This wide-ranging volume covers the final fifteen of the thirty-three years that Jonathan Edwards preached and includes some of his greatest sermons--including his Farewell Sermons to his Northampton congregation. The period is defined by Edwards' inventive strategies to improvise during the delivery of his sermons. Considering dependence on the written text in the pulpit to be a serious failing, he devised a double-columned, outlined format for his sermon manuscripts and continued to use it for the rest of his life. Sermons from this period also include those preached to Mahican and Mohawk Indians at the mission post of Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Edwards' various writings of 1743-58 map the complex terrain of his spiritual, intellectual, and professional life after the Great Awakening. He deals with topics ranging from the spiritual role of youth in the community to the struggles over communion in his Northampton congregation to the war with the French and their Indian allies.

This book is a collection of miscellaneous essays and lectures published or given publicly by the author over the course of forty years. All of the lectures were given on special occasions, the details of which are stated at the head of the lecture in question. One of the lectures ("Evangelicals and the Oxford Movement") was given as the Evangelical Library Lecture of 1983; one of the essays ("Jonathan Edwards and the Deists") won first prize in the Evangelical Library Essay Competition of 1987 and was published in the Banner of Truth Magazine in 1988; four of the lectures ("The Holy Spirit and Revival"; "Redemptive-Historical Preaching: A Critique"; "The Glory of Creation"; and "The Exclusiveness of Christ") were given at the annual conferences of Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary; one of the lectures ("Edwards in the Hands of English Professors") was given at a conference of the Evangelical Theological Society in 2006; and one ("The Extemporaneous Mode of Preaching'') was given as Carrick's inaugural lecture as professor of homiletics at Greenville Seminary in 2009.