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Jonathan Edwards was, for the most part, a withdrawn, soft-spoken man. Yet much of his life was caught up in controversy, and he faulted himself for an argumentative tendency.

The "Resolutions" he drew up while serving a small congregation in New York in 1722-23 are laced with reminders "never to say anything at all against anybody." He clearly struggled with "egotism" and "dogmaticalness" (as he put it) that he afterwards regretted.

"If I had more of an air of gentleness," Edwards lamented while tutoring at Yale in 1725, "I should be much mended."

But he never quite developed that air. He had been the pastor at Northampton for six years when the Connecticut River Valley was scandalized in 1734 by the calling of Robert Breck, a Harvard graduate suspected of Arminianism, as the pastor of the church at Springfield, just downriver from Northampton. The ministers of the Hampshire Association tried to have the call rescinded. But they could persuade neither the Springfield church nor the civil authorities in Boston to interfere, and Breck was duly installed.

As the pastor of the Connecticut Valley's greatest church, Edwards played a leading role in the controversy, writing the Hampshire Association's Letter of protest and taking the occasion to preach against Arminianism. This earned him a reputation for "meddling with the controversy in the pulpit"—not to mention the lasting enmity of Robert Breck.

For a time, it seemed Edwards could afford to ignore the costs of

the Breck debacle. In December 1734, "the Spirit of God began extraordinarily to set in" among the people of Northampton in the first of the great revivals he would see there, and "a great and earnest concern about the great things of religion" brought "more than 300 souls … to Christ."

But controversy was never far from his door. "The people of Northampton are not the most happy in their natural tempers," Edwards wrote ruefully, "They have, ever since I can remember, been famed for … a difficult turbulent temper."

Some of this taste for argument was rooted in Northampton's changing circumstances. All through the 1730s, farm property in western Massachusetts increased in price. Younger families found themselves increasingly squeezed off the land, and town meetings in Northampton grew more and more acrimonious. Edwards's preaching was particularly well received by these younger people, who hungered for the hope he gave them in God's absolute predestination of all things. It went down less easily among the status-conscious, established families, who did not like being reminded that none of their personal achievements amounted to anything in God's estimate.

When the head of one of these families, a lawyer and spiritual depressive named Joseph Hawley, committed suicide on June 1, 1735, the Northampton revival collapsed. Edwards now had another group of enemies.

Once again, however, it seemed the gathering storm would disperse harmlessly. The arrival of George Whitefield in Northampton in 1740 marked a renewal of the revival energies that would culminate in the Great Awakening. A relieved Edwards became one of the principal figures in defending the Awakening against its critics.

Soon, however, Edwards felt he needed to place limits on this second revival's exuberance. By the beginning of 1742, the revival in Northampton had become a pandemonium.

"The people were exceedingly moved, crying out in great numbers in the meetinghouse," Edwards wrote, "There were some instances of persons lying in a trance, remaining for perhaps a whole twenty-four hours motionless," and "a great deal of caution and pains were found necessary to keep the people, many of them, from running wild." In the end, the revival in Northampton did not last, and Edwards was blamed.

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