iah's front to hit," etc.

The most characteristic, popular, and widely circulated poem of
colonial New England was Michael Wigglesworth's _Day of Doom_ (1662), a
kind of doggerel _Inferno_, which went through nine editions, and "was
the solace," says Lowell, "of every fireside, the flicker of the
pine-knots by which it was conned perhaps adding a livelier relish to
its premonitions of eternal combustion." Wigglesworth had not the
technical equipment of a poet. His verse is sing-song, his language
rude and monotonous, and the lurid horrors of his material hell are
more likely to move mirth than fear in a modern reader. But there are
an unmistakable vigor of imagination and a sincerity of belief in his
gloomy poem which hold it far above contempt, and easily account for
its universal currency among a people like the Puritans. One stanza
has been often quoted for its grim concession to unregenerate infants
of "the easiest room in hell"--a _limbus infantum_ which even Origen
need not have scrupled at.

The most authoritative expounder of New England Calvinism was Jonathan
Edwards {356} (1703-1758), a native of Connecticut, and a graduate of
Yale, who was minister for more than twenty years over the Church in
Northampton, Mass., afterward missionary to the Stockbridge Indians,
and at the time of his death had just been inaugurated president of
Princeton College. By virtue of his _Inquiry into the Freedom of the
Will_, 1754, Edwards holds rank as the subtlest metaphysician of his
age. This treatise was composed to justify, on philosophical grounds,
the Calvinistic doctrines of foreordination and election by grace,
though its arguments are curiously coincident with those of the
scientific necessitarians, whose conclusions are as far asunder from
Edwards's "as from the center thrice to the utmost pole." His writings
belong to theology rather than to literature, but there is an intensity
and a spiritual elevation about them, apart from the profundity and
acuteness of the thought, which lift them here and there into the finer
ether of purely emotional or imaginative art. He dwelt rather upon the
terrors than the comfort of the word, and his chosen themes were the
dogmas of predestination, original sin, total depravity, and eternal
punishment. The titles of his sermons are significant: _Men Naturally
God's Enemies, Wrath upon the Wicked to the Uttermost, The Final
Judgment_, etc. "A natural man," he wrote in the firs