Moses Coit Tyler:  The most original and acute thinker yet produced in America.

This is the man whose intellectual life has thrilled in the mental activity of more than 1,400 men and women of the past century and a half, and which has not lost its virtue or its power in all these years.

England and Scotland are not wont to sit at our feet even in this day, and yet they sat at the feet of Jonathan Edwards as in the presence of a master when he was a mere home missionary, living among the Indians, to whom he preached every Lord’s day.

The birth of fame is always an interesting study.  It is easy to play the part of a rocket if one can sizzle, and flash, and rise suddenly in darkness, but to take one’s place among luminaries and shine with permanent brilliancy is so rare an experience as to present a fascinating study.

Jonathan Edwards was twenty-eight years of age, had been the pastor of a church on the frontier, as Northampton was, for four years without any notable experience, when he was invited to preach the annual sermon before the association of ministers at Boston.  Never since that day have Boston and Harvard been more thoroughly the seat of culture and of intellectual power than then.  It was a remarkable event for a young man of twenty-eight to be invited to come from the Western limit of civilization and preach the annual sermon before the philosophical, theological, and scholastic masters of the East.  This sermon was so powerful that the association published it.  This was his first appearance in print.  So profoundly moved by this effort were the churches of New England that the clergymen generally gave public thanks to the Head of the Church for raising up so great a teacher and preacher.  Thus was born the fame of Jonathan Edwards.

It is nearly 170 years since then.  Science and invention, enterprise and ambition have done great things for America and for Americans.  We have mighty universities, libraries, and laboratories, but we have no man who thinks more clearly, writes more logically, speaks more vigorously than did Jonathan Edwards, and we have never had such a combination of spirit and power in any other American.  This mastery is revealing itself in various ways in hundreds of his descendants to-day, and it has never ceased to do it since his blood gave tonic to the thought and character of his children and his children’s children.

CHAPTER III

THE INHERITANCE AND TRAINING OF MR. EDWARDS

No man can have the intellectual power, nobility of character, and personal grandeur of Jonathan Edwards and transmit it to his children’s children for a century and a half who has not himself had a great inheritance.  The whole teaching of the culture of animals and plants leaves no room to question the persistency of character, and this is so grandly exemplified in the descendants of Mr. Edwards that it is interesting to see what inheritances were focused in him.