er tones which never rose to
passionate enunciation, he read these discourses, the house was often
filled with shrieks and waitings, and that a brother minister once laid
hold of his skirts, exclaiming, in an involuntary agony, "Oh! Mr.
Edwards! Mr. Edwards! is God not a God of mercy?"

Not that these men were indifferent or insensible to the dread words
they spoke; their whole lives and deportment bore thrilling witness to
their sincerity. Edwards set apart special days of fasting, in view of
the dreadful doom of the lost, in which he was wont to walk the floor,
weeping and wringing his hands. Hopkins fasted every Saturday. David
Brainerd gave up every refinement of civilized life to weep and pray at
the feet of hardened savages, if by any means he might save _one_. All,
by lives of eminent purity and earnestness, gave awful weight and
sanction to their words.

If we add to this statement the fact, that it was always proposed to
every inquiring soul, as an evidence of regeneration, that it should
truly and heartily accept all the ways of God thus declared right and
lovely, and from the heart submit to Him as the only just and good, it
will be seen what materials of tremendous internal conflict and
agitation were all the while working in every bosom. Almost all the
histories of religious experience of those times relate paroxysms of
opposition to God and fierce rebellion, expressed in language which
appalls the very soul,--followed, at length, by mysterious elevations of
faith and reactions of confiding love, the result of Divine
interposition, which carried the soul far above the region of the
intellect, into that of direct spiritual intuition.

President Edwards records that he was once in this state of
enmity,--that the facts of the Divine administration seemed horrible to
him,--and that this opposition was overcome by no course of reasoning,
but by an "_inward and sweet sense_," which came to him once when
walking alone in the fields, and, looking up into the blue sky, he saw
the blending of the Divine majesty with a calm, sweet, and almost
infinite meekness.

The piety which grew up under such a system was, of necessity,
energetic,--it was the uprousing of the whole energy of the human soul,
pierced and wrenched and probed from her lowest depths to her topmost
heights with every awful life-force possible to existence. He whose
faith in God came clear through these terrible tests would be sure never
to know gre