wards supposes in the nature of God an original
disposition to an "emanation" of His being, and it is the excellency
of this divine being, particularly in the elect, which is, in his
view, the final cause and motive of the world.

Edwards makes no attempt to reconcile the pantheistic element in his
philosophy with the individuality implied in moral government. He
seems to waver between the opinion that finite individuals have no
independent being and the opinion that they have it in an
infinitesimal degree; and the conception of "degrees of existence" in
the essay on Virtue is not developed to elucidate the point. His
theological conception of God, at any rate, was not abstractly
pantheistic, in spite of the abstractness of his language about
"being," but frankly theistic and trinitarian. He held the doctrine of
the trinitarian distinctions indeed to be a necessity of reason. His
_Essay on the Trinity_, first printed in 1903, was long supposed to
have been withheld from publication because of its containing Arian or
Sabellian tendencies. It contains in fact nothing more questionable
than an attempted deduction of the orthodox Nicene doctrine,
unpalatable, however, to Edwards's immediate disciples, who were too
little speculative to appreciate his statement of the subordination of
the "persons" in the divine "oeconomy," and who openly derided the
doctrine of the eternal generation of the Son as "eternal nonsense";
and this perhaps was the original reason why the essay was not
published.

Though so typically a scholar and abstract thinker on the one hand and
on the other a mystic, Edwards is best known to the present generation
as a preacher of hell fire. The particular reason for this seems to
lie in a single sermon preached at Enfield, Connecticut, in July 1741
from the text, "Their foot shall slide in due time," and commonly
known from its title, _Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God_. The
occasion of this sermon is usually overlooked. It was preached to a
congregation who were careless and loose in their lives at a time when
"the neighbouring towns were in great distress for their souls." A
contemporary account of it says that in spite of Edwards's academic
style of preaching, the assembly was "deeply impressed and bowed down,
with an awful conviction of their sin and danger. There was such a
breathing of distress and weeping, that the preacher w