claim to God's favor, and gratitude has to be conceived, accordingly, not as an appropriate acknowledgment of the answer to our prayers, so to speak, but as the acknowledgment of God's sovereign but life-giving power to order things as he pleased, without "giving any account of any of his matters," as Edwards put it in "The Justice of God."

Known today mainly for his famous sermon "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God"—usually considered the epitome of hellfire preaching, in which God is conceived in grossly personal terms—Edwards in fact stripped God of personal attributes, precisely by insisting on his absolute sovereignty (and also by stressing his revelation of himself in nature). God was simply "being in general." As such, he "was absolutely perfect, and infinitely wise, and the fountain of all wisdom," and it was therefore "meet ... that he should make himself his end, and that he should make nothing but his own wisdom his rule in pursuing that end, without asking leave or counsel of any." Virtue, then, lay in the joyous affirmation of the beauty and justice of such a God (not, however, in a merely grudging acquiescence to his authority). Like Milton, Edwards associated virtue with a certain "predisposition and will," as he put it, not with the performance of good deeds. The faith that moved mountains, braved the deep, and tamed the thunder, virtue had more to do with courage and resolution—with an exuberance of spirit, a superabundant vitality—than with a scrupulous reckoning of one's obligations to others. ^*

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sumably familiar and therefore acceptable to his Northampton congregation, only in order to carry his argument to a conclusion directly at odds with the eighteenth‐ century idea of God as a moral bookkeeper, carefully adjusting the sentence to the crime. The absolute and unconditional injunction to love God, as Edwards saw it, made the refusal to love God "infinitely heinous, and so deserving of infinite punishment." Edwards's imagery probably defeated its own purpose. By using the language of crime and punishment, he invited the objection that all crimes are relative and contingent, that none (however reprehensible) deserve an eternity of suffering, and that any God who could inflict such a sentence was nothing more than a petty tyrant. Edwards, his enemies said, equated sin with the crime of lèse majesté—no crime at all, by enlightened eighteenth-century standards of constitutional monarchy.

*	In an interesting article in the Dictionary of the History of Ideas, "Virtù in and since the Renaissance," Jerrold E. Seigel analyzes the "fundamental division among meanings

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