Johnathen Edwards

"Consider the fearful danger you are in; it is a great furnace of wrath, a wide and bottomless pit, full of the fire of wrath, that you are held over in the hand of that God, whose wrath is provoked and incensed as much against you, as against many of the damned in Hell. You hang by a slender thread, with the flames of divine wrath flashing about it, and ready every moment to singe it, and burn it asunder; and you have no interest in any mediator, and nothing to lay hold of to save yourself, nothing to keep off the flames of wrath, nothing of your own, nothing that you ever have done, nothing that you can do, to induce God to spare you.... The sovereign pleasure of God, for the present, stays his rough wind; otherwise it would come like a whirlwind, and you would be like the chaff of the summer threshing floor."

1. Explain the mood of this passage.
· He uses an angry persuasive mood. He is trying to scare his congregation into salvation, by comparing them to insects dangling over the fires of hell and only gods mercy keeps them from burning.
2. Using specific examples, give one example of a metaphor, one example of a simile, and one example of an allusion that Edwards uses in this passage from the sermon to elicit this particular mood. o Metaphor: Fire of Wrath o Simile: Comparing the people to chaff on the summer threshing floor o Allusion: Hell o He uses the wordings "Haste and escape for your lives, look not behind you, escape to the mountain, lest you be consumed" from the bible in Genesis.
3. What specific words (minimum of three) does he choose to make his tone clear?
· Fear, Wrath, Flames
4. What images (pictures in the listeners' mind) does Edwards use in the passage to make his tone clear? What effect do those images have on establishing the tone of the piece?
· He uses the images of burning in hell. These images establish the tone of fear.
5. In the last two paragraphs of the sermon (refer to the Investigate page of this lesson) Edwards