In estimating the authority of Edwards as a theologian, it is requisite that we should know the temperament and habits of that very remarkable person. It is not, perhaps, generally considered, that great as were the energy and acuteness of his reasoning powers, he was less under the dominion of these than of his imagination and feelings. In early life this is not unfrequently the case with persons of imaginative character; but, commonly, the ardent enthusiasm of youth gives way afterwards to the ascendancy of the higher faculties. Edwards was, constitutionally, too much the creature of dreams and impulses ever to escape from their control. His gigantic mind was held in perpetual bondage. His natural temperament was fostered throughout the whole period which moulds and fixes the character, by his holding little converse with human beings beyond the sphere of a particular religious community in an obscure American town, and by an almost uninterrupted contemplation of nature in her gloomy and awful forms, amid the silence of uncultivated plains, and the solitude of interminable forests. The profound feeling, the intense excitement, which accompanied his early devotional exercises, were such as to insure a permanent attachment to every principle and every impression of that susceptible age. The visions of a warm, and often morbid, imagination continued to be cherished with religious confidence and love for ever afterwards. Every doubt, of what he once had received for truth, was anxiously suppressed in the manhood of his mind as an infernal suggestion; and the acuteness of his reasoning powers, by supplying him at all times with an argument, for what he conceived it _his duty_ to believe, served, not to emancipate him from false apprehensions of truth, but to rivet upon him more firmly the chains of ignorance or error. When argument was doubtful, a dogged fanaticism supplied its place. This may be illustrated by a particular instance, and bearing directly on the subject of our present discussion. It cannot be doubted, by any person qualified to appreciate his writings, that his views of the Divine sovereignty are resolvable into a system of absolute fatalism, so far as the actions and destinies of men are concerned. Reason and conscience revolt from the consequences involved in such a system; all our moral instincts condemn it. But it was instilled into his mind by Calvinistic instructors in the days of his boyhood; his imagination was perpetually haunted by it; and having identified it with the truth of divine revelation, which he held in religious veneration and awe, he finally vanquished every doubt respecting it, not by the deliberate exercise of his judgment, on a calm investigation of evidence, but by the force of his religious feelings, and of his ascendant imagination. Let him tell his own story.