The Life and Diary of David Brainerd

It is the journal and life of David Brainerd, the young missionary to the American Indians in the 1740s, prepared for publication by Jonathan Edwards. Its pages trace his conversion, his lonely labours and hardships in the wilderness, his deep struggles and consolations of soul, and his early death from tuberculosis — a searching record of a short life poured out for God.

David Brainerd was a young New England missionary who gave a few intense years to preaching among the Native peoples of colonial America before dying of tuberculosis at twenty-nine. Expelled from Yale and often sick and alone, he laboured and prayed with extraordinary devotion, and his diary became one of the most influential missionary records ever published.

Brainerd spent his final months in the home of Jonathan Edwards, who nursed him and, after his death, edited his diaries into this Life. Edwards saw in Brainerd a living example of true religion — the heart-affections he had defended in his own writings — and published the diary as a portrait of genuine, self-denying Christian devotion.

Because Brainerd's example of prayer, self-denial, and wholehearted devotion has stirred countless later missionaries — among them William Carey, Henry Martyn, and David Livingstone — to give themselves to the work. His short, sacrificial life, told in his own words, has functioned for generations as a summons and a pattern for missionary consecration.

A soul of deep earnestness and frequent struggle — seasons of darkness, self-examination, and longing for God alternating with times of sweet communion and joy in prayer. Brainerd is unsparing about his own discouragements and failings, which is part of the diary's power: it shows real, costly devotion in a man honest about his weakness.

It is sober and often heavy, unflinching about suffering, loneliness, and death. Yet through it runs a thread of devotion and hope that has inspired rather than depressed its readers — the sense of a life, however short and hard, wholly spent for God and not wasted. Its melancholy is real, but so is its glory.

Anyone drawn to missions, or to the question of what wholehearted devotion to God costs and looks like. It has been a companion to missionaries and earnest Christians for over two centuries, valued both as a moving life story and as a searching example of prayer and self-denial that measures the reader's own devotion.

At the beginning, with Brainerd's early life and conversion, and on through the diary in order as his labours and struggles unfold. Edwards arranged it as a continuous life, and read that way it builds a cumulative portrait of a young man's devotion that has moved and challenged readers ever since.