78. =Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.= The full title-page of this,
Edwards's most famous sermon, read in the original edition as follows:
"Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. A sermon Preached at Enfield, July
8th 1741. At a time of great Awakenings; and attended with remarkable
Impressions on many of the Hearers. By Jonathan Edwards A.M. Pastor of the
Church of Christ in Northampton. Amos ix. 2, 3.--Though they dig into
Hell, thence shall mine Hand take them; though they climb up to Heaven,
thence will I bring them down. And though they hide themselves in the Top
of Carmel, I will search and take them out thence; and though they be hid
from my Sight in the Bottom of the Sea, thence will I command the Serpent,
and he shall bite them. Boston: Printed and Sold by S. Kneeland and T.
Green in Queen Street over against the Prison, 1741."
Benjamin Trumbull in his _History of Connecticut_ (New Haven, 1818), Vol.
II, p. 145, records the circumstances under which this sermon was
delivered as told to him by Mr. Wheelock, a minister from Connecticut
(Enfield, Conn., was at that time included in Hampshire County, Mass.),
who heard it. "While the people in neighboring towns," writes Trumbull,
"were in great distress for their souls, the inhabitants of that town were
very secure, loose, and vain. A lecture had been appointed at Enfield, and
the neighboring people, the night before, were so affected at the
thoughtlessness of the inhabitants, and in such fear that God would, in
his righteous judgment, pass them by, while the divine showers were
falling all around them, as to be prostrate before him a considerable part
of it, supplicating mercy for their souls. When the time appointed for the
lecture came, a number of the neighboring ministers attended, and some
from a distance. When they went into the meeting-house, the appearance of
the assembly was thoughtless and vain. The people hardly conducted
themselves with common decency. The Rev. Mr. Edwards, of Northampton,
preached, and before the sermon was ended, the assembly appeared 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 was obliged to speak to the people and desire silence, that he
might be heard. This was the beginning of the same great and prevailing
concern in that place, with which the colony in general was visited." The
circumstances, thus, under which this sermon was preached were
exceptional; the excitement of the Great Awakening was at its height; the
congregation to whom the sermon was addressed were notorious for their
apathy; Edwards doubtless felt that an exceptionally strong presentation
of their danger was necessary to arouse them. And this sermon is probably
the most tremendous of its kind ever delivered by a Christian minister.
The kind, however, was by no means exceptional in Edwards's preaching,
particularly at this period. Believing as he did that the decisions of men
in this life were fraught with the most momentous issues to all eternity,
he held it his bounden duty to present these issues before them in the
liveliest manner possible.[16] The Justice of God in the Damnation of
Sinners; The Future Punishment of the Wicked Unavoidable and Intolerable;
The Eternity of Hell Torments; When the Wicked shall have filled up the
Measure of their Sin, Wrath will come upon them to the Uttermost; The End
of the Wicked contemplated by the Righteous; or, The Torments of the
Wicked in Hell, no occasion of grief to the Saints in Heaven; Wicked Men
useful in their Destruction only,--these are among the titles of his
sermons. Moreover, there is reason to believe that this very sermon, or
its like, was used on other occasions besides the one to which it is
explicitly ascribed. There is a tradition[17] that Edwards preached it
once when Whitfield had disappointed an audience by not appearing, and
that he produced a great effect by it. The manuscript is dated _June_,
1741, which suggests that it may have been preached in Northampton, or
elsewhere, the month before it was attended with such remarkable
impressions on the hearers in Enfield. But still more significant is the
existence of an undated second sermon from the same text. In this, which
was undoubtedly of earlier origin, the thought is somewhat differently
worked out: it is less lurid, less fully elaborated, less terrific; but it
contains many of the ideas, for example, on the uncertainty of life, the
suddenness with which destruction may overtake the sinner, etc., that are
found in the Enfield sermon. Edwards was evidently fascinated by the
theme; he works it out with the sure touch of a great artist, with the
intellectual force of the skilled dialectician. And he proclaims his
message with the intensity of conviction of an Old Testament prophet. No
wonder his hearers were moved. The effect would certainly have been less
great had there been any note or personal vindictiveness in the preaching.
But there is nothing of this; it is not in this sense that the sermon can
be called "imprecatory." On the contrary, so far as Edwards's personal
attitude is concerned, it is not difficult to detect in it the pathos and
the pity of the gentlest of men weeping over the senseless folly of those
who, blind to impending destruction, refuse repeated invitations of safety
(cf. Matt. xxiii. 37). For the rest, he is quite impersonal, detached; the
truth he preaches is sure, awful, but objective. On the modern reader the
sermon is likely to produce a very painful impression, unless he, for his
part, reads it in the same impersonal, detached way. It is not only the
realism of the presentation, but the harshness of the doctrine, which
offends. Edwards, for instance, frequently speaks of the reason why
sinners are not immediately cast into hell; but the reason assigned is not
the mercy or goodness or love of God, but His mere power and sovereign
pleasure. This is one aspect of the truth of the spiritual universe as
Edwards sees it. He is not a sentimentalist; he proclaims the truth as he
finds it. As far as Edwards himself is concerned, there is nothing in the
whole sermon, or in any of his "imprecatory" sermons, so called, half as
revolting as Dante's attitude towards sinners in hell. Take, for instance,
the case of Filippo Argenti in the Lake of Mud (_Inferno_, Canto viii.):
"'Master, I should much like to see him ducked in this broth before we
depart from the lake.' And he to me, 'Ere the shore allows thee to see it
thou shalt be satisfied; it will be fitting that thou enjoy such a
desire.' After this a little I saw such rending of him by the muddy folk
that I still praise God therefor, and thank Him for it. All cried, 'At
Filippo Argenti!' and the raging Florentine spirit turned upon himself
with his teeth."
89. =The God that holds you ... drop down into hell.= This is probably the
best remembered paragraph in this all too well remembered sermon.
Comparison with the original manuscript shows some interesting variants
from the printed text, and at the same time gives evidence of the
deliberateness with which the sentences were wrought out with reference to
their calculated effect. For both reasons the passage is here reproduced
as written.
"You are over the pit of hell in Gods hand very much as one holds a spider
or some loathsome Insect over the fire & 'tis nothing but for God to let
you go & you fall in." (Here follow four undecipherable lines, which
apparently, however, do not belong in this connection. The passage then
continues on the next page of the Ms.) "& this G. that thus holds you in
his hand is very angry with you & dreadfully provoked. ____ his wrath
burns like fire. ____ you are lothsome and hatefull in his eyes & and
worthy to be burnt--he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else but to be
cast into the fire you are ten thous. times more loathsome in his eyes
than the most noisome insect in the eyes of us men ____ & you have
offended him a thous. times so much as ever an obstinate rebel did his
prince. ____ & yet you are in his hands & tis nothing at all but his mere
pleasure that he keeps you from falling into hell every moment ____ there
is no other reason to be given why you did not go to hell last night why
you did not wake up in hell after you had closed your eyes to sleep &
there is no other reason to be given why you have [not] drop'd since you
rose in the morning ____ yea since you sit on here in the house of G.
Provoking his pure Eyes by your sinfull wicked manner of attending his
Holy worship ____ Yea there is nothing else to be given as the Reason why
you don't this very moment drop down into hell."
Between the sentences here separated by longer spaces, lines curving from
the lower part of the preceding to the upper part of the following are
drawn, indicating possibly rhetorical pauses in the delivery and
suggesting to the modern reader a succession of waves, wave on wave of
horror, each more overwhelming than the one that went before.
The above passage is contained in the manuscript under division I. of the
"Application," division II. beginning, "And consider here more
particularly" (p. 89). The four divisions thereafter following correspond
roughly to those in the printed edition, but are mere headings, and differ
from the six divisions first sketched. Inserted in the manuscript is a
loose sheet containing in Edwards's handwriting a careful outline of the
whole sermon, such as he might have made when preparing the sermon for the
press or used as notes for preaching. The manuscript of the entire sermon
is short, but twenty-two pages of writing and one blank leaf.