Old Age and Religion in the Writings and Life of Jonathan Edwards

Abstract

In his Faithful Narrative of a Surprising Work of God, an account of the awakening of 1734–35 in his church at Northampton, Massachusetts, Jonathan Edwards excitedly reported a considerable number of old persons among the several hundred converts. “I suppose,” he wrote, “there were … more than twenty of them above fifty, and about ten of them above sixty, and two of them above seventy years of age.” Edwards's evident self-satisfaction stemmed from the widespread belief that conversion among the elderly was unusual. “It has been a thing heretofore rarely to be heard of,” he noted, “that any were converted past middle age; but now we have the same ground to think that many such have in this time been savingly changed, as that others have been so in more early years.”