A sermon preached by Jonathan Edwards to his Enfield, Connecticut, congregation in July 1741, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" is particularly noted for its vivid descriptions of the torments of Hell and mankind's natural depravity. At the same time, it was also an appeal to man's need for salvation and a reminder of the agonies that awaited the unreformed. Coming during the height of the Great Awakening--a period of religious fervor in the first half of the eighteenth century--the homily was at once regarded by many as the greatest ever given on American soil and vehemently attacked by others as puritanical "fire and brimstone."
Accompanying this landmark document are sermons by ten other influential Puritans of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, among them Thomas Shepard's "The Parable of the Ten Virgins," and Cotton Mather's "An Hortatory and Necessary Address," as well as sermons by John Cotton, John Winthrop, Increase Mather, Jonathan Mayhew, Thomas Hooker, Peter Bulkeley, and Samuel Willard.
