Edwards' Last Sermon

Jonathan Edwards died on March 22, 1758. This is his grave to the right. On April 3, his 18-year-old daughter Susannah wrote to her older sister Esther (Burr), describing Jonathan's final sermon three months earlier there in Stockbridge before leaving to take up the presidency at Princeton (then College of New Jersey), leaving his family behind. Susannah remembers:

My father took leave of all his people and family as affectionately as if he knew he should not come again. On the Sabbath afternoon he preached from these words, 'We have no continuing city, therefore let us seek on to come.' The chapter that he read was Acts the 20th. O, how proper. What could he have done more? When he had got out of doors he turned about, 'I commit you to God,' said he.

--M. Haykin, ed., A Sweet Flame: Piety in the Letters of Jonathan Edwards, 161

Edwards spent his whole life preparing to die.

--George Marsden, Jonathan Edwards: A Life (Yale University Press 2003), 490