THE GREAT AWAKENING It was not wholly dark in American Christendom before the dawn of the Great Awakening.

The censoriousness which was the besetting sin of the evangelists in that great religious movement, the rhetorical temptation to glorify the revival by intensifying the contrast with the antecedent condition, and the exaggerated _revivalism_ ever since so prevalent in the American church,--the tendency to consider religion as consisting mainly in scenes and periods of special fervor, and the intervals between as so much void space and waste time,--all these have combined to deepen the dark tints in which the former state is set before us in history.
The power of godliness was manifest in the earlier days by many infallible signs, not excluding those "times of refreshing" in which the simultaneous earnestness of many souls compels the general attention.
Even in Northampton, where the doctrine of the venerable Stoddard as to the conditions of communion has been thought to be the low-water mark of church vitality, not less than five such "harvest seasons" were within recent memory.

It was to this parish in a country town on the frontier of civilization, but the most important in Massachusetts outside of Boston, that there came, in the year 1727, to serve as colleague to his aged grandfather, Pastor Stoddard, a young man whose wonderful intellectual and spiritual gifts had from his childhood awakened the pious hopes of all who had known him, and who was destined in his future career to be recognized as the most illustrious of the saints and doctors of the American church.

The authentic facts of the boyhood of Jonathan Edwards read like the myths that adorn the legendary Lives of the Saints.

As an undergraduate of Yale College, before the age of seventeen, his reflections on the mysteries of God, and the universe, and the human mind, were such as even yet command the attention and respect of students of philosophy.