In the winter of 1734 the congregation at Northampton, a farming town on the Connecticut river, began to change. Young people who had been indifferent became serious; conversions ran at a rate the minister had never seen; and for about half a year the town talked of little else. Edwards wrote it all down, carefully, with dates, numbers and case histories, including one of a four year old girl and one of a man who cut his own throat.
That account, published in London as a faithful narrative of the surprising work of God, did something no revival had done before: it gave the phenomenon a documented shape, with stages, and it circulated across the Atlantic. When far larger revivals broke out in 1740 and 1741 under George Whitefield and others, ministers on both sides of the ocean already had a template for recognising and describing them.
Edwards was the Awakening's chief defender against those who dismissed it as enthusiasm, and its most exacting critic when its supporters claimed too much. The sermon everyone knows, preached at Enfield in 1741, with the spider held over the fire, belongs to that period and is genuinely his, but it is one sermon of over a thousand and is a poor guide to the rest. His own congregation dismissed him in 1750, after twenty three years, in a dispute over who might be admitted to communion; he went to the frontier settlement at Stockbridge, preached to a mixed English and Mohican congregation, and wrote his major treatises there.