Few Christian leaders since the Reformation have been as gifted as Jonathan Edwards. A man of intense personal devotion to Christ, he was a leader of revival, and a creative Reformed theologian as well as being a missionary and a philosopher fully meriting Hugh Martin’s description of him as ‘that greatest of metaphysical divines’.
Yet it is likely that he would have preferred to be remembered simply as ‘pastor of the Church of Northampton.’ Preached in 1738 (the same year that Edwards published A Narrative of Surprising Conversions), Charity and Its Fruits gives us an insight into his regular pulpit ministry in the years between the Northampton revival of 1735 and the Great Awakening of 1740.
