Edwards' theological work is broad in scope but rooted in the Puritan heritage as exemplified in the Westminster and Savoy Confessions of Faith.

Recent studies have emphasized how thoroughly Edwards grounded his life's work on conceptions of beauty, harmony, and ethical aptness, and how central the Age of Enlightenment was to his mindset.

Edwards delivered the sermon "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God", a classic of early American literature, during another revival in 1741, following George Whitefield's tour of the Thirteen Colonies.

[5] Edwards is well known for his many books, such as The End for Which God Created the World and The Life of David Brainerd, which inspired thousands of missionaries throughout the 19th century, and Religious Affections which many Calvinist Evangelicals still read today.

Although many European scientists and American clergymen found the implications of science pushing them towards deism, Edwards believed the natural world was evidence of God's masterful design.

Before he started working as a full-time pastor in Northampton, he wrote on various topics in natural philosophy, including light and optics, in addition to spiders.

While he worried about those of his contemporaries who seemed preoccupied by materialism and faith in reason alone, he considered the laws of nature to be derived from God and demonstrating his wisdom and care.

Balancing these mystic joys is the stern tone of his Resolutions, in which he is almost ascetic in his eagerness to live earnestly and soberly, to waste no time, to maintain the strictest temperance in eating and drinking.

Then 17, Sarah was from a notable New England clerical family: her father was James Pierpont, a founder of Yale College; and her mother was the granddaughter of Thomas Hooker.

[23][page needed] Solomon Stoddard died on February 11, 1729, leaving to his grandson the sole ministerial charge of one of the largest and wealthiest congregations in the colony.

[29] At least two people committed suicide in the depths of their spiritual distress, one from Edwards's own congregation – his uncle Joseph Hawley II.

[33] Revivals began to spring up again, and Edwards preached his most famous sermon, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, in Enfield, Connecticut, in 1741.

In 1741, Edwards published in the defense of revivals The Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God, dealing particularly with the phenomena most criticized: the swoonings, outcries, and convulsions.

In the same pamphlet he defends an appeal to the emotions and advocates preaching terror when necessary, even to children, who in God's sight "are young vipers... if not Christ's.

But his own mystic devotion and the experiences of his wife during the Awakening (which he recounts in detail) make him think that the divine visitation usually overpowers the body, a view in support of which he quotes Scripture.

The general convention of Congregational ministers in the Province of Massachusetts Bay seemed to agree, protesting "against disorders in practice which have of late obtained in various parts of the land."

In spite of Edwards's able pamphlet, the impression had become widespread that "bodily effects" were recognized by the promoters of the Great Awakening as the true tests of conversion.

[35] To offset this feeling, during the years 1742 and 1743, Edwards preached at Northampton a series of sermons published under the title of Religious Affections (1746), a restatement in a more philosophical and general tone of his ideas as to "distinguishing marks."

The Half-Way Covenant, adopted by the synods of 1657 and 1662, had made baptism alone the condition to the civil privileges of church membership, but not of participation in the sacrament of the Lord's Supper.

However, Patricia Tracy's research has cast doubt on this version of the events, noting that in the list he read from, the names were definitely distinguished.

For four years, no candidate presented himself for admission to the church, and when one eventually did, in 1748, he was met with Edwards's formal tests as expressed in the Distinguishing Marks and later in Qualifications for Full Communion, 1749.

His doctrine that the Lord's Supper is not a cause of regeneration and that communicants should be professing Protestants has since (largely through the efforts of his pupil Joseph Bellamy) become a standard of New England Congregationalism.

[citation needed] He declined both of these to become pastor in 1751 of the church in Stockbridge, Massachusetts and a missionary to the Housatonic Indians,[38] taking over for the recently deceased John Sergeant.

To the Indians, he preached through an interpreter, and their interests he boldly and successfully defended, by attacking the whites who were using their official positions among them to increase their private fortunes.

He composed the treatises on which his reputation as a philosophical theologian chiefly rests, the essay on Original Sin, the Dissertation Concerning the Nature of True Virtue, the Dissertation Concerning the End for which God created the World, and the great work on the Will, written in four and a half months and published in 1754 under the title, An Inquiry into the Modern Prevailing Notions Respecting that Freedom of the Will which is supposed to be Essential to Moral Agency.

Edwards felt himself in "the decline of life", and inadequate to the office, but was persuaded to replace Burr as president of the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University).

Written in Latin, the long emotional epitaph inscription on the horizontal gravestone eulogizes his life and career and laments the great loss of his passing.

[44][45][46] His descendants have had a disproportionate effect upon American culture: his biographer George Marsden notes that "the Edwards family produced scores of clergymen, thirteen presidents of higher learning, sixty-five professors, and many other persons of notable achievements.

[55][56] In a 1741 pamphlet, Edwards defended the institution for those who were debtors, war captives, or were born enslaved in North America, but rejected the Atlantic slave trade.

Some of the major works include: The text of many of Edwards's sermons have been preserved, some are still published and read today among general anthologies of American literature.