not the technical equipment of a poet.  His verse is sing-song, his language rude and monotonous, and the lurid horrors of his material hell are more likely to move mirth than fear in a modern reader.  But there are an unmistakable vigor of imagination and a sincerity of belief in his gloomy poem which hold it far above contempt, and easily account for its universal currency among a people like the Puritans.  One stanza has been often quoted for its grim concession to unregenerate infants of “the easiest room in hell”—­a limbus infantum which even Origen need not have scrupled at.

The most authoritative expounder of New England Calvinism was Jonathan Edwards (1703-58), a native of Connecticut and a graduate of Yale, who was minister for more than twenty years over the church in Northampton, Mass., afterward missionary to the Stockbridge Indians, and at the time of his death had just been inaugurated president of Princeton College.  By virtue of his Inquiry into the Freedom of the Will, 1754, Edwards holds rank as the subtlest metaphysician of his age.  This treatise was composed to justify, on philosophical grounds, the Calvinistic doctrines of fore-ordination and election by grace, though its arguments are curiously coincident with those of the scientific necessitarians, whose conclusions are as far asunder from Edwards’s “as from the center thrice to the utmost pole.”  His writings belong to theology rather than to literature, but there is an intensity and a spiritual elevation about them, apart from the profundity and acuteness of the thought, which lift them here and there into the finer ether of purely emotional or imaginative art.  He dwelt rather upon the terrors than the comfort of the word, and his chosen themes were the dogmas of predestination, original sin, total depravity, and eternal punishment.  The titles of his sermons are significant:  Men Naturally God’s Enemies, Wrath upon the Wicked to the Uttermost, The Final Judgment, etc.  “A natural man,” he wrote in the first of these discourses, “has a heart like the heart of a devil. . . .  The heart of a natural man is as destitute of love to God as a dead, stiff, cold corpse is of vital heat.”  Perhaps the most famous of Edwards’s sermons was Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, preached at Enfield, Conn., July 8, 1741, “at a time of great awakenings,” and upon the ominous text, Their foot shall slide in due time.  “The God that holds you over the pit of hell,” runs an oft-quoted passage from this powerful denunciation of the wrath to come, “much as one holds a spider or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked. . . .  You are ten thousand times more abominable in his eyes than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours. . . .  You hang by a slender thread, with the flames of divine wrath flashing about it. . . .  If you cry to God to pity you he will be so far from pitying you in your doleful case that