She will sometimes go about from
place to place singing sweetly, and seems to be always full of joy and
pleasure, and no one knows for what. She loves to be alone, walking in
the fields and groves, and seems to have some one invisible always
conversing with her"
[Illustration: MEMORIAL TABLET TO JONATHAN EDWARDS
(First Church, Northampton, Mass)]
Jonathan Edwards thus places before us Sarah Pierrepont, a New England
Puritan maiden. To note the similarity of thought between the Old Puritan
England and the New, let us turn to the maiden in Milton's Comus:--
"A thousand liveried angels lackey her,
Driving far off each thing of sin and guilt,
And in clear dream and solemn vision,
Tell her of things that no gross ear can hear,
Till oft converse with heav'nly habitants
Begin to cast a beam on th'outward shape,
The unpolluted temple of the mind,
And turns it by degrees to the soul's essence,
Till all be made immortal."
Unlike Dante, Edwards married his Beatrice at the age of seventeen. In
1727, the year of his marriage, he became pastor of the church in
Northampton, Massachusetts. With the aid of his wife, he inaugurated the
greatest religious revival of the century, known as the "Great Awakening,"
which spread to other colonial churches, crossed the ocean, and stimulated
Wesley to call sinners to repentance.
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