July 8, 1741, "at a time of great awakenings," and upon the ominous
text, _Their foot shall slide in due time_. "The God that holds you
over the pit of hell," runs an oft-quoted passage from this powerful
denunciation of the wrath to come, "much as one holds a spider or some
loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully
provoked. . . . You are ten thousand times more abominable in his eyes
than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours. . . . You hang by a
slender thread, with the flames of divine wrath flashing about
it. . . . If you cry to God to pity you he will be so far from pitying
you in your doleful case that he will only tread you under foot. . . .
He will crush out your blood and make it fly, and it shall be sprinkled
on his garments so as to stain all his raiment." But Edwards was a
rapt soul, possessed with the love as well as the fear of the God, and
there are passages of sweet and exalted feeling in his _Treatise
Concerning Religious Affections_, 1746. Such is his portrait of Sarah
Pierpont, "a young lady in New Haven," who afterward became his wife
and who "will sometimes go about from place to place singing sweetly,
and no one knows for what. She loves to be alone, walking in the
fields and groves, and seems to have some one invisible always
conversing with her." Edwards's printed works number thirty-six
titles. A complete edition of them in ten volumes was published in
1829 by his great grandson, Sereno Dwight. The memoranda from
Edwards's note-books, quoted by his editor and biographer, exhibit a
remarkable precocity. Even as a school-boy and a college student he
had made deep guesses in physics as well as metaphysics, and, as might
have been predicted of a youth of his philosophical insight and ideal
cast of mind, he had early anticipated Berkeley in denying the
existence of matter. In passing from Mather to Edwards we step from
the seventeenth to the eighteenth century. There is the same
difference between them in style and turn of thought as between Milton