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As Edwards himself puts it in Charity and Its Fruits: "It is not contrary to Christianity that a man should love himself or, which is the same thing, should love his own happiness. That a man should love his own happiness, is as necessary to his nature as the faculty of the will is" (see p. 42 for more on Edwards, happiness, and self-love).

Among his many writings, Edwards may be most widely known for his sensitive editing of David Brainerd's journal. The Life and Diary of David Brainerd, like A Faithful Narrative, has never gone out of print. The book records the heroic labors of this young missionary to the Indians, who died of tuberculosis at the age of 29, in the arms of his fiancee, Edwards's daughter Jerusha. It galvanized the early American missions movement and inspired thousands worldwide—including the Baptist missionary leader William Carey—with its challenge to holiness and sacrifice.

Edwards died from an inoculation to ward off smallpox, just after taking the presidency at Princeton. At the time, most physicians followed some variety of a practice called variolation when vaccinating patients. In one method, doctors took scabs from an infected person and blew them down the nostrils of a healthy one. Two to three percent of those variolated died. Forty years after Edwards's death, English physician Edward Jenner vastly improved the vaccine when he discovered that people exposed to cowpox, a less serious disease, more effectively resisted smallpox.

Copyright © 2003 by the author or Christianity Today International/Christian History magazine.
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