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By the twentieth century, though, the Unitarians and the skeptics had won so far as the American literary canon was concerned. Children delighted in Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.'s "The Wonderful 'One-Hoss Shay,' " which lampooned the dramatic collapse of New England Calvinism. All that was left of Edwards was his famous hell-fire sermon, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God." It was as though the only thing anyone was supposed to know about Dante was that he had written the Inferno and "entered into complicity with torture" (as David Denby says of Dante in his Great Books). Readers were not likely to recognize that Edwards's sinner, kept only by the thread of God's long-suffering from plunging into the everlasting fires, is part of a much larger picture whose beauty could be as overwhelming as its terror. Rather, in the human-affirming late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, damning Edwards as a hell-fire preacher was an important step in freeing the middle classes from their Puritan past.

During the mid twentieth century, when neo-orthodox theologians were pointing out that a civilization without sin, without God, and without intellect was a bleak prospect, Edwards and the Puritans were dramatically rehabilitated in scholarly reputation. Perry Miller led the way. Edwards, in Miller's estimation, marked a peak in American intellectual life from which there had been steady descent into anti-intellectual superficiality. (Never mind that Miller invented his own essentially modern Ed wards.) Scholarly enthusiasm for Edwards's intellectual prowess continues to inspire impressive scholarship even beyond those who find Ed wards spiritually invigorating. Yet the negative image has not been overcome among wider audiences.

The problem for most Americans is that Edwards does not fit their image of a great American or even of a good one. Twentieth-century common sense staggers in the face of many of the attitudes he took for granted. It's not that the eighteenth century lies beyond the reach of our imaginative sympathies; we can easily feel a kinship with Edwards's Massachusetts contemporary Benjamin Franklin. No, Edwards is simply on "the wrong side" of too many issues. Even many Christians find him so.

Edwards was a Puritan absolutely preoccupied with the centrality of God. He was an elitist. God had ordered everything and had ordered it as hierarchies. Elitism was, of course, the common assumption of the time, and in the eighteenth-century New England colonies, clergy had the authority of a spiritual nobility. Edwards expected to be listened to, as did others in his class. Even though he proclaimed spiritual equality, the idea of social equality hardly occurred to him. He owned African household slaves, as was common among the New England elite. Because he died in 1758, he was never touched by any American revolutionary sentiments. Indeed, al though he was part of an evangelical movement that found many surprising affinities to the Revolution, Edwards himself was as far from the postrevolutionary world as was Rip Van Winkle.

Further away, perhaps, for adding to the distance between Edwards and many later Americans, is his unrelenting attack on many of the humanistic assumptions of the Enlightenment. Be cause the United States was born under the star of Enlightenment self-confidence, Americans typically take many of its assertions as axiomatic. Their first faith is in humans, their native innocence, their natural abilities to do good, the independence of science and their own reason, their individual sovereignty, and their equality. Even many evangelical or traditionalist Christians have shared such assumptions.

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