The Compassionate Puritan

The Compassionate Puritan

Few people have lived or died as well as Jon. He graduated from Yale at the top of his class at age seventeen. While still a teenager, he wrote a paper on metaphysical theology. He then penned a treatise on atomic theory two hundred years before Albert Einstein’s work on the topic. Many scholars rate Jon as America’s greatest philosopher. His books on metaphysics are masterpieces. No other American has produced more national leaders among his descendants.

Shortly before Jon became the president of Princeton, his scientific curiosity focused on advances in medicine. The science of inoculation was primitive, but when smallpox ravaged colonial America, Jon volunteered to be a human guinea pig. On March 22, 1758, several days after he was inoculated with an experimental vaccination, he died from the disease.

Jon possessed one of the most brilliant minds in American history. His quest for knowledge was insatiable. But if you assume that he took that inoculation for the advancement of medical science, you would be wrong. Most folks would find it hard to believe that he did it because of compassion. History remembers him for his famous sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” His portraits reveal a stern Puritan. His call for repentance sparked the revivals that shook colonial America. When he rebuked church leaders for their hypocrisy, he made enemies in high places. After he called out his parishioners for their lukewarm faith, they fired him. History recalls Jonathan Edwards either as a brilliant-but-coldly-rational philosopher or a hellfire-and-brimstone preacher.

Most folks don’t know that he spent a year’s salary to purchase a black slave and then set her free. He begged Christians everywhere to do the same. Later, he worked among the Mohicans and took up their cause when most colonists despised them. His home was often filled with individuals from various Native tribes, much to the distress of his neighbors. After he was thrown out of his church, he was offered pulpits in prestigious parishes but became a missionary to the impoverished Housatonic tribe of New Jersey. He made even more enemies by going after crooked politicians who tried to steal their land.

When his Native neighbors began dying by the thousands from smallpox, he took that high-risk inoculation in hopes that a cure would be found. He refused to heed friends who argued that his life was too important to risk. The love that compelled him to plead with colonists to flee from hell also drove him to die for those they despised as savages. In his final hours, Edwards’s throat was so constricted that he could hardly eat, drink, or breathe. With his final gasping words, he instructed his daughter Lucy to give a portion of his estate to the poor. His physician said that he had never seen a man die with as much calmness and grace as Edwards. Jonathan Edwards not only died well but also lived better by lifting others’ burdens. This story of the third president of Princeton University should inspire us with this truth:

A life well lived is not measured in how many positions we’ve held, but in how many people we’ve helped.

Pure and genuine religion in the sight of God the Father means caring for orphans and widows in their distress.

James 1:27