The mature Edwards looked back on this rigor as involving "too great a dependence on my own strength; which afterwards proved a great damage to me."15 Yet he never abandoned his belief in the value of strict spiritual disciplines, as his later Life ofDavid Brainerd would reveal.
His theological explanation in his "Personal Narrative" for the difference between his early and his mature experiences as a convert was that he now had
"a more full and constant sense of the absolute sovereignty of God, and a delight in that sovereignty;
