A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections

A book about how to tell true religion from its counterfeits. Edwards argues first that genuine faith is not cool assent but affection — the heart moved — and then spends the rest of the treatise refusing every easy test of whether those affections are real. Twelve signs prove nothing either way: intensity, fluency in talking about it, the order in which things happened, even confidence. Twelve more are the real marks.

He wrote it in 1746, after the Great Awakening had swept New England and then curdled. Thousands had been converted; some of them were not, and nobody could tell which. Edwards had defended the revival publicly and now had to say what in it had been the work of God and what had been enthusiasm — a judgement that cost him his own pulpit a few years later.

The twelfth sign is where the argument lands, and it is the plainest thing in the book: gracious affections show themselves in practice — in what a life actually does, over time, under pressure. Edwards gives it more room than the other eleven together, having spent three hundred pages removing every shortcut a reader might have preferred.

It is demanding and it is meant to be uncomfortable. Anyone who has wondered whether an experience of God was genuine is the reader Edwards had in mind, and he neither dismisses the question nor answers it cheaply.