The literary reputation of Jonathan Edwards has turned, like the
vicissitudes of his life, upon factors that could not be
foreseen. His contemporary fame was chiefly as a preacher, and
was due to sermons like those upon "God Glorified in Man's
Dependence" and "The Reality of Spiritual Life," rather than to
such discourses as the Enfield sermon, "Sinners in the Hands of
an Angry God," which in our own day is the best known of his
deliverances. Legends have grown up around this terrific Enfield
sermon. Its fearful power over its immediate hearers cannot be
gainsaid, and it will long continue to be quoted as an example of
the length to which a Calvinistic logician of genius was
compelled by his own scheme to go. We still see the tall,
sweet-faced man, worn by his daily twelve hours of intense mental
toil, leaning on one elbow in the pulpit and reading from
manuscript, without even raising his gentle voice, those words
which smote his congregation into spasms of terror and which seem
to us sheer blasphemy.
Yet the "Farewell Sermon of 1750" gives a more characteristic
view of Edwards's mind and heart, and conveys an ineffaceable
impression of his nobility of soul.
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