Accordingly, Edwards got into trouble by endeavouring to force his own notions of discipline amongst certain young people, belonging to 'considerable families,' who were said to indulge in loose conversation and equivocal books. They possibly preferred 'Pamela,' which had then just revealed a new source of amusement to the world, to awakening sermons; and Edwards' well-meant efforts to suppress the evil set the town 'in a blaze' (i. 64). A more serious quarrel followed. Edwards maintained the doctrine, which had been gradually dying out amongst the descendants of the Puritans, that converted persons alone should be admitted to the Lord's Supper. The practice had been different at Northampton; and when Edwards announced his intention of enforcing the test of professed conversion, a vigorous controversy ensued. The dispute lasted for some years, with much mutual recrimination. A kind of ecclesiastical council, formed from the neighbouring churches, decided by a majority of one that he should be dismissed if his people desired it; and the people voted for his dismissal by a majority of more than 200 to 20 (i. 69).
Edwards was thus a martyr to his severe sense of discipline. His admirers have lamented over the sentence by which the ablest of American thinkers was banished in a kind of disgrace. Impartial readers will be inclined to suspect that those who suffered under so rigorous a spiritual ruler had perhaps some reason on their side. However that may be, and I do not presume to have any opinion upon a question involving such complex ecclesiastical disputes, the result to literature was fortunate. In 1751 Edwards was appointed to a mission for Indians, founded at Stockbridge, in the remotest corner of Massachusetts, where a few remnants of the aborigines were settled on a township granted by the colony. There were great hopes, we are told, of the probable influence of the mission, which were destined to frustration from accidental causes. The hopes can hardly have rested on the character of the preacher. It is difficult to imagine a more grotesque relation between a minister and his congregation than that which must have subsisted between Edwards and his barbarous flock. He had remarked pathetically in one of his writings on the very poor prospect open to the Houssatunnuck Indians, if their salvation depended on the study of the evidences of Christianity (iv. 245). And if Edwards preached upon the topics of which his mind was fullest, their case would have been still harder. For it was in the remote solitudes of this retired corner that he gave himself up to those abstruse meditations on free-will and original sin which form the substance of his chief writings. A sermon in the Houssatunnuck language, if Edwards ever acquired that tongue, upon predestination, the differences between the Arminian and the Calvinist schemes, Liberty of Indifference, and other such doctrines, would hardly be an improving performance. If, however, his labours in this department 'were attended with no remarkable visible success' (i. 83), he thought deeply and wrote much. The publication of his treatise on the Freedom of the Will followed in 1754, and upon the strength of the reputation which it won for him, he was appointed President of New Jersey College in the end of 1757, only to die of small-pox in the following March. His death cut short some considerable literary schemes, not, however, of a kind calculated to add to his reputation. Various remains were published after his death, and we have ample materials for forming a comprehensive judgment of his theories. In one shape or another he succeeded in giving utterance to his theory upon the great problems of life; and there is little cause for regret that he did not succeed in completing that 'History of the Work of Redemption' which was to have been his _opus magnum_. He had neither the knowledge nor the faculties for making much of a Puritan view of universal history, and he has left a sufficient indication of his general conception of such a book.