| Assignment due: Exercise
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. Edward Taylor, resident pastor of the Congregational Church at Westfield, Connecticut, served his congregation for fifty-eight years. Arriving in Boston in 1668, he enrolled in Harvard University. He taught school for a few years before accepting a position in the ministry. His poetry suggests the style of the English "metaphysics," a style most abhorrent to the Puritans of the seventeenth-century. "Upon a Spider Catching a Fly" exemplifies the pious, devotional perspective and purpose of his poetry, collected and donated to the Yale University Library by his grandson, The Reverend Ezra Stiles, a close friend and confidant of Benjamin Franklin. . Born perhaps a century too late, Jonathan Edwards was one of the last great defenders of Calvinism in eighteenth-century New England. A mystic, given to trances and visions, Edwards is still recognized today as one of the most brilliant minds of the period. He was one of three divines who spurred "The Great Awakening," the first sweeping religious revival movement in the American colonies. However, he was dismissed from his congregation at Westfield, Connecticut, over his recalcitrant position regarding the "half-way covenant," a starchy reminder of the strident Calvinism his parishioners no longer tolerated. Edwards retired to the Berkshire Hills in Vermont, but was named to the post of President of Yale University only weeks before he died.
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