t of these
discourses, "has a heart like the heart of a devil.~.~.~. The heart of
a natural man is as destitute of love to God as a dead, stiff, cold
corpse is of vital heat." Perhaps the most {357} famous of Edwards's
sermons was _Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God_, preached at
Enfield, Conn., July 8, 1741, "at a time of great awakenings," and upon
the ominous text, _Their foot shall slide in due time_. "The God that
holds you over the pit of hell" runs an oft-quoted passage from this
powerful denunciation of the wrath to come, "much as one holds a spider
or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully
provoked.~.~.~. You are ten thousand times more abominable in his eyes
than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours.~.~.~. You hang by a
slender thread, with the flames of divine wrath flashing about
it.~.~.~. If you cry to God to pity you, he will be so far from
pitying you in your doleful case that he will only tread you under
foot.~.~.~. He will crush out your blood and make it fly, and it shall
be sprinkled on his garments so as to stain all his raiment." But
Edwards was a rapt soul, possessed with the love as well as the fear of
the God, and there are passages of sweet and exalted feeling in his
_Treatise Concerning Religious Affections_, 1746. Such is his portrait
of Sarah Pierpont, "a young lady in New Haven," who afterward became
his wife, and who "will sometimes go about from place to place singing
sweetly, and no one knows for what. She loves to be alone, walking in
the fields and groves, and seems to have some one invisible always
conversing with her." Edwards's printed works number thirty-six
titles. A complete edition of them in ten volumes was published in
1829 by his {358} great-grandson, Sereno Dwight. The memoranda from
Edwards's note-books, quoted by his editor and biographer, exhibit a
remarkable precocity. Even as a school-boy and a college student he
had made deep guesses in physics as well as metaphysics, and, as might
have been predicted of a youth of his philosophical insight and ideal
cast of mind, he had early anticipated Berkeley in denying the
existence of matter. In passing from Mather to Edwards, we step from
the seventeenth to the eighteenth century. There is the same
difference between them in style and turn of thought as between Milton
and Locke, or between Fuller and Dryden. The learned digressions, the
witty conceits, the perpetual interlard