that the smoke of your torment shall still ascend up, forever and ever;
and that your souls, which shall have been agitated with the wrath of
God all this while, yet will still exist to bear more wrath; your
bodies, which shall have been burning and roasting all this while in
these glowing flames, yet shall not have been consumed, but will remain
to roast through an eternity yet, which will not have been at all
shortened by what shall have been past."

When we remember that to the Puritan man, woman, or child the message of
the preacher meant the message of God, we may imagine what effect such
words had on a colonial congregation. To the overwrought nerves of many
a Puritan woman, taught to believe meekly the doctrines of her father,
and weakened in body by ceaseless childbearing and unending toil, such a
picture must indeed have been terrifying. And the God that she and her
husband heard described Sabbath after Sabbath was not only heartily
willing to condemn man to eternal torment but capable of enjoying the
tortures of the damned, and gloating in strange joy over the writhings
of the condemned. Is it any wonder that in the midst of Jonathan
Edward's sermon, _Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God_, men and women
sprang to their feet and shrieked in anguish, "What shall we do to be
saved?"

"The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a
spider, or some loathsome insect, over the fire, abhors you and is
dreadfully provoked; his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks
upon you as worthy of nothing else but to be cast into the fire; he is
of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight; you are ten
thousand times as abominable in his eyes, as the most hateful and
venomous serpent is in ours. You have offended him infinitely more than
ever a stubborn rebel did his prince; and yet it is nothing but his hand