Seventeenth-Century New England (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
∑∞∫ Notes to Pages 27–28
3. Timothy Edwards, sermon on Acts 16:29–30, pp. 11–12, 1695, Washington University Library, quoted in Kenneth Minkema, ''The Edwardses: A Ministerial Family in Eighteenth-Century New England'' (Ph.D. diss., University of Connecticut, 1988), 82. See 80–95, re Timothy Edwards' views on steps toward salvation. Other information on Timothy Edwards is drawn from Minkema, passim.
4. Charles Hambrick-Stowe, The Practice of Piety: Puritan Devotional Disciplines in Seventeenth-Century New England (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 219–21. See ibid., 219–41, on Puritan preparation for death. 5. Exercises on endpapers of Timothy Edwards, sermon on I Kings 2:2, February 7, 1744/45, Connecticut Historical Society, Hartford, quoted in Minkema, ''Edwardses,'' 155. Cf. ibid., 153–55 re the Edwardses' home life.
6. Hambrick-Stowe, Practice of Piety, 219. Erik R. Seeman, Pious Persuasions: Laity and Clergy in Eighteenth-Century New England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 52–53, finds that eighteenth-century New England laypeople almost always believed their own dead children were in heaven. Seeman understates, however, the degree to which the clergy, specifically Jonathan Edwards himself, allowed room for salvation of infants. As Gerald McDermott, Jonathan Edwards Confronts the Gods: Christian Theology, Enlightenment Religion, and Non-Christian Faiths (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 137, points out, Edwards says in his Miscellany no. 78 that infants may be regenerate already at birth.
7. Kenneth P. Minkema, ''The East Windsor Conversion Relations, 1700–1725,'' Connecticut Historical Society Bulletin 51 (winter 1986): 30.
8. Timothy Edwards, sermon on Acts 16:29–30, p. 5, quoted in Minkema, ''Edwardses,'' 83. The influential Puritan writer William Perkins (1558–1602) referred to this stage as ''legal terrors'' brought on by a sense of total unworthiness to keep God's law. See Norman Pettit, The Heart Prepared: Grace and Conversion in Puritan Spiritual Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), esp. 65; Edmund S. Morgan, Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea (New York: New York University Press, 1963), esp. 68; and Janice Knight, Orthodoxies in Massachusetts: Rereading American Puritanism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994). These accounts deal with the varieties of Puritan opinions, a point Knight emphasizes. On Timothy Edwards' insistence on this step, see chapter 3.
9. Minkema, ''East Windsor Relations,'' 13, summarizes the usual paradigm as involving four steps. I have compressed the second, ''realization of God's anger against sin'' (when one backslid into sin) and ''a recognition that God has every right to condemn sinners to hell.'' The steps were not exact. Cf. idem, 3–66. ''Light'' and ''glorious change'' are from Timothy Edwards' Theological Notebook, reflections on Richard Baxter, Connecticut Historical Society, as quoted in Minkema, ''Edwardses,'' 83. The rest is from New England's most often used authoritative creed, the Westminster Confession of Faith, chaps. 12–15. The confession can be found, among other places, in Creeds of the Churches, 3d ed., ed., John Leith (Atlanta: John Knox, 1982).
10. William K. B. Stoever, ''A Faire and Easie Way to Heaven'': Covenant Theology and Antinomianism in Early Massachusetts (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1978), 63–67 and passim, provides a lucid account of the subtleties of the New England debates. Opinions varied, of course, as in the Antinomian controversy, over the subtleties of the relation between law and grace. The Edwardses' views followed the dominant opinions of New England clergy, here summarized.