Jonathan Edwards | AdventAI

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jan 9, 1872

Jonathan Edwards.

EDWARDS was pre-eminently a student. Tall in person, and having even a womanly look, he was of delicate constitution. He was, however, so temperate and methodical in his living, that he was usually in good health, and able to give more time to study than most men. Twelve or thirteen hours of every day were commonly allotted to this. So devoted was he to his work as a student, that he was most unwilling to allow anything to disturb it. Though he was careful to eat regularly, and at certain fixed hours, yet he would postpone his meals for a time, if he was so engaged in his study that the interruption of eating would interfere with the success of his thinking. He was so miserly in his craving for time, that he would leave the table before the rest of the family, and retire to his room, they waiting for him to return again when they had finished their meal, and dismiss them from the table with the customary grace.

Edwards was almost a thinking machine. Wherever he was, wherever he went, his pen was with him as the means of preserving his thoughts, and if by chance he failed to have it with him in his walks or rides, he would fasten pieces of paper to various parts of his clothing by means of pins, and associate with each some train of thought or some important conclusion, to be thus preserved, until he could get to his ink and paper. So, also, at night, he would fasten pins into his bed-curtains as the mementoes of his thoughts during his wakeful hours.—Harper's.