Throughout Christianity's existence as a religion worshipping a mythical deity, any beliefs outside the norm were considered heresy and their followers tormented by True Believers. Puritans and various other Christian sects fled Europe to escape the persecution of state religions; Catholic and Protestant. None sought refuge in the Land of their Savior, although the Ottoman Empire were religiously tolerant as long as you paid your taxes. New England was the preferred destination of these Biblities and their cults flourished in the New World. The 18th Century saw the advent of the First Great Awakening or the Evangelical Revival sweeping through Britain and its thirteen North American colonies in the 1730s and 1740s. The Great Awakening promoted a fervent, emotional religiosity, while the Enlightenment encouraged the pursuit of reason in all things. The Evangelicals encouraged to abandon the Church to find their own way to the Myth with a mystical fever firing their souls to escape damnation and Hell.
The preacher Jonathan Edwards suggest to his followers that they did not need priests or ministers to find God and asked them to discover a path to appreciate the mercy of an unforgiving God as portrayed by the mainstay faiths.
Hundreds of worshippers showed up for Edwards' long-winded sermons. There was no TV. NO theater. No amusement. Only Bible-thumping oratories pitching the imaginations of the common folk into the suffering and torment of eternal damnation under the rule of Satan although the Price of Light was not mention in Edwards' famous sermon; The Justice of God in the Damnation of Sinners, which was delivered at Northampton, June 22, 1750.
Edwards had fallen out of favor and had no office within New England, yet he still had a voice as he promoted a sober, “reasonable” religion, that “the essence of all true religion lies in holy love.
He was only three years away from eternity.
SERMON I. The Justice of God in the Damnation of Sinners.
ROMANS III.19.
—That every mouth may be stopped.—
THE main subject of the doctrinal part of this epistle, is the free grace of God in the salvation of men by Jesus Christ; especially as it appears in the doctrine of justification by faith alone. And the more clearly to evince this doc|trine, and shew the reason of it, the apos|tle, in the first place, establishes that point, that no flesh living can be justified by the deeds of the law. And to prove it, he is very large and particular in shewing, that all mankind, not only Gentiles but Jews, are under sin, and so under the condemnation of the law; which is what he insists upon from the beginning of the epistle to this place. He first begins with the Gentiles; and in the first chapter shews that they are under sin, by setting forth the exceeding corruptions and horrid wicked|ness that overspread the Gentile world: And then through the second chapter, and the former part of this third chapter, to the text and following verse, he shows the same of the Jews, that they also are in the same circumstances with the Gentiles in this regard. They had an high thought of themselves, because they were God's covenant people, and circumcised, and the children of Abraham. They despised the Gentiles as polluted, condemned, and accursed; but looked on themselves, on ac|count of their external privileges, and ceremonial and moral righteousness, as a pure and holy people, and the children of God; as the apostle observes in the second chapter. It was therefore strange doctrine to them, that they also were unclean and guilty in God's sight, and under the condemnation and curse of the law.
O! what cause is here for praise? What obligations are upon you to bless the Lord, who hath dealt bountifully with you, and to magnify his holy name? What cause for you to praise him in humility, to walk humbly before God, and to be conformed to that in Ezek. xvi.63.: "That thou mayest remember and be confounded, and never open thy mouth any more, be|cause of thy shame, when I am pacified toward thee for all that thou hast done, saith the Lord God!" You should never open your mouth in boasting, or self-justification: You should lie the lower before God for his mercy to you.
O! what cause is here for praise? What obligations are upon you to bless the Lord, who hath dealt bountifully with you, and to magnify his holy name? What cause for you to praise him in humility, to walk humbly before God, and to be conformed to that in Ezek. xvi.63.: "That thou mayest remember and be confounded, and never open thy mouth any more, be|cause of thy shame, when I am pacified toward thee for all that thou hast done, saith the Lord God!" You should never open your mouth in boasting, or self-justification: You should lie the lower before God for his mercy to you. But you have reason, the more abundantly for your past sins, to open your mouth in God's praises, that they may be continually in your mouth, both here and to all eternity, for his rich, unspeakable, and sovereign mercy to you, whereby he, and he alone, hath made you to differ from others.
And it goes on and on and on for hours.
It changed no one's mind and the faithful continued to follow the easy road.
No one wanted to be hung or flogged or water-tested for heresy.
The Great Awakening survived with Methodists and Baptists bringing their flocks into the modern era laden with the falsehood of eternity and God all-forgiving.
The Goddites are have many Awakenings in the ensuing years, the Second Great Awakening, the Great Disappointment, the Rise of the KKK, the Anti-Temperance League of the 1930s and most recently the Rise of Radical Christianity devoted to seizing the souls of the Damned from Damnation. They speak in tongues, see the throes of sinners in Hell, and seek to create a heaven on earth so the Nailed God can return to this world to transport them to Paradise.
We sinners can only hope that they get their wish soon and leave us.
Pacem in Terra.
ps Edwards sermon had to have lasted over an hour.
Brimstone and torture at the hands of the Great Satan and his minions.
Once more the Believers are usurping the rights on Non-Believers and Softer Believers to force everyone to abandon sin and come to worship their Creator. They have enlisted conservative Muslims, Hassidim, Hindus as well as lapsed Latino Catholics now adherents to Evangelism. We must stand against their attempt to force a Heaven on Earth. It is next door to Hell.
