The Diary of Mather's fellow-townsman Judge Samuel Sewall has been read more generally in recent years than anything written by Mather himself. It was begun in 1673, nine years earlier than the first entry in Mather's Diary, and it ends in 1729, while Mather's closes in 1724. As a picture of everyday happenings in New England, Sewall's Diary is as far superior to Mather's as Pepys's Diary is to George Fox's Journal in painting the England of the Restoration. Samuel Sewall was an admirably solid figure, keen, forceful, honest. Most readers of his Diary believe that he really was in luck when he was rejected by the Widow Winthrop on that fateful November day when his eye noted--in spite of his infatuation--that "her dress was not so clean as sometime it had been. Jehovah Jireh!" One pictures Cotton Mather as looking instinctively backward to the Heroic Age of New England with pious nervous exaltation, and Samuel Sewall as doing the day's work uprightly without taking anxious thought of either past or future. But Jonathan Edwards is set apart from these and other men. He is a lonely seeker after spiritual perfection, in quest of that city "far on the world's rim," as Masefield says of it, the city whose builder and maker is God. The story of Edwards's career has the simplicity and dignity of tragedy. Born in a parsonage in the quiet Connecticut valley in 1703--the year of John Wesley's birth--he is writing at the age of ten to disprove the doctrine of the materiality of the soul. At twelve he is studying "the wondrous way of the working of the spider," with a precision and enthusiasm which would have made him a great naturalist. At fourteen he begins his notes on The Mind and on Natural Science. He is graduated from Yale in 1720, studies theology, and at twenty-four becomes the colleague of his famous grandfather, Solomon Stoddard, in the church at Northampton. He marries the beautiful Sarah Pierrepont, whom he describes in his journal in a prose rhapsody which, like his mystical rhapsodies on religion in the same youthful period, glows with a clear unearthly beauty unmatched in any English prose of that century. For twenty-three years he serves the Northampton church, and his sermons win him the rank of the foremost preacher in New England. John Wesley reads at Oxford his account of the great revival of 1735. Whitefield comes to visit him at Northampton. Then, in 1750, the ascetic preacher alienates his church over issues pertaining to discipline and to the administration of the sacrament. He is dismissed. He preaches his "farewell sermon," like Wesley, like Emerson, like Newman, and many another still unborn. He removes to Stockbridge, then a hamlet in the wilderness, preaches to the Indians, and writes treatises on theology and metaphysics, among them the world-famous Freedom of the Will. In 1757, upon the death of his son-in-law, President Aaron Burr of Princeton, Edwards is called to the vacant Presidency. He is reluctant