n 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 (1703-58), 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 fore-ordination 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 first 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 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 Go