sensibility.... One way in which God will show his power in the
punishment of the wicked will be in strengthening and upholding their
bodies and souls in torments which otherwise would be intolerable."

The sermons preached by President Edwards on this subject are so
terrific in their refined poetry of torture, that very few persons of
quick sensibility could read them through without agony; and it is
related, that, when, in those calm and tender tones which never rose to
passionate enunciation, he read these discourses, the house was often
filled with shrieks and waitings, and that a brother minister once laid
hold of his skirts, exclaiming, in an involuntary agony, "Oh! Mr.
Edwards! Mr. Edwards! is God not a God of mercy?"

Not that these men were indifferent or insensible to the dread words
they spoke; their whole lives and deportment bore thrilling witness to
their sincerity. Edwards set apart special days of fasting, in view of
the dreadful doom of the lost, in which he was wont to walk the floor,
weeping and wringing his hands. Hopkins fasted every Saturday. David
Brainerd gave up every refinement of civilized life to weep and pray at
the feet of hardened savages, if by any means he might save _one_. All,
by lives of eminent purity and earnestness, gave awful weight and
sanction to their words.

If we add to this statement the fact, that it was always proposed to
every inquiring soul, as an evidence of regeneration, that it should
truly and heartily accept all the ways of God thus declared right and
lovely, and from the heart submit to Him as the only just and good, it
will be seen what materials of tremendous internal conflict and
agitation were all the while working in every bosom. Almost all the
histories of religious experience of those times relate paroxysms of