Life of David Brainerd (1749)

After the young missionary David Brainerd died of tuberculosis at the Edwards home in 1748, Edwards read through Brainerd’s manuscript diaries. Impressed, he resolved to prepare them for the press. Exalting Brainerd’s self-sacrificial faith in the cause of converting the “heathen,” Edwards presented Brainerd as a concrete example of sainthood as laid out in Religious Affections. In the process, however, as Norman Pettit has shown, Edwards omitted many portions of Brainerd’s diary to prevent the public from knowing about the emotional extremes he experienced, so that he would not be dismissed as an “enthusiast” or as melancholic. The Life of David Brainerd, as scholar Joseph Conforti notes, is Edwards’s “most popular work’; it has never been out of print. This work was a major impetus and inspiration to the domestic and foreign missionary movement of the late eighteenth and through the nineteenth century. For Edwards, Brainerd may well have served too as a model for mission work among the Indians at Stockbridge.