ruption; but the primacy of faith over works had never been easy to explain to sober, upstanding, industrious citizens who led what appeared to be exemplary lives and expected to be rewarded accordingly. By the eighteenth century, the good people of New England, insofar as they remained Calvinists at all, almost invariably preferred the milder version of Calvinism advocated by the Dutch theologian Jacobus Arminius as early as the I590s. Preachers like Edwards, who dwelled on the absolute sovereignty of God and urged reconciliation to his inscrutable and apparently arbitrary justice as the essence of religious experience, now found themselves in a small minority. Edwards preached reconciliation to a congregation that felt no need of it, one composed of wealthy, ambitious, and respectable folk, moral by their own lights and therefore unburdened with a burning sense of sin.

Arminians took a contractual view of man's relations to God, according to which God rewarded good behavior and punished only those who freely chose a contrary course. As Edwards pointed out, they held God accountable to human standards of fair dealing, thereby compromising his sovereignty. But the idea of God's absolute sovereignty was hard to square with the prevailing political theory of the times, which held that governments themselves had to obey the law. Part of the trouble here— part of Edwards's difficulty in making himself understood—lay in his attempt to defend a thoroughly abstract, impersonal conception of God with an abundance of political imagery, which invited the objection that his God was a tyrant, jealously concerned with his own honor at the expense of his subjects' needs. The more astute among Edwards's heirs would find it necessary to abandon this political description of God, at the risk, however, of losing the distinction between the creator and his creation.

Edwards's formulation of Calvinism flew in the face of the whole trend of enlightened thought. It was incompatible not only with eighteenth‐ century political theory but with the new penology, with new conceptions of the family, and with the commercial morality of an enlightened age. At a time when absolute monarchy was everywhere discredited, Edwards made God the sovereign lord of all creation. At a time when the old penal codes were criticized for their harshness, their failure to make the punishment fit the crime, and their inability either to deter crime or to reform the criminal, Edwards upheld God's arbitrary justice. At a time

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