate Consort

JONATHAN EDWARDS.

The allusion to New London is understood by recalling the bonfires of unsound religious books which the fanatical followers of the crazy revivalist, James Davenport, had kinIdled there two or three weeks before.

The household bills preserved in the same way give us occasional items of interest: as when a jeweller's account shows that Mrs. Edwards had purchased in 1743 "a Gold Locket & Chane" for £11, we have a right to feel that her rare graces of spirit were not disjoined from a human love for the beautiful. And again, when we find the great preacher charged twice in a list of common household goods at three months' interval with "one dozen of long pipes," we feel that he too had his human side and his solace for overmuch study. But perhaps the most gratifying of all is a little entry in the midst of humdrum purchases of foolscap paper and sealing-wax and Bayley's spelling-books,-"1 childs Plaything, 4/6." A glimpse of Jonathan Edwards buying playthings for his children is worth all the rest of the sermon. As it happens, the same sermon is written in part (in July, 1744) on a leaf of an old writing-book on which familiar rhymes of the "New England Primer" have been copied. as exercises by the two of these self-same children, Esther and Mary, who were in turn to be the mothers of the two most widely known, not equally honored, grandchildren of Jonathan Edwards, Aaron Burr and Timothy Dwight.

After the sermons the most voluminous section of our