The "Diary" of Mather's fellow-townsman Judge Samuel Sewall has been
read more generally in recent years than anything written by Mather
himself. It was begun in 1673, nine years earlier than the first entry
in Mather's "Diary," and it ends in 1729, while Mather's closes in 1724.
As a picture of everyday happenings in New England, Sewall's "Diary"
is as far superior to Mather's as Pepys's "Diary" is to George Fox's
"Journal" in painting the England of the Restoration. Samuel Sewall was
an admirably solid figure, keen, forceful, honest. Most readers of his
"Diary" believe that he really was in luck when he was rejected by the
Widow Winthrop on that fateful November day when his eye noted--in spite
of his infatuation--that "her dress was not so clean as sometime it had
been. Jehovah Jireh!"

One pictures Cotton Mather as looking instinctively backward to the
Heroic Age of New England with pious nervous exaltation, and Samuel
Sewall as doing the day's work uprightly without taking anxious thought
of either past or future. But Jonathan Edwards is set apart from these
and other men. He is a lonely seeker after spiritual perfection, in
quest of that city "far on the world's rim," as Masefield says of it,
the city whose builder and maker is God.

The story of Edwards's career has the simplicity and dignity of tragedy.
Born in a parsonage in the quiet Connecticut valley in 1703--the year
of John Wesley's birth--he is writing at the age of ten to disprove the
doctrine of the materiality of the soul. At twelve he is studying
"the wondrous way of the working of the spider," with a precision and
enthusiasm which would have made him a great naturalist. At fourteen he
begins his notes on "The Mind" and on "Natural Science." He is graduated
from Yale in 1720, studies theology, and at twenty-four becomes the
colleague of his famous grandfather, Solomon Stoddard, in the church
at Northampton. He marries the beautiful Sarah Pierrepont, whom he
describes in his journal in a prose rhapsody which, like his mystical
rhapsodies on religion in the same youthful period, glows with a clear
unearthly beauty unmatched in any English prose of that century. For
twenty-three years he serves the Northampton church, and his sermons win
him the rank of the foremost preacher in New England. John Wesley reads
at Oxford his account of the great revival of 1735. Whitefield comes to
visit him at Northampton. Then, in 1750, the ascetic preacher
alienates his