Thomas Cole, The Subsiding of the Waters of the Deluge

It was not that Edwards negleted the element of 'salutary terror,' as he called it. He could preach a hellfire sermon with the best. He told sinners: '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.' This particular sermon, published (in 1741) under the tittle Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, was avidly read all over the colonies and committed to heart by many lesser evangelists who wanted to melt hardened hearts. But it was Edwards' nature, as an American, to stress not just God's anger but also his bounty to mankind, and to rejoice in the plenty and, not least, the beauty, of God's creation. Edwards put an entirely new gloss on the harsh old Calvinist doctrine of Redemption by stressing that God did not just choose some, and not others, but, as it were, radiated his own goodness and beauty into the souls of men and women so that they became part of him. He called it 'a kind of participation in God' in which 'God puts his own beauty, i.e. his beatiful likeness, upon their souls.' In a riveting discourse, God Glorified in the Work of Redemption, first published in 1731, he insisted that the happiness human beings find in 'the Glorious Excellences and Beauty of God' is the greatest of earthly pleasures as well as a spiritual transformation. Through God we love beauty and our joy in beauty is worship. Moreover, this joy and knowledge of beauty, and through beauty God, is 'attainable by persons of mean capacities and advantages as well as those that are of the greatest parts and learning.' The core of his message, and certainly the secret of his appeal, then and now, and to the masses as well as to intellectuals, is that love is the essence of the religious experience.