The Rev. Jonathan Edwards continued in Northampton more than twenty-three years, till he was dismissed in 1750. The causes which led to his dismissal were his endeavors to enforce what he considered to be his duty in regard to the discipline of the church, and likewise the opposition he made to the sentiment supported by his colleague and grandfather, Rev. Mr. Stoddard, that unconverted persons ought to be allowed to come to the sacrament of the Lord’s supper. In 1751, he was settled at Stockbridge as missionary to the Indians, where 1751, continued six years, preaching to the Indians and white people. Here he found leisure to prosecute his theological and metaphysical studies, and produced those works which will probably hand down his name to the latest posterity. In January, 1758, he reluctantly accepted the presidency of the college at Princeton, New Jersey. The small-pox prevailing, President Edwards was induced to be inoculated, which was the cause of his death, March 22, 1758, in the 55th year of his age.

David Brainerd, the celebrated missionary, died at the house of Jonathan Edwards, in this place, Oct. 9, 1747, in the thirtieth year of his age. His life was written by Mr. Edwards. “His life and diary,” says a celebrated English divine, “exhibits a perfect pattern of the qualities which should distinguish the instructor of rude and barbarous tribes; the most invincible patience and self-denial, the profoundest humility, exquisite prudence, indefatigable industry, and such a devotedness to God, or rather such an absorption of the whole soul in zeal for the divine glory and the salvation of men, as is scarcely paralleled since the age of the apostles. His constitutional melancholy, though it must be regarded as a physical imperfection, imparts an additional interest and pathos to the narrative, since we more easily sympathize with the emotion of sorrow than of joy. There is a monotony in his feelings, it must be acknowledged, and consequently a frequent repetition of the same ideas, which will disgust a fastidious or superficial reader, but it is the monotony of sublimity.”

The following inscriptions are copied from monuments in the Northampton grave-yard:

A tabular monument of free-stone is placed over the grave of this celebrated missionary. The inscription at first was on an inlet of schistus, which many years since was destroyed by the frost, and the inscription at present is said to be unknown. An inlet of marble with the above inscription now supplies the place of the former one in the horizontal slab over his remains.