New Edwards Manuscript Acquired by Yale

2013-09-06

The Jonathan Edwards Center is happy to announce that Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, which holds the largest collection of Edwards’s manuscripts, has obtained a previously unknown notebook by Edwards. The notebook, “Efficacious Grace, Book IV,” joins three other notebooks by that name in the Beinecke collection. Originally part of Edwards’s series of working notebooks for his treatise on the will, the books were repurposed by him for a projected series on efficacious grace. The notebook contains entries on that topic, along with “determining grace,” “predestination,”  “the nature of virtue,”  “interposition of God,” and others, and cites a wide range of authors.

This new, extraordinary acquisition was made possible through the Rev. Robert Rafford, of Middlebury, Connecticut, who was given the notebook some twenty years ago by a descendant of Edwards. The Edwards Center extends a hearty thanks to Rev. Rafford for making it possible for this document to rejoin the main corpus, where scholars will be able to benefit from it.