Anne Bradstreet Vs Edwards

The Puritan faith varied greatly between its public and private members during the 17th and 18th century. Anne Bradstreet shows the private side of the Puritan faith in her poem and Jonathan Edwards shows the public side of the Puritan faith. Bradstreet was a very successful colonial poet during the mid to late 17th century, while Edwards was a Puritan preacher who led the Great Awakening about seventy years after Bradstreet, in the 1730s and 1740s. Bradstreet’s poem “Upon the Burning of Our House,” written in 1666, and Edwards’s sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” given in 1741, reveal the Puritan views on loving God. Although Bradstreet and Edwards both believe in an omnipotent God, Edwards believes that people should fear God and His unimaginable wrath toward them, while Bradstreet believes that God
Bradstreet shows this love for God above all else when she says, “My hope and treasures lies above”(54). After her house-symbolizing her material life on earth-burnt down, Bradstreet realizes that nothing in this world is greater than that of heaven and that everything she desires in life is in heaven with God.“And to my God my heart did cry” (Bradstreet 8) reveals two very important aspects of Bradstreet’s belief. First, she wakes up, confused, inside of a burning house, but her first thought is to pray to God. This prayer shows how greatly Bradstreet trusts God to help her in her times of need and how often she thinks about God to pray to him in this confusing moment. Second, Bradstreet’s very personal relationship with God is revealed through the words “my God.” By using the word “my,” Bradstreet is showing that she loves God and is as close to him as she is to her husband, who she would refer to as “my husband.” In her poems, Bradstreet reveals that she loves and trusts God, as well as that she has a very close, personal relationship with