Jonathan Edwards , Jr., an important figure in the New Divinity movement of American theology in the late eighteenth century, was born in Northampton, Massachusetts, the second son of the Reverend Jonathan and Sarah Pierpont Edwards, but he spent his childhood in Stockbridge, where his father preached to the Indians and wrote his major treatises. In Stockbridge the younger Edwards became fluent in Indian languages: "all my thought ran in Indian," he later recalled. (Edwards eventually published Observations on the Language of the Muhhekaneew Indians, 1788.) At the age of ten he was accompanied by the Indian missionary Gideon Hawley to the deeper wilderness of Western New York but returned to Stockbridge soon after the French and Indian War commenced.

In January 1758 the family moved to Princeton, New Jersey, where Jonathan Edwards , Sr., assumed the presidency of the College of New Jersey (later Princeton University). His tenure was brief, however...