he will only tread you under foot. . . .  He will crush out your blood and make it fly, and it shall be sprinkled on his garments so as to stain all his raiment.”  But Edwards was a rapt soul, possessed with the love as well as the fear of the God, and there are passages of sweet and exalted feeling in his Treatise Concerning Religious Affections, 1746.  Such is his portrait of Sarah Pierpont, “a young lady in New Haven,” who afterward became his wife and who “will sometimes go about from place to place singing sweetly, and no one knows for what.  She loves to be alone, walking in the fields and groves, and seems to have some one invisible always conversing with her.”  Edwards’s printed works number thirty-six titles.  A complete edition of them in ten volumes was published in 1829 by his great grandson, Sereno Dwight.  The memoranda from Edwards’s note-books, quoted by his editor and biographer, exhibit a remarkable precocity.  Even as a school-boy and a college student he had made deep guesses in physics as well as metaphysics, and, as might have been predicted of a youth of his philosophical insight and ideal cast of mind, he had early anticipated Berkeley in denying the existence of matter.  In passing from Mather to Edwards we step from the seventeenth to the eighteenth century.  There is the same difference between them in style and turn of thought as between Milton and Locke, or between Fuller and Bryden.  The learned digressions, the witty conceits, the perpetual interlarding of the text with scraps of Latin, have fallen off, even as the full-bottomed wig and the clerical gown and bands have been laid aside for the undistinguishing dress of the modern minister.  In Edwards’s English all is simple, precise, direct, and business-like.

Benjamin Franklin (1706-90), who was strictly contemporary with Edwards, was a contrast to him in every respect.  As Edwards represents the spirituality and other-worldliness of Puritanism, Franklin stands for the worldly and secular side of American character, and he illustrates the development of the New England Englishman into the modern Yankee.  Clear rather than subtle, without ideality or romance or fineness of emotion or poetic lift, intensely practical and utilitarian, broad-minded, inventive, shrewd, versatile, Franklin’s sturdy figure became typical of his time and his people.  He was the first and the only man of letters in colonial America who acquired a cosmopolitan fame and impressed his characteristic Americanism upon the mind of Europe.  He was the embodiment of common sense and of the useful virtues, with the enterprise but without the nervousness of his modern compatriots, uniting the philosopher’s openness of mind to the sagacity and quickness of resource of the self-made business man.  He was representative also of his age, an age of aufklaerung, eclaircissement, or “clearing up.”  By the middle of the eighteenth century a change had taken place in