It is customary to associate Jonathan Edwards with the town of Northampton. That he was born in East Windsor (Conn.), was graduated from Yale College in New Haven, served a Presbyterian church in New York City, wrote his great treatises – A Careful and Strict Enquiry into … Freedom of Will (1754) and The Great Christian Doctrine of Original Sin (1758) – in Stockbridge (Mass.), and died as president of the College of New Jersey in Princeton does not mitigate the local association. For it was in Northampton where Edwards came of age theologically. He served as its minister from 1729 to 1750, following his grandfather Solomon Stoddard, who had served the same parish for the preceding sixty years. As with the one, so with the other: Northampton was Stoddard and it was also Edwards, a dynasty holding sway for over eighty years and commanding the religious spirit up and down the length of the Connecticut Valley.