He tells us that he read this with a greater delight "than the most greedy miser finds when gathering up handfuls of silver and gold from some newly disclosed treasure." This eager thirst for knowledge never left him. He trained himself to read, pen in hand, equalling in energy and steadfast purpose the studious Cotton Mather of an earlier generation. Graduating at Yale in 1720, he was for a short time a tutor in the college, soon afterwards becoming a pastor, first in the church at Northampton, Massachusetts, and then among the Stockbridge Indians. Three months before his death he became president of Princeton College.
Although, like most of the clergymen of his day, Edwards was a voluminous writer, his works belong to theology and metaphysics rather than to literature. However, "there is an intensity," notes Professor Beers, and a spiritual elevation about them, apart. from the profundity and acuteness of the thought, which lift them here and there into the finer ether of purely emotional or imaginative art."
The Freedom of the Will. — Although Edwards published thirty-six different books, his fame chiefly depends upon one master work bearing the formidable title:
"A Careful and Strict Inquiry into the Modern Notion of that Freedom of Will which is Supposed to be Essential to Moral Agency, Virtue and Vice, Reward and Punishment, Praise and Blame."
This learned metaphysical discussion supports the doctrine laid down by Calvin, that the will is not self-determined and free, that man does not act by virtue of a free choice, but in accordance with the will of a
