So that thus it is, that the natural men are held in the hand of God over the pit of hell; they have deserved the fiery pit, and are already sentenced to it; and God is dreadfully provoked, his anger is as great towards them as to those that are actually suffering the executions of the fierceness of his wrath in hell, and they have done nothing in the least, to appease or abate that anger, neither is God in the least bound by any promise to hold them up one moment; the devil is waiting for them, hell is gaping for them, the flames gather and flash about them, and would fain lay hold on them and swallow them up; the fire pent up in their own hearts is struggling to break out; and they have no interest in any Mediator, there are no means within reach that can be any security to them. (Edwards 97)
Obviously Jonathan Edwards was not very good with grammar because he could have easily split that first sentence up into enough sentences to make up a good sized paragraph. If I have ever seen a run-on sentence, this would be one of the prime examples of what NOT to do. I guess it is not that bad considering he wrote this in the eighteenth century when most people were not able to read or write, and very rarely both.
Anyway, I guess I will stop ranting about his writing style. He is the one that was a nationally recognized author in his time after all. There are a few parallels that I can draw between Jonathan Edward’s Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God and Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. On the surface, the easiest connection would be the fact that they both have to do with religion. Both are equally ridiculous. Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God is just trying to scare people into being “good” Christians by telling them things like:
The bow of God’s wrath is bent, and the arrow mad 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. (Edwards 98)
The technique might have worked pretty well for a while, but I do not think that people would put up with someone like that in today’s society. In The Crucible, all of the people who were thought to be “witches” were only thought to be because two girls start sprouting random names as to make themselves seem like gifts from God (Miller 48). Another thing that seems very strange today would be the fact that if they plead guilty, they were jailed for life, but if they did not confess to their supposed crimes, they were hanged. Seemed like a lose-lose situation for those accused. All because some girls wanted to dance in the woods and were too afraied to admit it. That in and of itself would put the blame back onto the society for making things so boring that people had to resort to things like this; ergo, the blame goes back to people like Jonathan Edwards for making anything that didn’t have to do with church or God a deadly sin.
Edwards, Jonathan. "From Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God." Comp. Jeffrey D. Wilhelm, Ph.D. and Douglas Fisher, Ph.D. Glencoe Literature. American Literature ed. Columbus: McGraw-Hill Companies, 2009. 97-99. Print.
Miller, Arthur. The Crucible. New York, NY: Penguin, 1996. Print.
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