lence of the heart' (ii. 445). God has bestowed such
instincts upon men for their preservation here; but they will disappear
in the next world, where no such need for them exists. He is driven,
indeed, to make some vague concessions (against which his enlightened
commentators protest), to the effect that 'these things [the natural
affections] have something of the general nature of virtue, which is
love' (ii. 456); but no such uncertain affinity can make them worthy to
be reckoned with that union with God which is the effect of the Divine
intervention alone.

Edwards is thus in the singular position of a Pantheist who yet regards
all nature as alienated from God; and in the treatise on Original Sin he
brings out the more revolting consequences of that view by help of the
theological dogma of corruption. He there maintains in its fullest sense
the terrible thesis, that all men are naturally in a state of which the
inevitable issue is their 'utter eternal perdition, as being finally
accursed of God and the subjects of His remediless wrath through sin'
(vi. 137). The evidence of this appalling statement is made up, with a
simplicity which would be amusing if employed in a less fearful cause,
of various texts from Scripture, quoted, of course, after the most
profoundly unhistorical fashion; of inferences from the universality of
death, regarded as the penalty incurred by Adam; of general reflections
upon the heathen world and the idolatry of the Jews; and of the
sentences pronounced by Jehovah against the Canaanites. In one of his
sermons, of portentous length and ferocity (vol. vii., sermon iii.), he
expands the doctrine that natural men--which includes all men who have
not gone through the mysterious process of conversion--are God's
enemies. Their heart, he says, 'is like a viper, hissing and spitting
poison at God;' and God requites their ill-will with undying enmity and
never-ceasing torments. Their unconsciousness of that enmity, and even
their belief that they are rightly affected towards God, is no proof
that the enmity does not exist. The consequences may be conceived. 'God
who made you has given you a capacity to bear torment; and He has that
capacity in His hands; and He can enlarge it and make you capable of
more misery, as much as He will. If God hates anyone and sets Himself
against him as His enemy, what cannot He do with him? How dreadful it
must be to fall into the hands of such an enemy!' (vii. 201). How
dr