Benjamin Franklin And Jonathan Edwards

Author : Carl Van Doren
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781331101178
Total Pages : 410 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (11 download)

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Download or read book Benjamin Franklin and Jonathan Edwards written by Carl Van Doren and published by . This book was released on 2015-07-10 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Excerpt from Benjamin Franklin and Jonathan Edwards: Selections From Their Writings The careers of Benjamin Franklin and Jonathan Edwards, most considerable among American writers of the eighteenth century, for more years than have been noted were almost as nearly parallel as they were impressively divergent later, when the contrast between the two men came to be so remarkable, so dramatic, that we may now regard them as protagonists and symbols of the hostile movements which strove for the mastery of their age. Franklin, chief of the victors, we know far better than the defeated Edwards, who all his life upheld a cause which even in his youth was lost, had he but known it, and who seems on most of his pages to speak of forgotten issues in a forgotten dialect; while Franklin seems contemporaneous, fresh, full of vitality. Yet we know even Franklin too exclusively through his Auto-biography, which is a great book but not half varied enough to display its author entire - a great book but one written for his children, and an eager world, with a somewhat patriarchal pen; or else we know him through the scientific, or philanthropic, or civic essays and pamphlets in which he urged the countless good measures now associated with his fame. In either case, the racy, robust, colonial humorist is overlooked, the correspondent of so much variety, the finished wit who in his old age matched himself gracefully and equally with the most elegant wits of France. Edwards survives, so far as he may be said to survive at all, outside technical histories of Calvinism and metaphysics, chiefly as a dim figure preaching sermons full of awful imprecations, and hardly at all as a remarkable scientific observer, and one of the impressive mystics of the world. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.