Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from The Works of President Edwards, Vol. 4 of 8: Containing, a Treatise Concerning Religious Affections; Observations Concerning Faith; Reasons Against Dr. Watt's Notion of the Preexistence of Christ's Human Soul
NE sure test of any thinker is the courage and persistence he displays in attacking fundamental questions. Judged by this cri terion, Edwards was a thinker of stature. Not only did he produce a formidable answer to the formidable problem of the freedom of the will, but in the present Treatise Concerning Religious Af fections 1 he struggled with the central question of Puritan Prot estantism: How Shall the presence of the divine Spirit be discerned? In the Afiections Edwards dared to see a perennial problem in a parochial situation; dared to believe that religious revivals in eighteenth-century New England would pose a problem as old as religion itself. By what criteria are we to judge genuine from spurious piety? Believe not every sp1r1t, but try the spirits, the author of the First Epistle of John had warned; Edwards was to teach his contemporaries how to Obey the command. To attack this question and to return to It In several treatises demanded a serious Spirit, but to believe that so basic a problem could be involved in experiences disdainfully described by some as mere commotions, buried away in a wilderness, took courage and resolve as well.
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