and righteous their punishment is and therefore how properly inflicted
by the supreme Governor of the world.... They will rejoice when they see
him who is their Father and eternal portion so glorious in his justice.
The sight of this strict and immutable justice of God will render him
amiable and adorable in their eyes. It will occasion rejoicing in them,
as they will have the greater sense of _their own happiness_, by seeing
the contrary misery. It is the nature of pleasure and pain, of happiness
and misery, greatly to heighten the sense of each other.... When they
shall see how miserable others of their fellow-creatures are, who were
naturally in the same circumstances with themselves; when they shall see
the smoke of their torment, and the raging of the flames of their
burning, and hear their dolorous shrieks and cries, and consider that
they in the meantime are in the most blissful state, and shall surely be
in it to all eternity; how will they rejoice!... When they shall see the
dreadful miseries of the damned, and consider that they deserved the
same misery, and that it was sovereign grace, and nothing else, which
made them so much to differ from the damned, that if it had not been for
that, they would have been in the same condition; but that God from all
eternity was pleased to set his love upon them, that Christ hath laid
down his life for them, and hath made them thus gloriously happy
forever, O how will they adore that dying love of Christ, which has
redeemed them from so great a misery, and purchased for them so great
happiness, and has so distinguished them from others of their
fellow-creatures!"

It was a strange creed that led men to teach such theories. And when we
learn that Jonathan Edwards was a man of singular gentleness and
kind-heartedness, we realize that it must have tortured him to preach
such doctrines, but that he believed it his sacred duty to do so.