Merioneth, where his father was vicar. He was educated at Westminster and at Jesus College, Oxford (B.A., 1860), and after teaching for two years at Llandovery went to Llangollen as his father’s curate. He became vicar of Aberdare in 1866 and of Carnarvon in 1869. Here he began his lifelong controversy with Nonconformity, especially as represented by the Rev. Evan Jones (Calvinistic Methodist) and Rev. E. Herber Evans (Congregationalist). In 1870 he fought in vain for the principle of all-round denominationalism in the national education system, and in the same year addressed a famous letter to Mr Gladstone on “The Church of the Cymry,” pointing out that the success of Nonconformity in Wales was largely due to “the withering effect of an alien episcopate.” One immediate result of this was the appointment of the Welshman Joshua Hughes (1807–1889) to the vacant see of St Asaph. Edwards became dean of Bangor in 1876 and at once set about restoring the cathedral, and he promoted a clerical education society for supplying the diocese with educated Welsh-speaking clergy. He was a popular preacher and an earnest patriot; his chief defect was a lack of appreciation of the theological attainments of Nonconformity, and a Welsh commentary on St Matthew, which he had worked at for many years and published in two volumes in 1882, was severely handled by a Bangor Calvinistic Methodist minister. Edwards suffered from overwork and insomnia and a Mediterranean cruise in 1883 failed to restore his health; and he died by his own hand on the 24th of May 1884 at Ruabon.
See V. Morgan, Welsh Religious Leaders in the Victorian Era.
EDWARDS, JONATHAN (1703–1758), American theologian and philosopher, was born on the 5th of October 1703 at East (now South) Windsor, Connecticut. His earliest known ancestor was Richard Edwards, Welsh by birth, a London clergyman in Elizabeth’s reign. His father Timothy Edwards (1669–1758), son of a prosperous merchant of Hartford, had graduated at Harvard, was minister at East Windsor, and eked out his salary by tutoring boys for college. His mother, a daughter of the Rev. Solomon Stoddard, of Northampton, Mass., seems to have been a woman of unusual mental gifts and independence of character. Jonathan, the only son, was the fifth of eleven children. The boy was trained for college by his father and by his elder sisters, who all received an excellent education. When ten years old he wrote a semi-humorous tract on the immateriality of the soul; he was interested in natural history, and at the age of twelve wrote a remarkable essay on the habits of the “flying spider.” He entered Yale College in 1716, and in the following year became acquainted with Locke’s Essay, which influenced him profoundly. During his college course he kept note books labelled “The Mind,” “Natural Science” (containing a discussion of the atomic theory, &c.), “The Scriptures” and “Miscellanies,” had a grand plan for a work on natural and mental philosophy, and drew up for himself rules for its composition. Even before his graduation in September 1720 as valedictorian and head of his class, he seems to have had a well formulated philosophy. The two years after his graduation he spent in New Haven studying theology. In 1722–1723 he was for eight months stated supply of a small Presbyterian church in New York city, which invited him to remain, but he declined the call, spent two months in study at home, and then in 1724–1726 was one of the two tutors at Yale, earning for himself the name of a “pillar tutor” by his steadfast loyalty to the college and its orthodox teaching at the time when Yale’s rector (Cutler) and one of her tutors had gone over to the Episcopal Church.
The years 1720 to 1726 are partially recorded in his diary and in the resolutions for his own conduct which he drew up at this time. He had long been an eager seeker after salvation and was not fully satisfied as to his own “conversion” until an experience in his last year in college, when he lost his feeling that the election of some to salvation and of others to eternal damnation was “a horrible doctrine,” and reckoned it “exceedingly pleasant, bright and sweet.” He now took a great and new joy in the beauties of nature, and delighted in the allegorical interpretation of the Song of Solomon. Balancing these mystic joys is the stern tone of his Resolutions, in which he is almost ascetic in his eagerness to live earnestly and soberly, to waste no time, to maintain the strictest temperance in eating and drinking. On the 15th of February 1727 he was ordained minister at Northampton and assistant to his grandfather, Solomon Stoddard. He was a student minister, not a visiting pastor, his rule being thirteen hours of study a day. In the same year he married Sarah Pierrepont, then aged seventeen, daughter of James Pierrepont (1659–1714), a founder of Yale, and through her mother great-granddaughter of Thomas Hooker. Of her piety and almost nun-like love of God and belief in His personal love for her, Edwards had known when she was only thirteen, and had written of it with spiritual enthusiasm; she was of a bright and cheerful disposition, a practical housekeeper, a model wife and the mother of his twelve children. Solomon Stoddard died on the 11th of February 1729, leaving to his grandson the difficult task of the sole ministerial charge of one of the largest and wealthiest congregations in the colony, and one proud of its morality, its culture and its reputation.
In 1731 Edwards preached at Boston the “Public Lecture” afterwards published under the title God Glorified in Man’s Dependence. This was his first public attack on Arminianism. The leading thought was God’s absolute sovereignty in the work of redemption: that while it behoved God to create man holy, it was of His “good pleasure” and “mere and arbitrary grace” that any man was now made holy, and that God might deny this grace without any disparagement to any of His perfections. In 1733 a revival of religion began in Northampton, and reached such intensity in the winter of 1734 and the following spring as to threaten the business of the town. In six months nearly three hundred were admitted to the church. The revival gave Edwards an opportunity of studying the process of conversion in all its phases and varieties, and he recorded his observations with psychological minuteness and discrimination in A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God in the Conversion of Many Hundred Souls in Northampton (1737). A year later he published Discourses on Various Important Subjects, the five sermons which had proved most effective in the revival, and of these none, he tells us, was so immediately effective as that on the Justice of God in the Damnation of Sinners, from the text, “That every mouth may be stopped.” Another sermon, published in 1734, on the Reality of Spiritual Light set forth what he regarded as the inner, moving principle of the revival, the doctrine of a “special” grace in the immediate and supernatural divine illumination of the soul. In the spring of 1735 the movement began to subside and a reaction set in. But the relapse was brief, and the Northampton revival, which had spread through the Connecticut valley and whose fame had reached England and Scotland, was followed in 1739–1740 by the Great Awakening, distinctively under the leadership of Edwards. The movement met with no sympathy from the orthodox leaders of the church. In 1741 Edwards published in its defence The Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God, dealing particularly with the phenomena most criticized, the swoonings, outcries and convulsions. These “bodily effects,” he insisted, were not “distinguishing marks” of the work of the Spirit of God; but so bitter was the feeling against the revival in the more strictly Puritan churches that in 1742 he was forced to write a second apology, Thoughts on the Revival in New England, his main argument being the great moral improvement of the country. In the same pamphlet he defends an appeal to the emotions, and advocates preaching terror when necessary, even to children, who in God’s sight “are young vipers . . . if not Christ’s.” He considers “bodily effects” incidentals to the real work of God, but his own mystic devotion and the experiences of his wife during the Awakening (which he gives in detail) make him think that the divine visitation usually overpowers the body, a view in support of which he quotes Scripture. In reply to Edwards, Charles Chauncy anonymously wrote The Late Religious Commotions in New England Considered (1743), urging conduct as the sole test of conversion; and the general convention of Congregational ministers in the Province of Massachusetts Bay protested “against disorders in practice which have of late obtained in
