Religious sermon on divine restraint and human will, referencing Jonathan Edwards and Newtonian cosmology

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 107 Page 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. HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_021353