as obliged to
speak to the people and desire silence, that he might be heard."
Edwards preached other sermons of this type, but this one was the most
extreme. The style of the imprecatory sermon, however, was no more
peculiar to him than to his period. He was not a great preacher in the
ordinary meaning of the word. His gestures were scanty, his voice was
not powerful, but he was desperately in earnest, and he held his
audience whether his sermon contained a picturesque and detailed
description of the torments of the damned, or, as was often the case,
spoke of the love and peace of God in the heart of man. He was an
earnest, devout Christian, and a man of blameless life. His insight
into the spiritual life was profound. Certainly the most able
metaphysician and the most influential religious thinker of America,
he must rank in theology, dialectics, mysticism and philosophy with
Calvin and Fenelon, Augustine and Aquinas, Spinoza and Novalis; with
Berkeley and Hume as the great English philosophers of the 18th
century; and with Hamilton and Franklin as the three American thinkers
of the same century of more than provincial importance.

Edwards's main aim had been to revivify Calvinism, modifying it for
the needs of the time, and to promote a warm and vital Christian
piety. The tendency of his successors was--to state the matter
roughly--to take some one of his theories and develop it to an
extreme. Of his immediate followers Joseph Bellamy is distinctly
Edwardean in the keen logic and in the spirit of his _True Religion
Delineated_, but he breaks with his master in his theory of general
(not limited) atonement. Samuel Hopkins laid even greater stress than
Edwards on the theorem that virtue consists in disinterested
benevolence; but he went counter to Edwards in holding that
unconditional resignation to God's decrees, or more concretely,
willingness to be damned for the glory of God, was the test of true
regeneration; for Edwards, though often quoted as holding this
doctrine, protested against it in the strongest terms. Hopkins,
moreover, denied Edwards's identity theory of original sin, saying
that our sin was a result of Adam's and not identical with it; and he
went much further than Edwards in his objection to "means of grace,"
claiming that the unregenerate were more and more guilty for continual
rejection of the gospel if they were outwardly right