Then to others the thought of God’s wrath suggests cruelty. They think, perhaps, of what they have been told about Jonathan Edwards’s famous gospel sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” which God used to bring awakening to the town of Enfield, in New England, in 1741. In this sermon Edwards, enlarging on his theme that “natural men are held in the hand of God over the pit of hell,” used some most vivid furnace imagery to make his congregation feel the horror of their position
