This is justly regarded as "one of the most beautiful and most eloquent" of Edwards's sermons (A. V. G. Allen, _Jonathan Edwards_, p. 67). It was preached at a time when the signs were multiplying of an increased interest in religion among the people of Northampton, preluding the great revival of the next and the following years. The original manuscript bears the date, August, 1733. The death of Mr. Stoddard in 1729 had removed the restraints of a long-established and unquestioned authority, and the results, as Edwards describes them, were deplorable. "It seemed," he says, "to be a time of extraordinary dullness in religion: licentiousness for some years greatly prevailed among the youth of the town; they were many of them very much addicted to night walking, and frequenting the tavern, and lewd practices, wherein some by their example exceedingly corrupted others." "But in two or three years ... there began to be a sensible amendment of these evils," and "at the latter end of the year 1733, there appeared a very unusual flexibleness and yielding to advice" in the young (_Narrative of Surprising Conversions_). The improved conditions reacted on the preacher and, as a consequence, we have the sermon on Spiritual Light. The principle enunciated in this sermon is the cardinal and controlling principle of the whole revival. The revival is just its exhibition and the experienced evidence, for Edwards at least, of its truth. Nothing in his account of the movement is more impressive than the way he studies it, tracing minutely the details of the process, wondering at its variety, whereby the Holy Spirit makes real and effectual the divine message (see Allen, _op. cit._ pp. 143 ff.). There was nothing essentially new in the principle itself; that God directly influences the soul, that the soul is capable of an immediate intuition of divine things, this had been the common teaching of all, and especially of all the Christian, mystics. Indeed, it may be doubted whether religion as a form of personal experience does not universally involve a consciousness of some such transcendent relationship (see W. James, _Varieties of Religious Experience_, Boston, 1902, _passim_). What was new in Edwards's formulation of the doctrine was his manner of defining it, the way in which he relates it to the other parts of his system, his insistence on the supernatural character of this divine illumination, his sharp distinction between common and special grace. His doctrine of supernatural light appears, in fact, as a necessary corollary of his conception of the relation of man and God in the work of redemption expressed in his sermon on Man's Dependence. It is partly, at least, from this point of view that it seems to him not only scriptural, but reasonable. It was a doctrine intimately connected with his views of conversion. It was on this account no less than because of its emphasis of a mystical rather than a moral or