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fire.” For the present God restrained
human wickedness “by his mighty
power, as he does the raging waves of
the troubled sea,” but, if God should
withdraw that restraining power,
humanity’s willful self-regard would
overturn nature. The most dangerous
fire in creation was not, therefore, the
fire of hell but rather the hellfire bursting
forth from an unrestrained human will:
“The corruption of the heart of man is a
thing that is immoderate and boundless
in its fury; and while wicked men live
here, it is like fire pent up by God’s
restraints,” but, should God ever relax
his governance, humanity’s boundless
fury “would set on fire the course of
nature.”

The turmoil stirred by human
willfulness, like a violent storm at sea,
threatened to capsize the ark of the
universe, and the earth responded to this
threat in a terrifying version of the
pathetic fallacy, in which not empathy
but enmity arose between humans and
their natural environment.
Consequently, except for “the sovereign
pleasure of God, the earth would not
bear you one moment,” and Edwards
warned the Enfield congregation that
“the creation groans with you” and
resented its subservience to human
usurpation: “the sun don’t willingly
shine upon you to give you light to serve
sin and Satan; the earth don’t willingly
yield her increase to satisfy your lusts;
nor is it willingly a stage for your
wickedness to be acted upon; the air
don’t willingly serve you for breath to
maintain the flame of life in your vitals,
while you spend your life in the service
of God’s enemies. God’s creatures are
good, and were made for men to serve
God with, and do not willingly subserve
to any other purpose, and groan when
they are abused to purposes so directly

contrary to their nature and end.” A
rebellious humanity antagonized the rest
of creation, “and the world would spew
you out, were it not for the sovereign
hand of him who hath subjected it in
hope.”

The just order of the cosmos
would rightly destroy humanity for its
willful rebellion against the order of the
whole, and the fact that this had not
already happened was the expression of
something like the self-restraining mercy
of a monarch who does not order the
execution of a traitor who has offended
the royal honor: “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 mere 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.”

The Great Awakening was
coterminous and interactive with the
eighteenth century development of the
modern physical sciences, especially
building on the work of Isaac Newton
(1642-1727). Edwards’s assumptions
about the harmonious order of creation
combined the science of his day with the
aristocratic social order of eighteenth-
century society. In warning the town of
Enfield that it had transgressed the
cosmic order, Williams was also
asserting that it had violated the societal
aspect of that order; as minister, he
called the town to task for both
violations.

Conclusion

Edwards imagined the
Newtonian universe as an aristocratic
social hierarchy held in harmony by
sovereign law, at once moral and natural.

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