An Unpublished Letter from John Erskine to Jonathan Edwards

Abstract

In roughly a year before Edwards’s death, the Scottish minister John Erskine wrote to Edwards informing him that Freedom of the Will was being misappropriated in Scotland in order to affirm Lord Kames’s views on liberty as expressed in his Essays on the Principles of Morality and Natural Religion (1751). Encouraged by Erskine to write a response that could be published, Edwards explained the differences he had with Kames’s Essays in a letter on July 25, 1757.  Erskine’s first attempt to convince an Edinburgh bookseller named “Miller” to publish Edwards’s letter was not successful…