Quotes from Jonathan Edwards

What we call a vice is actually an inability to recognize what has the greatest value.

Your wickedness makes you as it were heavy as lead, and to tend downwards with great weight and pressure towards hell; and if God should let you go, you would immediately sink and swiftly descend and plunge into the bottomless gulf, and your healthy constitution, and your own care and prudence, and best contrivance, and all your righteousness, would have no more influence to uphold you and keep you out of hell than a spider's web would have to stop a falling rock.

So we read, in Heb. xiii. 17, of ministers being rulers in the house of God, "that watch for souls, as those that must give account." And we see by the forementioned Luke xiv., that ministers must give an account to their master, not only of their own behavior in the discharge of their office, but also of their people's reception of them, and of the treatment they have met with among them. And

In short, were a man to "give all his goods to feed the poor, and his body to be burned," out of zeal to promote some public good, yet without love to God, without benevolent attachment to universal being, he is morally nothing, or worse than nothing.

If God should only withdraw his hand from the floodgate, it would immediately fly open, and the fiery floods of the fierceness and wrath of God would rush forth with inconceivable fury, and would come upon you with omnipotent power; and if your strength were ten thousand times greater than it is, yea, ten thousand times greater than the strength of the stoutest, sturdiest devil in hell, it would be nothing to withstand or endure it. The

O! one hour with God infinitely exceeds all the pleasures and delights of this lower world.

Is it right for God to be pleased when others hold him in contempt? Is it fitting that he be joyful when his created beings despise him? Of course not! To the contrary, it's fitting and proper for God to be displeased when his created beings hold him in contempt. But this means that it's also fitting and proper for him to be pleased when appropriate love, esteem, and honor are given to him.

As there is no true religion where there is nothing else but affection, so there is no true religion where there is no religious affection.

And many other places to the like purpose. And therefore men can be justified by their words, no otherwise than as evidences or manifestations of what is in the heart. And it is thus that Christ speaks of the words in this very place, as is evident by the context, ver. 34, 35. "Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh. A good man out of the good treasure of the heart," &c. The words

however you may have reformed your life in many things, and may have had religious affections, and may keep up a form of religion in your families and closets, and in the house of God, and may be strict in it), you are thus in the hands of an angry God; 'tis nothing but his mere pleasure that keeps you from being this moment swallowed up in everlasting destruction. However

They justify themselves with their inability; and the design and end of the law, as a school-master to fit them for Christ, is defeated.

There shall be a glorious reward to faithful ministers: to those who have been successful: Dan. xii. 3, "And they that be wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament; and they that turn many to righteousness as the stars forever and ever;" and also to those who have been faithful, and yet not successful: Isa. xlix. 4, "Then I said, I have labored in vain, I have spent my strength for nought: yet surely my judgment is with the Lord, and my reward with my God.