ys the Doctor, "that she had had peculiar
exercises respecting me since I had been in the family; that she trusted
I should receive light and comfort, and doubted not that God intended yet
to do great things by me."

After pursuing his studies for some months with the Puritan philosopher,
young Hopkins commenced preaching, and, in 1743, was ordained at
Sheffield, (now Great Barrington') in the western part of Massachusetts.
There were at the time only about thirty families in the town. He says
it was a matter of great regret to him to be obliged to settle so far
from his spiritual guide and tutor but seven years after he was relieved
and gratified by the removal of Edwards to Stockbridge, as the Indian
missionary at that station, seven miles only from his own residence; and
for several years the great metaphysician and his favorite pupil enjoyed
the privilege of familiar intercourse with each other. The removal of
the former in 1758 to Princeton, New Jersey, and his death, which soon
followed, are mentioned in the diary of Hopkins as sore trials and
afflictive dispensations.

Obtaining a dismissal from his society in Great Barrington in 1769,
he was installed at Newport the next year, as minister of the first
Congregational church in that place. Newport, at this period, was, in
size, wealth, and commercial importance, the second town in New England.
It was the great slave mart of the North. Vessels loaded with stolen men
and women and children, consigned to its merchant princes, lay at its
wharves; immortal beings were sold daily in its market, like cattle at a
fair. The soul of Hopkins was moved by the appalling spectacle. A
strong conviction of the great wrong of slavery, and of its utter
incompatibility with the Christian profession, seized upon his mind.
While at Great Barrington, he had himself owned a slave, whom he had sold
on leaving the place, without compunction or suspicion in regard to the
rightfulness of the transaction. He now saw the origin of the system in
its true light; he heard the seamen engaged in the African trade tell of
the horrible scenes of fire and blood which they had witnessed, and in
which they had been actors; he saw the half-suffocated wretches brought
up from their noisome and narrow prison, their squalid countenances and
skeleton forms bearing fearful evidence of the suffering attendant upon
the transportation from their native homes. The demoralizing effects of
slaveholding ev