Nor was this all. The pulpiteer of divine justice went on to heaven with the elect and with them looked down into the roaring pit below. All bowed to the inexorable will of the Eternal and even rejoiced in it. "Parents,” he said, "will sing hallelujahs as they see their children driven into the flames where they are to lie roasting forever."

None of this was metaphorical to Edwards. His theology was literal. The woman was conjured from the rib, the snake did talk with her and at his bidding she did nibble the apple that corrupted the mother of mankind with the consciousness of carnality. And the hell to pay for this disobedience was so terribly real that sinners struck down in Northampton felt its heat.

The revival became epidemic, "like a distemper" its contemporary critics said, only instead of putting people to flight it drew them into its convulsive throes. Overwhelmed by its power, they swooned, fell into trances, beheld visions like those of delirium tremens and babbled incoherently of things beyond mortal ken.

Emerging from the first stage of fear and anguish, the "victorious" ones exulted in their own damnation as Edwards lashed them into acknowledgment of the triumphant justice of God. But some went insane. This extremity did not worry Edwards, who calmly said:

"We cannot determine how great a calamity distraction is, considered with all its consequences, and all that might have been consequent if the distraction had not happened; nor indeed whether, thus considered, it be any calamity at all, or whether it be not a mercy, by preventing some great sin."

Doubtless the zealous evangelist was thinking of the Scriptural injunction to pluck out the offending eye. On this score one wretched man tried to cut his throat and set

the example for many others, some of whom, it is not recorded how many, succeeded in ending their lives.

Of one suicide it was said that he was so concerned about his soul that he "durst entertain no hope." And it was added that "after this multitudes in this and other towns seemed to have it strongly suggested to them and pressed upon them to do as this person had done as if somebody had spoken to them, saying: 'Cut your own throat! Now is a good opportunity! Now! Now!'"

Those who survived the prescribed course of conversion, however, did find peace,-peace in the acceptance of the judgment of God and resignation to the disposal of God. For Edwards conceded that those "elected from eternity according to God's good pleasure" would be saved.

The choice was all God's. His liberty in making it was "perfect" and "just," an attribute of His "complete sovereignty." He could inflict damnation on the instant or defer it. But He also aimed "to satisfy His infinite benevolence by the bestowment of a good infinitely valuable because eternal." There was no appeal to His justice, which only condemned, but this had to be admitted as a prerequisite to an appeal to His mercy through Christ.

But it was not so much the love of God as the wrath of God that went out on winged words day and night from the pulpit of Northampton from the first of January to the last of May, 1735, and spread to South Hadley, Deerfield, Hatfield, West Springfield, Longmeadow, Enfield, Hadley Old Town and Northfield, the eventual home of Dwight L. Moody.

On to Connecticut the widening fire of the Edwardean hell advanced. Its consuming power was first felt in Windsor. It was "remarkable" at East Windsor and "wonderful"

at Coventry. "Similar scenes" were enacted at Lebanon, Durham, Stratford, Ripton, Guilford, Mansfield, Tolland, Hebron, Bolton, Preston, Groton, Woodbury and New Haven where the tumult invaded the quiet stately halls of Yale.

Even so the message sped, finding an echo or at least a parallel in the New Jersey "awakening" under William and Gilbert Tennent. In Northampton Edwards alone gathered three hundred converts in half a year, converts whom he had led through the fiery ordeal to the depths of all-engulfing despair. Then they knew their hell. Then they felt their hell. And then they found their God.

These "legal distresses," Edwards says in his retrospective "Narrative of Surprising Conversions," were succeeded by a "special and delightful manifestation of the grace of God-a comfortable and sweet view of a merciful God." In fact, he remarks that in some converts "the first sight of their just desert of hell, and of God's sovereignty with respect to their salvation, and a discovery of sufficient grace, are so near that they seemed to go, as it were, together."

The first recorded redemption is that of a young woman of Northampton, quaintly described as having been "notorious as a leader in scenes of gayety and rustic dissipation." It may be that her worst offenses were playing a good hand at euchre or dancing a lively step in a quadrille. Edwards further vouchsafes that she was "one of the greatest company-keepers in town" and even this might have meant merely that she was willing to take the arm of too many a gallant and often was "seen" home after nine o'clock curfew.

Be all this as it may, Edwards say of this Magdalenian maid:

"When she came to me, I had never heard that she had become in any way serious, but by the conversation I had with her it appeared to me that what she then gave an account of was a glorious work of God."

Humble and penitent as the young lady was, the divine had fears that "the work of conversion in a person of such a character would give it a bad name."

"But the event was the reverse to a wonderful degree," he declares. "The news of it seemed to spread like a flash of lightning upon the hearts of the young people all over the town and many others. Many went to talk with her concerning what she had met with, and what appeared in her seemed to be to the satisfaction of all that did so."

In other words, the tale of the once naughty miss was tremendously interesting-especially the confession and then the descent into damnation-as it brought her through the fire to the mercy seat. It was an experience to be shared, paralleled, and improved upon and it was

even so.

One woman of a quiet rational family, whose education had been opposed to such evangelical "enthusiasm," became converted. She was "much wrought up and read her Bible almost constantly to find relief for her distressed soul," Edwards tells us.

"Her terror was great that she had sinned against God and for three days she trembled in fear of His wrath. Then a calmness came over her when she felt that she had discovered Christ. Two days later her soul was filled with distress for Christless persons and she wanted her brother to carry her from house to house to warn sinners. (The brother would not thus oblige her.) She had many extraordinary discoveries of the glory of God, sensing Him in