Harvard University Press, 1989), 248–50.
Notes to Pages 457–65 ∑Ω≥
19. Entry 652, Works, 18: 192–93. 20. Original Sin, Works, 3: 435–37. Edwards' The Great Christian Doctrine of Original Sin was the least influential of his major theological works. In the nineteenth century even some of his admirers, such as the conservative Reformed theologians at Princeton Theological Seminary, were critical of his metaphysical theories regarding the divinely constituted identity of the race. See Joseph A. Conforti, Jonathan Edwards, Religious Tradition, and American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 122–23.
21. Peter Gay, A Loss of Mastery: Puritan Historians in Colonial America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), 91–116. Gay was challenging the emphases of Perry Miller, Jonathan Edwards (New York: William Sloan, 1949), who provides a powerful, if overstated, account of Edwards as a modern critic of the assumptions of modernity.
22. Mark A. Noll, America's God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), provides an excellent recent account.
chapter 28. Challenging the Presumptions of the Age
1. Edwards to Thomas Foxcroft, February 11, 1757, Works, 16: 696. 2. Edwards had developed the basic argument in earlier Miscellanies, such as nos. 445, 461 (1729–30) Works, 13, and 702 (1736–37), Works, 18. 3. Bellamy, for instance, published his sermon on The Wisdom of God in Permission of Sin in 1758, which Edwards had likely read and approved before he left Stockbridge. See Joseph Bellamy, Sermons upon the Following Subjects, viz. The Divinity of Christ, The Millenium, The Wisdom of God in the Permission of Sin (Boston, 1758).
4. Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man, ed. Maynard Mack ((London: Methuen, 1950 [1734]), Epistle 1, ll. 289–94, pp. 50–51; Epistle, 3, ll. 109–14, p. 103.
5. For some comparisons of Edwards with Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716), see Paul Ramsey, ''Introduction,'' Works, 1: 113–17.
6. Edwards uses the phrase ''our modern freethinkers'' in a reference to the antagonists to whom the dissertation is addressed, Concerning the End for Which God Created the World, Works, 8: 536.
7. See An Unpublished Essay of Edwards on the Trinity, ed. George P. Fisher (New York: Scribner's, 1903).
8. Concerning the End, Works, 8: 530, cf. 526–30. 9. Ibid., 531. 10. Ibid., 533 (quotation) and 534. 11. Norman Fiering, Jonathan Edwards's Moral Thought and Its British Context (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981), provides by far the most comprehensive account of the context for Edwards' moral thought. Equally important are Paul Ramsey's extensive editorial comments, Works, 8, including his introduction, notes on the text, and lengthy appendices, especially appendix 2, ''Jonathan Edwards on Moral Sense, and the Sentimentalists,'' 689–705, in which he takes serious issue with Fiering. My account is informed by these and many other works, though I do not think it follows any one closely, except as indicated.
12. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 248–50.
13. Francis Hutcheson, A Short Introduction to Moral Philosophy (Glasgow, 1747), 16–17.