Puritans were "people of one Book," right? Not Jonathan Edwards. He was a person of two books: the Bible and the book of nature. Nature was the showplace of God's glory and the reflection of his beauty.

In his Personal Narrative, the great theologian recalls of his days as a young Christian in love with God: "I often used to sit and view the moon, for a long time; and so in the daytime, spent much time in viewing the clouds and sky, to behold the sweet glory of God in these things." Hardly the austere Puritan.

To be fair to the Puritans, during the first, killing winters they had spent in New England, its howling wilderness had seemed to offer little in way of glory and beauty. By Edwards's day, that landscape had become at least partly tamed. It was easier, now, to look out one's window or stroll one's fields and see the hand of a benevolent God at work all around.

But even in this gentler age, young Jonathan stood out among his Christian contemporaries for the theological intensity of his ...

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