The son of a minister who was a lover of learning as well as of religion, like a great many other ministers of his time in New England, who prepared young men for college, and gave his daughters the same kind of instruction in the same subjects. Edwards was also the grandson of a minister on his mother’s side; and his ancestry, like his descendants, was notable for intellectual vigor. He graduated from Yale College at the age of thirteen,--not an uncommon happening in that day of few entrance requirements,--and the qualities of his mind and the direction of his taste are indicated by the fact that he was already making notes on the mind and on natural philosophy. He studied for the ministry, and when he was twenty-four years old settled at Northampton, Massachusetts, where he was fortunate enough to marry a woman as remarkable as himself, of whom he wrote a description which has become a classic in the literature of love. Edwards was pursued by a haunting sense of sinfulness, and the depravity of the world often weighed heavily upon him. Mrs. Edwards happily combined a piety equal to that of her husband with great cheerfulness of disposition. [Illustration: HOUSE IN BOSTON IN WHICH FRANKLIN WAS BORN, 1706] [Illustration: MEDALLION OF FRANKLIN, Age 72 By Jean Baptiste Nini] [Illustration: FRANKLIN’S GRAVE Fifth and Arch Sts., Philadelphia] EDWARDS AS AN AUTHOR A man of his intensity was certain to come into collision with some of the ideas held by his contemporaries and with much of their practice; and Edwards finally antagonized his congregation to such a degree that at the age of fifty-six he preached his farewell sermon. Several avenues of work were open to him, for he had become a man of wide reputation; but he settled at Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and wrote in the quiet of what was then a wilderness his famous treatise on “The Freedom of the Will,” which is probably the most important American contribution to philosophy. It is his sermons, however, rather than his treatises, which entitle his work to a place in the history of American literature. Between eleven and twelve hundred of these sermons are preserved in Yale University Library. They are characterized by great vigor of thought, intensity of feeling, and often impressive power of statement. One of them, more famous, though in some respects not so true a piece of literature as others, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” created great commotion in its time, and the glow of the fire which possessed the preacher has not yet wholly faded from its pages. [Illustration: FRANKLIN, from a painting by D. Martin] LITERATURE OF THE REVOLUTION