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For Esther’s father was that overwhelming Jonathan Edwards, theologian and Calvinist extraordinary, whose presence cast a huge shadow over colonial America immediately prior to the Revolution.

Born in 1703 of a line of respectable ministers and wealthy lawyer-merchants, he achieved the seemingly quite usual “soul awakening” while an undergraduate at Yale. He entered the ministry, preached a space in New York and was invited back to New Haven to teach. There he met Sarah Pierpont, daughter of a minister and Professor of Moral Philosophy at Yale, was smitten with the sweet sight of God’s handiwork, and married.

He soon received a call to preach at Northampton, Massachusetts, and it was in that community that he reared the tremendous edifice of his theologic doctrine and wrote those voluminous volumes that are the despair of students of religious philosophy today. It was in that small community that he builded the largest Protestant congregation in the world, and preached unremittingly for twenty years to hysteria-ridden, emotionally unstrung auditors.

It is difficult to appraise Jonathan Edwards’ work adequately. Many have tried it—the great divine has not suffered from a lack of biographers or interpreters. But too often they have fallen back on the more dramatic and sensational elements of his career. The Great Awakening, of which we have spoken in connection with the Reverend Aaron Burr, was, in America, largely his doing. But he was neither the originator nor the founder; the roots go back to England, to the Wesleys and to Whitefield whom Edwards met and admitted to closest friendship.

It is true that he was a Puritan of Puritans, that he remodeled the primitive Calvinism and fashioned it into a logical, coherent intellectual system. It is also true that he held forth in his pulpit with stern, unbending righteousness, flaying savagely the alleged sins of his time, the dancing, the bundling—that he thundered the everlasting wrath, and drew for the horrified, yet fascinated gaze of his congregation the flames of Hell, the predestined damnation that awaited all but the elect—that he detailed pitilessly for their delectation the last refined agonies of the irremediably lost.

But there was something more to the man, to the cause that he sponsored. Religion had become formal, theocratic, a thing of government and power rather than of personal inner light. He made his dramatic decision to save the ancient Calvinism, to restore the old Congregational dominance, where the minister was but the servant, the exhorter, rather than the fount of all salvation. But he was caught, wittingly or unwittingly, in forces far removed. The Great Awakening, with its evangelical fervor and revivalist frenzy, as has been pointed out, was not a local manifestation; it was a worldwide movement.

Edwards, as well as Wesley, perceived that the trouble with the Church was that it had not reached the masses it pretended to serve. The religion of Calvin and the Puritans had congealed into a narrow aristocracy, essentially associated with wealth and birth. The lowly, the vast incoherent people to whom Christ had preached, were outside the fold, left to their own devices, barred from the seats of the haughty, comfortable congregations of the established towns. It was to bring these lowly into the fold, to bring emotional, personal religion to the inchoate frontiers, that the revivalists labored.

Theologically, Jonathan Edwards and John Wesley were poles apart, but in their social objectives they were essentially the same. The great divine’s work was one of the earliest notes in American life for a more democratic regime, religious as well as political. It was a failure religiously. The Congregationalists were left ultimately divided and torn. Neither Edwards nor Aaron Burr, the elder, sensed the full implications of what they were doing, of the unloosing of democratic forces that necessarily ensued, of the strange fruit of which they had helped plant the seed.

The Reverend Jonathan Edwards especially failed. He was deposed from his own parish after twenty years because he was too unyielding, too harsh and narrow in his applications of theology to everyday life. The emotional fervor had died out slowly among his congregation—being but human people—while their pastor grew more and more harsh in his personal judgments and in his delineations of the requisites for salvation. The final and disastrous conflict between shepherd and flock arose out of the admission of sinners to the Sacrament. The congregation, uneasy and increasingly restive, insisted on a more liberal rule. But Edwards was adamant—only the saintly, the elect, were admissible. Being of the elect was no light matter. It required a blaze of inner illumination, a public confession that one had been touched with the divine, pure essence, a long, searching catechism and probation period from which many otherwise quite good and worthy people shrank. Not all of them were exhibitionists.

As a result Jonathan Edwards was cast out by a narrow majority and moved to Stockbridge, in western Massachusetts. This was a frontier settlement in the heart of the Indian country, subject to all the hardships of primitive life, to the ravages of wild beasts and of wilder Indians who seemingly did not appreciate to the full his missionary activities. His family, including little Esther, went with him, to share the fatigues and dangers and grinding poverty with uncomplaining fortitude. It was from Stockbridge that the Reverend Aaron Burr retrieved Esther and brought her back to Newark to preside over his bachelor establishment and the young students of the College.