Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God

July 8, 1741 | Jonathan Edwards | Enfield, Connecticut

This is an excerpt. What was left out, and why, is set out at the foot of the page.

Headnote, written for Huzzah

Edwards preached this at Enfield, Connecticut, on 8 July 1741, in the summer the revival was at its height, and it is the one colonial sermon most Americans have heard of. That is a difficulty rather than a help. It is quoted for its images and almost never read for its argument, and the argument is what this movement of the library is for.

It is not a political sermon and it should not be read as one. Edwards is preaching on a half verse of Deuteronomy to a congregation he believed to be at risk, and nothing in it is about magistrates, charters or the rights of subjects. He is not describing government. He says so by omission: the only ruler in the sermon is God, and the earthly prince appears once, as the weaker case.

What the sermon does is fix a vocabulary, and the vocabulary is the reason it sits here. Edwards states his doctrine in the language of power held under no constraint: sovereign pleasure, arbitrary will, restrained by no obligation, hinder'd by no manner of difficulty. Then he spends the sermon insisting that this is endurable in one case only, because the will in question is God's, and that the hearer's whole security is that he has no promise and no covenant to stand on. Thirty five years later the same words are the charge. Arbitrary will, pleasure, obligation, promise and covenant are what a generation would say a king may not have over them, and they had learned to hear the words somewhere. Not from this sermon in particular, and not because Edwards meant anything of the kind. But a people taught to examine what a claim of authority actually rests on, and taught it weekly, does not stop at the meeting house door.

There is a second answer to why a sermon about hell opens a movement otherwise made of political arguments, and it is about the practice rather than the doctrine. Three things are visible on the sheets of this printing. Edwards was pastor at Northampton and preached this at Enfield, so the man in the pulpit was not that congregation's own minister. The sermon takes half a verse of Deuteronomy and cites its scripture as it goes, which puts every step of it where a hearer with a Bible could check it. And in the application he breaks off to point his hearers at what was happening in the next neighbouring town. Taken together that is the Awakening's real work on the people who sat through it. It put them in the habit of weighing a preacher's claim against the text themselves, and of comparing one preacher with another, instead of waiting to be told what a passage meant. Mayhew, nine years later, points that habit at a king.

The document

Deut. XXXII. 35. Their foot shall slide in due time.

In this verse is threatned the vengeance of God on the wicked unbelieving Israelites, that were God's visible people, and lived under means of grace ; and that, notwithstanding all God's wonderful works that he had wrought towards that people, yet remained, as is expressed, ver. 28. void of counsel, having no understanding in them ; and that, under all the cultivations of heaven, brought forth bitter and poisonous fruit ; as in the two verses next preceeding the text.

The expression that I have chosen for my text, Their foot shall slide in due time, seems to imply the following things, relating to the punishment and destruction that these wicked Israelites were exposed to.

[A passage is omitted here. See the note at the foot of this page.]

The observation from the words that I would now insist upon is this,

There is nothing that keeps wicked men, at any one moment, out of hell, but the meer pleasure of GOD.

By the meer pleasure of God, I mean his sovereign pleasure, his arbitrary will, restrained by no obligation, hinder'd by no manner of difficulty, any more than if nothing else but God's meer will had in the least degree, or in any respect whatsoever, any hand in the preservation of wicked men one moment.

[A passage is omitted here.]

The bow of God's wrath is bent, and the arrow made ready on the string, and justice bends the arrow at your heart, and strains the bow, and it is nothing but the meer pleasure of God, and that of an angry God, without any promise or obligation at all, that keeps the arrow one moment from being made drunk with your blood.

[A passage is omitted here.]

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 so abominable in his eyes as the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours. You have offended him infinitely more than ever a stubborn rebel did his prince : And yet 'tis nothing but his hand that holds you from falling into the fire every moment : 'Tis to be ascribed to nothing else, that you did not go to hell the last night ; that you was suffer'd to awake again in this world, after you closed your eyes to sleep : And there is no other reason to be given why you have not dropped into hell since you arose in the morning, but that God's hand has held you up : There is no other reason to be given why you han't gone to hell since you have sat here in the house of God, provoking his pure eyes by your sinful wicked manner of attending his solemn worship : Yea, there is nothing else that is to be given as a reason why you don't this very moment drop down into hell.

[The sermon closes.]

Now undoubtedly it is, as it was in the days of John the Baptist, the ax is in an extraordinary manner laid at the root of the trees, that every tree that brings not forth good fruit, may be hewn down, and cast into the fire.

Therefore let every one that is out of Christ, now awake and fly from the wrath to come. The wrath of almighty GOD is now undoubtedly hanging over great part of this congregation : Let every one fly out of Sodom : Haste and escape for your lives, look not behind you, escape to the mountain, lest you be consumed.

What was left out

The sermon runs to about eight thousand words. Printed here are the opening, the doctrine, two passages from the application, and the close, together about six hundred and fifty. Because the sermon states its doctrine early and then argues it for twenty pages, the cuts are marked in four separate blocks rather than as a single continuous omission. What is omitted is the great bulk of it: the ten considerations by which Edwards holds that nothing but the pleasure of God keeps a wicked man out of hell, the whole first movement of the application with its images of the rock, the bondage of the creation and the dammed waters, the four heads under which the wrath to come is described, the addresses to the several parts of the congregation, and the passage on the neighbouring towns where the awakening was then at its height. The complete text is linked in the source note below.

Source and provenance

Text set from the Boston third edition, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. A Sermon Preached at Enfield, July 8th 1741, Boston, re-printed and sold by J. Kneeland, The Third Edition, read from the page images at https://archive.org/details/bim_eighteenth-century_sinners-in-the-hands-of-_edwards-jonathan_1772. Every passage printed below was read on the page images of that printing and transcribed from them. The machine readable text of this imprint was used only to find the passages and is not a witness to anything: it keeps the long s as a separate character and it scrambles line order at the page boundaries, so its paragraphs cannot be trusted. The long s is expanded to s here and the spelling and pointing are otherwise left as the 1772 sets them, including meer, preceeding, hinder'd, suffer'd, han't and 'tis. The passages stand on pages 5, 6 and 7, 16, 17, and 27. The sermon's doctrine is set in italic in the 1772 and is printed here in roman. Every passage that falls within it was then checked against The Works of President Edwards, Worcester, printed by Isaac Sturtevant, 1808, volume 7, read from the scan at https://archive.org/details/worksofpresident07edwa. That collected edition is abridged and is not the base text here. It ends in the middle of the application on page 502, followed immediately by End of the seventh volume, so it does not contain the close of the sermon at all, and the last passage printed below rests on the 1772 alone with no second witness. Where the two do run together the 1808 modernises throughout and none of it is followed: it sets mere for meer, hindered for hinder'd, suffered for suffer'd, it is for 'tis, have not gone for han't gone, do not for don't, Men's hands cannot be strong for Mens hands can't be strong, and God will not hold them up for God won't hold them up. It also encloses the doctrine in quotation marks and drops the commas the 1772 sets around at any one moment. One departure is more than spelling and is recorded here for that reason. In the passage on the spider the 1808 reads the most hateful and venomous serpent where the 1772 reads the most hateful venomous serpent, without the and. The 1772 is followed and that line was read on the page image before it was set. Edwards prints one footnote of his own in this sermon, at the foot of page 25, reading The next neighbouring Town. It falls outside every passage printed here and is not reproduced.

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