Susan Stinson

Mr. Edwards was aware of how much he loved to write letters. He searched the sources and limits of everything he felt in order to ensure that his affections were entirely in service of his love of God, never threatening to displace or surpass it, never feeding any illusion of control on his part in conflict with the truth that all things were in the hands of his perfectly Sovereign God. So he noted the ways that his heart beat faster whenever he dipped his quill into the ink.

There was a rhythm to writing letters that he thought might be tied to the breath, and so, of course, to the soul. Certainly, yes, this was felt in the curl and press of the fingers on a quill, in the way an arm slid along a page, how a sleeve might pick up ink, might smear the words of the careless. Certain ministers – Mr. Edwards was one of them, and Solomon Stoddard, even more so – could write so small as to get the full hours of a sermon onto one or two sides of a most diminutive page. A whole town, even one peopled with those who fought each other over the right to build hog pens on the commons, could be held still by the rise and lean of the inked letters, to wait for God in his disordered house under a steady rain of argument and exhortation from a poet preacher with a logician's discipline and fierceness drawn from total submission to the spirit and language of the one true Word of God.

To write a letter was to reach for another person in a private, circumspect way. A letter that might be published was still allowed a certain personal expression, a feeling of casual discourse, not to say intimacy, that was rarely approached in a sermon.

How to get a letter from one place to another was a perpetual question. The safest way would be to take it oneself, but then one might as well simply ride and talk, not write. Ship's captains were known to be rascals. One had famously actually cursed God when hot tar was spilled on his foot. (He had been prosecuted and convicted of blasphemy.) Otherwise dear friends might prove careless in ensuring a letter's safe delivery. An important communication might sit on a neighbor's mantelpiece for weeks, unless the addressee, moved by gossip or intuition, came in search of it. Or a traveler might be standing in the hallway, ready to get a difficult journey underway, whilst the writer, seizing the chance to get word of themselves to distant parties, worked in haste. Overseas communications were all the more slow and uncertain.

But a letter writer could feel the pull of a true correspondent from the other end of the world. There was that itch, that opening of feeling in privacy, the recalcitrant pleasures of pressing meaning into a surface, of letting a calmly silent version of ones voice spill recklessly across the page, or in tracing the minutest inflections of beloved matters in careful sentences, composed and reflected upon, then copied again. And then, bravely, uncertainly, irrevocably, sent.

Mr. Edwards knew himself best as a writer. It was where he most openly showed his tenderness. He wanted to disappear in the words, wanted to be unheard, unread, less than dust while God danced in his letters like specks in the sun, filtering every word through His Light. That was what Mr. Edwards wanted, except when he was seized by pride.

A whole town could be held still, except for those in it who were not.