Bliss Perry, The American spirit in lierature: a chronicle of great interpreters

[48] Pepys's Diary is to George Fox's Journal in painting the England of the Restoration. Samuel Sewall was an admirably solid figure, keen, forceful, honest. Most readers of his Diary believe that he really was in luck when he was rejected by the Widow Winthrop on that fateful November day when his eye noted — in spite of his infatuationthat “her dress was not so clean as sometime it had been. Jehovah Jireh!”

One pictures Cotton Mather as looking instinctively backward to the Heroic Age of New England with pious nervous exaltation, and Samuel Sewall as doing the day's work uprightly without taking anxious thought of either past or future. But Jonathan Edwards is set apart from these and other men. He is a lonely seeker after spiritual perfection, in quest of that city “far on the world's rim,” as Masefield says of it, the city whose builder and maker is God.

The story of Edwards's career has the simplicity and dignity of tragedy. Born in a parsonage in the quiet Connecticut valley in 1703-the year of John Wesley's birth-he is writing at the age of ten to disprove the doctrine of the materiality of the soul. At twelve he is studying “the wondrous way of the working of the spider,” with a