On July 1, 1750, the Rev. Jonathan Edwards preached his farewell sermon to the congregational church in Northampton, Massachusetts, which he had served for twenty-three years, almost all of his adult life. It was barely ten days after a bitter church meeting elected by one vote to dismiss him, ignoring his offer to resign. Edwards had already alienated the congregation when he proposed to discipline the children of some prominent families for circulating a “bad book,” a midwives’ manual. The final die was cast when he insisted that congregants demonstrate a saving work of God in their own souls in order to partake of the Lord’s Supper, a practice long since abandoned by the previous minister, Edwards’s own grandfather. Forgotten in the dispute were the repeated seasons of religious awakening that had graced the church under Edwards’s pastorate.

At forty-six, Jonathan Edwards would never have another congregation. Instead, the man who would one day be viewed as the greatest American religious thinker— and one of the foremost American philosophers—found himself stranded with a wife and seven dependent children. After almost a year of soldiering on in Northampton, rescue came in the form of a call to Stockbridge, Massachusetts, a tiny frontier outpost where the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England and the Bay Colony’s Board of Commissioners for Indian Affairs maintained a struggling mission to the Housatonics.

And yet, the ensuing eight years of exile were productive ones. In between running a boarding