Charity and Its Fruits: Excerpts from Six Important Chapters

Charity and Its Fruits is a thorough exposition of Biblical love as found in 1 Corinthians 13. As one of Edward’s best known works, it is entirely free from sentimentality. Preached as a series of moving sermons in 1738 from the pulpit of his small “Church at Northampton,” Connecticut, it reveals Edward’s insistence both that Christian experience is highly supernatural and that “all true Christian grace tends to practice.” This booklet presents excerpts from six important chapters.

Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758). Few Christian leaders since the Reformation have been as gifted as Edwards, who was a man of intense personal devotion to Christ. He was a leader of both the Northampton revival of 1735 and the Great Awakening in New England of 1740 and later became known as the “Theologian of Revival.” After being dismissed from his church in Northampton after a controversy over the standards of church admission, he served as a missionary to Indians on the frontier of Stockbridge, Massachusetts. He died a few weeks after beginning his work as the President of the College of New Jersey, later known as Princeton. Edwards is perhaps the best-known of all the American preachers from the colonial days. His writings live as classics which stir their readers to follow God with their whole hearts.