Douglas A. Sweeney

“for Edwards, God’s Word and Spirit illuminate our worldly wisdom, rendering our knowledge more clear, beautiful and real than ever before. In a remarkable notebook entry dating from 1729, Edwards depicted this point vividly: A mind not spiritually enlightened [by means of the Bible and God’s Spirit] beholds spiritual things faintly, like fainting, fading shadows that make no lively impression on his mind, like a man that beholds the trees and things abroad in the night: the ideas ben’t strong and lively, and [are] very faint; and therefore he has but a little notion of the beauty of the face of the earth. But when the light comes to shine upon them, then the ideas appear with strength and distinctness; and he has that sense of the beauty of the trees and fields given him in a moment, which he would not have obtained by going about amongst them in the dark in a long time. A man that sets himself to reason without divine light is like a man that goes into the dark into a garden full of the most beautiful plants, and most artfully ordered, and compares things together by going from one thing to another, to feel of them and to measure the distances; but he that sees by divine light is like a man that views the garden when the sun shines upon it. There is ... a light cast upon the ideas of spiritual things in the mind of the believer, which makes them appear clear and real, which before were but faint, obscure representations.133”
― Douglas A. Sweeney, Jonathan Edwards and the Ministry of the Word: A Model of Faith and Thought