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A man was born three months before Edwards and an ocean away who was to share the New England divine's twin passions for the church and the life of the mind. That man was John Wesley, the founder of Methodism. The two never met, but they labored for their Lord on two continents, together helping to birth the movement called "evangelicalism." Wesley read Edwards appreciatively and reprinted his Religious Affections, revising where the Puritan theologian's Calvinism was most strongly expressed.

Edwards, a strong supporter of the Great Awakening, nevertheless took a cautious view of what went on in the revivals. On one hand, Edwards criticized the Awakening enthusiast James Davenport, who hotly insisted that many New England ministers were in fact unconverted and bound for hell, and who once burned a pile of classic Christian texts he considered insufficiently spiritual. On the other, Edwards debated the Boston rationalist clergyman Charles Chauncy, who argued true religion was a matter of the mind rather than the heart. "We should distinguish the good from the bad," instructed Edwards, "and not judge of the whole by a part" (see p. 42).

Consumed as a beverage usually at breakfast, "cakes" of chocolate were in steady demand in the Edwards household. The family often had to rely on travelers to Boston to procure it. In one letter, Edward begs the courier to save some of the chocolate he paid for. "If you will bring what remains," he wrote, "you will much oblige your humble servant."

Most people don't associate Jonathan Edwards with James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans. But during Edwards's stint in Stockbridge, Mohican children boarded at the mission school, and his son Jonathan spent a year in Mohican villages learning the language. Unfortunately, an arsonist burned the school down two years after Edwards's arrival, and the French and Indian War broke out shortly after. The Mohicans abandoned Stockbridge, some to fight alongside the English and others to settle in Moravian towns (see p. 38).

Of Jonathan and Sarah Edwards's eleven children, the first four were all born on Sundays. This caused the people of Northampton to enjoy some merriment at their pastor's expense, as folklore had it that a child was born on the same weekday it was conceived.

Edwards was not the only one to enjoy revival in 1735; a group of students and recent graduates at Yale College also experienced a movement of the Spirit. One of these was Aaron Burr, Sr., later husband of Edwards's daughter Esther and father of the notorious Aaron Burr, Jr., second vice-president of the United States. In good Puritan fashion, Burr, Sr. first felt "polluted by nature and practice" and "almost concluded that my day of grace was past," and then had an experience in which God revealed to him "in the Gospel, an all-sufficient and willing Saviour." Burr eventually became Princeton College's second president, and when he died in 1757, Edwards took his place.

Rarely are the terms "Puritan" and "hedonist" put together, but Baptist pastor and author John Piper claims that Edwards was a hedonist. (That's a compliment.) Throughout Desiring God: Meditations of a Christian Hedonist, Piper draws heavily on Edwards in arguing that "the pursuit of virtue must be, in some measure, a pursuit of happiness. … In all virtuous acts we pursue the enjoyment of the glory of God, and more specifically, the enjoyment of the presence and the promotion of God's glory."

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