N37435:52
The justice of God in the damnation of sinners. Illustrated in a sermon
The justice of God in the damnation of sinners. Illustrated in a sermon. : To which is added a farewell sermon; by Jonathan Edwards, A.M. Delivered at Northampton, June 22d, 1750. After the people's public rejection of him as their minister, and renouncing their relation to him as pastor of the church.
Northampton: printed by Daniel Wright & Co for Simeon Butler, 1797
Title page typeset from the transcription.
Modern spelling is a reading aid: the words are the author’s, only the spelling is modernized. Original shows the page as printed, with the transcription marks.
What stupidity and sottishness has attended your course of wickedness; which has appeared in your obstinacy under awakening dispensations of God's word and providence. And how have some of you backslidden after you have set out in religion, and quenched God's Spirit after he had been striving with you! And what unsteadiness, and slothfulness, and great misimprovement of God's strivings with you, have you been chargeable with, that have long been the subject of them!
Now, can you think when you have thus behaved yourself, that God is obliged to show you mercy? Are you not after all this ashamed to talk of its being hard with God to cast you off? Does it become one that has lived such a life to open his mouth to excuse himself, or object against God's justice in his condemnation, or to complain of it as hard in God not to give him converting and pardoning grace, and make him his child, and bestow on him eternal life! Or to talk of his duties and great pains in religion, and such like things, as if such performances were worthy to be accepted, and to draw God's heart to such a creature! If this has been your manner, does it not show how little you have considered yourself, and how little a sense you have had of your own sinfulness?
Now, can you think when you have thus behaved yourself, that God is obliged to shew you mercy? Are you not after all this ashamed to talk of its being hard with God to cast you off? Does it become one that has lived such a life to open his mouth to excuse himself, or object against God's justice in his condemnation, or to complain of it as hard in God not to give him converting and pardoning grace, and make him his child, and bestow on him eternal life! Or to talk of his duties and great pains in religion, and such like things, as if such performances were worthy to be accepted, and to draw God's heart to such a creature! If this has been your manner, does it not shew how little you have considered yourself, and how little a sense you have had of your own sinfulness?