Jonathan Edwards
Jonathan Edwards(1703-58), America's greatest theologian, wrote his Treatise concerning Religious Affections against the background of the first Great Awakening, the American equivalent of what the British call the Evangelical revival. He preached a series of sermons in 1742/3 dealing with the subject of distinguishing between true and false religious experience. The Treatise was the text of these sermons revised for publication in 1746, abridged and presented here in contemporary English. What a lot of trouble the Church would have escaped, if Christians had kept to what Scripture teaches about a true experience of salvation.