Puritan ministers liked to remind their congregations that a good man without grace would still end up in hell. Without grace, the model householder and citizen was hardly better than a hardened sinner. In The Nature of True Virtue, one of his last works—the culmination of his career as a theologian, a treatise conceived as a kind of Puritan summa, though never completed—Edwards elaborated this stock theme, in effect, with his customary subtlety and refinement. Beginning with the familiar contrast between self-love and the love of God, he unfolded its implications with a rigor unprecedented in the Puritan tradition.

Self-love, as Edwards understood it, goes well beyond ordinary selfishness and egoism. It is the basis of a mature conscience, the source of man-made morality. Self-love, supplemented by our natural sense of consistency, fitness, and "measure," makes us feel that we should treat others as we would like to be treated by them. Thus it gives rise to a fairly demanding standard of justice—embodied, for example, in the golden rule. "In thinking of others," we tend to "put [ourselves] in their place," and this habitual, unreflective empathy underlies our condemnation of malice, envy, and other vices that "naturally tend to the hurt of mankind." Resenting envy and malice when directed against ourselves, we are led to condemn envy and malice in general. In the same way, self-love prompts the conventional praise of "meekness, peaceableness, benevolence, charity, generosity, and the social virtues in general." It underlies the conscientious performance of "relative duties," in Edwards's phrase:

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of virtue: on the one hand, a 'moral' sense which focuses on the conformity of actions to approved standards or ends, on the other a 'non-moral' sense concerned with the power of an action (or an actor) to be effective or to achieve a desired end." At first sight, Edwards's Nature of True Virtue appears to offer a prime example of the first of these two meanings. Even here, however, the second sense of the term continues to make itself felt. In early modern thought, the two "virtues" often prove very difficult to disentangle. As Seigel notes, "The word 'virtue' ... is used to attribute some kind of value to conduct or action." Even the "non-moral" meanings of virtue, therefore, carry strong moral connotations.

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