Undocumented Sermon by Jonathan Edwards Discovered

Recently, I discovered an undocumented original sermon by Jonathan Edwards. For the past few years, I have been doing a lot of research on how Edwards's works were published and the various people involved. From my research, I learned that the English Particular Baptist minister John Ryland, Jr. played an important role in the last decades of the 18th century, and into the 19th century, in editing and promoting Edwards's writings.

From reading the Scottish minister John Erskine's many letters to Ryland, I found out that the Baptist pastor helped edit the posthumous Miscellaneous Observations on Important Theological Subjects, published at Edinburgh in 1793. I have found evidence that Ryland showed the manuscript for this work to some of his English Particular Baptist colleagues, including Abraham Booth, who maintained a correspondence with Cornelius Brem, a member of the Scots Church at Rotterdam. Booth's connection with Brem led to Dutch translations of Freedom of the Will in 1774 and The End for Which God Created the World in 1788.

John Ryland, Jr.

From studying letters to and from Ryland, I also discovered that the Baptist minister published at least one of Edwards's manuscript sermons in two parts. In a letter on June 29, 1787 held at Yale's Beinecke Library, Ryland wrote to Jonathan Edwards, Jr. saying, "If you could possibly spare me a letter or short piece of your father's own writing, I must own I should feel it an amazing gratification for me to have the original, and if it were allowed to print it, to copy it out for the press myself." Ryland goes on to say that "Some of my friends would smile at my longing for a relique of President Edwards, but if it be a spice of popery I cannot help it."

Keeping in mind Ryland's desire to receive a "relique of President Edwards" to publish, I found a crucial reference in Erskine's letter to Ryland on October 3, 1791 held at the Edinburgh University Library. In the letter, Erskine wrote, "When you have resolved on to printing President Edwards's sermon on Rev. 14:2 with or without the resolutions, you may write Mrs. Galloway [the Edinburgh bookseller and publisher Margaret (Gray) Galloway] and me, before beginning the printing, and I have no doubt the design will be encouraged." What Erskine is saying in this letter is that Margaret Gray would almost certainly agree to be a selling agent from Edinburgh for the sermon. By this time, her father William Gray and her had published a number of reprinted and posthumous works by Edwards, including a Scottish edition of The Life of Brainerd in 1765, A History of the Work of Redemption in 1774 (and again in 1788), Sermons on Various Important Subjects in 1785, Practical Sermons in 1788, and Twenty Sermons in 1789. William and Margaret Gray also appeared as selling agents on the imprint of a 1789 Northampton, England edition of An Humble Attempt (edited by the English Baptist minister John Sutcliff) and the 1790 Edinburgh edition of An Humble Inquiry. Because Erskine had been the primary influence on the Grays in publishing and promoting Edwards's works from Scotland, he had every reason to believe that Margaret would support Ryland's efforts to publish a previously unpublished sermon on Revelation.

Another important piece of evidence on the publication of the Revelation sermon can be found in a letter by Ryland to Edwards, Jr. on August 28, 1801 held at Andover-Newton Theological School's Franklin Trask Library. Ryland wrote to the younger Edwards saying, "But it would be a gratification of a much higher sort if you would give me any further MSS of your dear father's, or (since I have one sample, and you might not like to spare more of his handwriting) if it were merely a transcript of anything that might be inserted in the Biblical Magazine."

So far, we can deduce the following points from these exchanges of letters:

1) Ryland, Jr. was a huge fan of Jonathan Edwards Sr.
2) Ryland, Jr. corresponded with John Erskine in Scotland and Jonathan Edwards, Jr. in America
3) Ryland, Jr. obtained a manuscript sermon on Revelation 14:2 from Edwards, Jr.
4) Ryland, Jr. had ties to the English Baptist Biblical Magazine

I did some digging around and found an excerpt of Edwards's sermon on Revelation 14:2 in The New-York Missionary Magazine 3 (1802), pp. 299-307. Prior to the excerpt, the following information appears:  


One final piece of the puzzle in this story may be found in a letter from Ryland, Jr. to Jonathan Walter Edwards (Edwards, Jr.'s son) on August 31, 1807 held at Yale's Beinecke Library. Ryland wrote that "I once obtained from Dr. Edwards [Edwards, Jr.] two sermons of your grandfather's which I value above every curiosity of the kind. I was in hope if it had pleased God to have spared his valuable life, of obtaining some further relick of the same kind. If at any time you would entrust me with my sermon that you or your friends would judge to be peculiarly interesting, I should account it an high honor to copy it carefully for the press. My time indeed is exceedingly occupied, but nothing would be more gratifying to me than to have a hand in preserving any of his remains which his nearest relatives were willing should be made public." In the same letter, Ryland  added that "I had the narrative of Phebe Bartlett reprinted, extracted from the Northampton Narrative, two or three years ago, and had since the pleasure to see the daughter of a counsellor, who was awakened by reading it. Her mother was a member of our church before, she is the first of a family of thirteen children, who has publickly professed fiath in Christ."

In this letter, we learn that Ryland received two sermons, originally delivered by Edwards Sr. We also find out that Ryland published a narrative of the four-year-old Phebe Bartlett's conversion experience that Edwards had included in his Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God (1737). I have yet to locate Ryland's edited version of Phebe Bartlett's conversion narrative, but I am happy to report that I have received images of Edwards's sermon on Revelation 14:2 that Ryland transcribed and edited.

Through the assistance of Emily Burgoyne at the Angus Library in Regent's Park College at Oxford University, UTC librarian Susan Edmondson, and Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary faculty members John Wilsey and Rob Caldwell, I was able to obtain images of the two-part sermon by Edwards that was published in the May and July 1801 issues of The Biblical Magazine. The images below were taken from a copy held at SWBTS's Roberts Library (one of only four archives worldwide that own copies of this obscure magazine). Until now, Edwards's sermon on Revelation was believed to have been published for the first time in 1830, as "Praise, One of the Chief Employments of Heaven," in The Works of President Edwards (volume 8, pp. 305-19), edited by Sereno Dwight.

Besides amending the date of the first publication of the Revelation 14:2 sermon, this discover also provides evidence of Ryland, Jr.'s active involvement in the publication of Edwards's writings. Even though Ryland is not mentioned by name in either the New-York Missionary Magazine excerpt of the sermon, or the fuller version published in The Biblical Magazine, we know from his correspondence with Erskine, Edwards, Jr., and Jonathan Walter Edwards that he was the one who transcribed and edited this sermon.

My First Dutch Book

Today, I received my first copy of a Dutch edition of one of Jonathan Edwards's works. I have previously posted about my copy of the first edition of The Life of David Brainerd, published at Boston in 1749. I now own a copy of Historiesch Verhaal, van Het Godvruchtig Levenen den Zaligen Doodt, Van den Eerwaarden Heer David Brainerd, Onlangs Bedienaardes Euangeliums, gezonden van de Eerwaarde Maatschappye in Schotland, totvoortplantinge der Christelyke kennisse; en Leeraar eener Gemeinte van ChristenIndianen, te Nieuwe-Jersey. Alles getrokken uit zyn Dag-register, en anderebyzondere Schriften, welke tot zyn eigen gebruik waren opgestelt; en nu totalgemeen nut uitgegeven, door Jonathan Edwwards, A. M. Bedienaar desEuangeliums te Northampton. Uit het Engels Vertaalt door J. Ros. Met een koorVoorberigt van G. V. Schuylenborgh, Dienaar in J. C. Kerke te Thienhoven. This is the first Dutch edition of The Life of David Brainerd, published at Utrecht in 1756 by the booksellers, Jan Jacob van Poolsum and Abraham van Paddenburg. This is a really cool edition, consisting of over 500 pages of text, a title page with red lettering, and a preface by Gerardus Schuylenburg.

The Dutch edition of The Life of Brainerd was translated by Jan Ross, a Rotterdam merchant who had connections with the Scots Church in that city. Ross was friends with Hugh Kennedy, one of the pastors of the Scots Church at Rotterdam. Kennedy emigrated from Scotland to Rotterdam in 1737 to serve as a minister there, but he continued to maintain correspondences with evangelicals in Britain. When a major Dutch revival took place in the Veluwe region of Gelderland in the Netherlands in 1749, Kennedy published a Dutch account of the awakening in 1751 (Nederige verdediging van het werk des Heiligen Geestes), defending the revivals as the authentic work of God. One year later, he published an English version of the Dutch awakening in London entitled, Short Account of the Rise and Continuing Progress of a Remarkable Work of Grace in the United Netherlands. 

It is very possible that Kennedy approached Jan Ross to translate a Dutch edition of The Life of Brainerd since the latter had already established himself as a capable translator of such works as Robert Wodrow's History of the Sufferings of the Church of Scotland from the Restoration to the Revolution and Daniel Neal's History of the Puritans in the early 1750s. Historiesch Verhaal, however, was published at Utrecht, and not Rotterdam. My theory is that Gerardus Schuylenburg, Reformed pastor of Tienhoven (near Utrecht), probably arranged for the book to be published there. Schuylenburg wrote the six-page preface, which presented a providential account of New England church history, from its early settlement to the recent time of the revivals. In my previous post, I mentioned that Schuylenburg housed John Frelinghuysen at his parsonage during the Dutch awakening. John Frelinghuysen was the son of the legendary revivalist Theodore Frelinghuysen, a progenitor of the American Great Awakening in the Middle Colonies. His son John had been in the Netherlands studying for the ministry before he traveled to America to assume his duties as a pastor in his father's place. 

I am slowly working my way through the literature on the Dutch revivals in 1749-50, and I hope to incorporate some of this information in my forthcoming book on how this awakening relates to some of Edwards's Dutch publications. 

I also am close to finishing a digital humanities project involving the geographical plotting of four subscription lists for Freedom of the Will (1754), Original Sin (1758), A History of the Work of Redemption (New York: 1786), and Religious Affections (Elizabethtown: 1787). I am in conversation with the Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale about creating an online exhibit for these subscription lists. Keep checking in for further information on this development.

More Doonsbury Comics on the Plight of the Adjunct Professor... from 1996

September 9, 1996

September 10, 1996

September 11, 1996

September 12, 1996

Life as an Adjunct Professor, According to Doonsbury

September 6, 2015

Dutch, Dutch, Dutch!

For the past several days I have been tracking down information on the dozen or so Dutch publications of Jonathan Edwards's works in the 18th century. This has been no easy task for me. Despite the benefits of the digital age in which we now live, it has been challenging to find sources online that talk about 18th-century Dutch publishing. Brill has an online database of booksale catalogues that I would love to peruse, however, it is extremely pricey. So pricey that Harvard isn't even a subscriber!

I have found the Dutch historian Fred Lieburg's article on "Interpreting the Dutch Great Awakening, 1749-1755," published in the journal Church History in 2008, to be especially helpful for my research. Also useful is the edited volume, Een golf van beroering: De Omstreden religiuze opwekking in Nederland in het midden van de achttiende eeuw (Hilversum, 2001), which features some very good articles by Lieburg and Joris van Eijnatten (among others). Thanks to Google Books and Google Translate, I have been able to read the pertinent sections that I need for my research.

The central topic in many of these essays is a significant revival that took place in the Veluwe region of Gelderland around 1750. The impetus for this revival seems to have been the fervent preaching of the Nijkerk Reformed pastor Gerardus Kuypers, who later recorded the events surrounding this spiritual resurgence in a Dutch publication. Kuypers also relayed information on the Dutch awakening to the Glasgow evangelical minister John Gillies, who published an account of the revival in the second volume of his Historical Collections Relating to Remarkable Periods of the Success of the Gospel in 1754.

Jonathan Edwards learned of the Dutch awakening from extracts of Kuypers's letters to Gillies as well as James Davenport, who received a firsthand account from John Frelinghuysen, the second son of the Reformed Dutch minister Theodorus Jacobus Frelinghuysen, who emigrated to the Raritan Valley of New Jersey in the 1720s to begin his influential ministry as an itinerant preacher. John Frelinghuysen apparently had been in the Netherlands during the Nijkerk revival, staying at the parsonage of Gerardus van Schuylenburg, a Reformed pastor at Tienhoven near Utrecht. News of the Dutch awakening also made its way to Britain when Hugh Kennedy, one of the pastors at the Scots Church at Rotterdam, published his Short Account of the Rise and Continuing Progress of a Remarkable Work of Grace in the United Netherlands at London in 1752.

I don't want to go into all the details here, but there is an intricate network of correspondence among evangelical ministers in the Netherlands, England, Scotland, and America all of whom help propagate the news of the Dutch awakening on both sides of the Atlantic. These networks are also related to the publications of several Dutch editions of Edwards's books, including his Faithful Narrative (twice at Amsterdam in 1740, and once in Leeuwarden in 1750), The Life of Brainerd (published at Utrecht in 1756, with a preface by Gerardus van Schuylenburg), Freedom of the Will (Utrecht, 1774), A History of the Work of Redemption (Utrecht, 1776), Religious Affections (Utrecht, 1779), Concerning the End for Which God Created the World (Amsterdam, 1788), Original Sin (published in two parts at Amsterdam in 1790 and 1792), The Wisdom of God in the Permission of Sin (Utrecht, 1791), and Samuel Hopkins's Life of Edwards (Utrecht, 1791). Many of the people involved in translating and publishing these editions had intimate ties with key members of a transatlantic network of evangelical ministers.


Recently, Frans Huisman, at the Library of Vrije Univeristiet Amsterdam, has helpfully alerted me to a valuable digital database of Dutch translated works prior to 1800 that he began assembling in 1995. In 2011, the Pietas database became active online, with some 6,200 texts. Although the website comes up in Dutch, you can use Google Translate to change it to English. There are also Dutch and English interfaces. Running a search on Pietas, I was amazed to find what appear to be two Dutch editions of Jonathan Edwards's works that are not listed in Thomas H. Johnson's The Printed Writings of Jonathan Edwards. One is a sermon on Psalm 65:[2] entitled, De allerhoogste God is een hoorder der gebeden (1793), and the other is a 1792 Dutch edition of Edwards's sermon on the eternity of hell torments (Betoog voor de eeuwigheid der straffen in een toekomstig leeven).

I am still working on assembling a coherent narrative on how Jonathan Edwards's works were published in the Netherlands, but I am enjoying the research so far.

Robert Hodge's Edition of A History of the Work of Redemption

I recently purchased two antiquarian books, adding to my collection of works by Jonathan Edwards. For the purposes of this post, I will be talking about my copy of the 1786 edition of A History of the Work of Redemption. The first edition of A History of the Work of Redemption was published at Scotland in 1774, and represented the first collaboration between Jonathan Edwards, Jr., who transcribed his father's manuscript, and John Erskine, who did the editorial work for the book from Scotland and arranged for its publication in Edinburgh.

The 1786 New York edition of A History of the Work of Redemption interests me because of its subscription list and advertisements. This edition was printed by Shepard Kollock for the New York bookseller Robert Hodge, who emigrated from Scotland around 1770 after serving as an apprentice in Edinburgh. Hodge first worked in Philadelphia for a printer before establishing his own bookselling and printing business in New York City.

Looking at the proposal for this book to the right, one will see that subscribers would pay ten shillings in New York currency, and non-subscribers twelve shillings. I estimate that these amounts would have been worth about 5s.6d./6s.6d. in British pound sterling at the time. The advertisements states that for every twelve books that subscribers bought, they would receive one copy gratis, with no money being required until it was delivered, that the book will be printed as an octavo of about 400 pages, that printing would begin once 500 subscriptions had been accounted for, and that it "will be printed on good paper and type," and "in a neat and elegant manner." One final notable feature in the advertisement is that the publisher would include a subscription list within the book.

My particular copy was bound in mottled sheepskin, and lettered on the spine, with raised bands,  and some gilding. Overall, this would have been an attractive copy when it was first bound.

Hodge did include a subscription list at beginning of the book, with some 476 names purchasing 736 copies. If he sold these books at the minimum price of 10s., and factoring in the number of free copies, he could have earned about £360 in New York currency as a gross sales figure, or roughly £200 in British sterling. Even after paying Kollock for the expense of composition and printing, it probably was a profitable venture for Hodge.

I am currently working on plotting the geographical distribution of subscribers for this book, but for now I can say that most of the people who ordered copies came from New York and New Jersey. What this seems to indicate is that the place of publication, in this case New York City, essentially dictated who the subscribers would be. The evidence points to Hodge using his personal and professional network to round up subscribers for the book in the surrounding regions. Even though the author, Jonathan Edwards, lived in Massachusetts, the subscribers for this particular edition of A History of the Work of Redemption predominantly came from the areas around the place of publication. Some of the largest orders came from nearby booksellers, such as Isaac Beers in New Haven, Connecticut and Thomas Dobson of Philadelphia, who would have been buying books wholesale in order to sell them in their shops at retail prices for a small profit.

At the end of Hodge's edition of A History of the Work of Redemption, there is a bookseller's advertisement (see the image to the right), dated from New York on August 29, 1786. In the advertisement, Hodge "returns his unfeined thanks to the public, for the generous encouragement they have given towards" the publishing of this edition. Due to the success of his version of A History of the Work of Redemption, Hodge offered detailed plans of publishing a new edition of Edwards's Religious Affections. The conditions of the sale for this book are the same as before: 10s./12s. to subscribers/non-subscribers for an octavo of about 400 pages, with a gratis copy given to those who subscribe for twelve.

Hodge published his edition of Religious Affections the following year in 1787, but this book does not appear to have sold very well. In the published subscription list, 308 people bought 462 copies, figures significantly less than the ones for his edition of A History of the Work of Redemption. Also interesting is the fact that Hodge included about 100 pages of additional material that he did not mention in his first advertisement. Besides the content of Religious Affections, Hodge's 1787 edition also added biographical material on Edwards, his daughter Esther Edwards Burr, and Sarah Edwards.

In my forthcoming monograph, I will be talking more about Hodge's editions and perhaps why some books sold better than others.