The preaching of those times was animated by an unflinching consistency which never shrank from carrying an idea to its remotest logical verge.  The sufferings of the lost were not kept from view, but proclaimed with a terrible power.  Dr. Hopkins boldly asserts, that “all the use which God will have for them is to suffer; this is all the end they can answer; therefore all their faculties, and their whole capacities, will be employed and used for this end....  The body can by omnipotence be made capable of suffering the greatest imaginable pain, without producing dissolution, or abating the least degree of life or 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 opposition to God and fierce rebellion, expressed in language which appalls the very soul,—­followed, at length, by mysterious elevations of faith and reactions of confiding love, the result of Divine interposition, which carried the soul far above the region of the intellect, into that of direct spiritual intuition.

President Edwards records that he was once in this state of enmity,—­that the facts of the Divine administration seemed horrible to him,—­and that this opposition was overcome by no course of reasoning, but by an “inward and sweet sense,” which came to him once when walking alone in the fields, and, looking up into the blue sky, he saw the blending of the Divine majesty with a calm, sweet, and almost infinite meekness.