Garrett Hall Ms. Roberts English 3 Honors February 1, 2013 Imagery in Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God Jonathan Edwards uses fear as his motivation in his sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” by using gruesome imagery to elicit his audience to be born again. Edwards gives his audience two choices, God and to be reborn again or death and hell to follow. This feeling of hopelessness makes his audience scared of their choices, if they in fact do choose the wrong thing. In the excerpt, Edwards states “Your wickedness makes you as it were heavy as lead, and to tend downward with great weight and pressure toward hell; and if god should let you go, you would immediately sink and swiftly descend and plunge into the bottomless gulf, and your healthy constitution, and your own care and prudence, and best contrivance, and all your righteousness, would have no more influence to uphold you and keep you out of hell, than a spider’s web would have to stop a fallen rock (Edwards 47)”. This is a metaphor to vividly depict the overall weakness and meagerness of humans.
Edwards uses a stricter and more straight up approach at speaking to his audience. He uses the word “You” a lot to show that it affects each and every one of them individually. This sermon in detail explains what happens to you with your sins and God. For example, using figurative language he says, “Your Wickedness makes you as it were heavy as Lead, ...”. This sentence shows how sins affect you in life.
He would look at all the funny looking people in church and concentrate on them instead of what he was supposed to hear. Lewis writes, “Provided that any of those neighbors sing out of tune, or have boots that squeak, or double chins, or odd clothes, the patient will quite easily believe that their religion must therefore be somehow ridiculous”. I think that this book teaches how Satan can use things that were meant for good, like the church, to attack us spiritually. Prayer is another thing that Screwtape says is a means of attack. A person may perceive a certain image of what God is, like a trinket or something they have seen that reminds them of God.
One of his most powerful sermons, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”, used many rhetorical strategies to persuade his unsaved audience to become saved to avoid the torment of hell. One productive approach that was substantial in scaring the unsaved people in the audience is through the use of imagery. Imagery is the usage of words to make an image in the mind of the listener(s); with which Edwards uses adequately to defend his reason. In his case, he utilizes this technique to penetrate the hearts and minds to everyone present. This strategy terrifies his listeners into following his directions and method of redemption.
Owen then seeks to convince the reader that it is not honourable or right to die for your country, as the title of the poem suggests so. He does this very successfully by presenting his very own opinion through a series of horrific and blood gorging imagery to show that the war is not honourable to die for. In stanza one, Owen describes the physical state of the soldiers to allow the reader to visualise and sense the cruel reality of how the war was for them. Their situation is made more realistic through the use of first person plural as displayed in the line “we cursed through the sludge”. Unexpected and contrasting descriptions of the soldiers such as referring to them as “bent double, like old beggars under sacks”, and associating them with animals by referring to them as “blood shod”, also changes the reader’s perception of what conditions were like during the war.
'Humiliation. In The Scarlett Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne adeptly employs rhetorical devices such as allusion, syntax, metaphor, irony and imagery. He dares to probe the deleterious nature of revenge and the duplicity of character in the Puritan society circa the late 1600’s. The Biblical allusions found in the Scarlet Letter are so great in number to the point of being obvious. First, Hester and Dimmesdale are comparative to Adam and Eve; after committing the infraction, she is cast out of the Puritan community and both are forced to live under the stress of their guilt and work to ease their consciences (Faira 1).
All people are born sinners. Natural men must be reborn to be saved; “…hell is waiting for them…” (Edwards 46). These views are that of Jonathan Edwards in Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. Edwards belonged to a religion that was lingering and was close to disappearing due to the growing numbers of Christians, so he used figurative language and imagery in order to scare people back into the Puritan way of life. “Your wickedness makes you as it were heavy as lead, and to tend downward with great weight and pressure toward hell.” (Edwards 47).
Edward’s diction and tone gives his listeners and readers an eerie feeling, a fear for sin, and an awakening for the wrath of God about to come. On the other hand, there is Equiano, who persuades the horrors of slavery in attempt to abolish the slave trade. He appeals to our senses with phrases such as “galling of the chains”, “shrieks of the women” and “groans of the dying” (73), giving his audience a feeling of sympathy. With these statements he makes people question the morality of the situation, in order to get his point across, that slavery brutalizes everyone; the slaves, their overseers, plantation wives, and the whole of
They believed that god was punishing humans for their sins and that god uses plagues, miserable famines, conflicts, wars and others to make people suffer who have done any harm(Answers). During the late 1340’s, this reason shows that civilians were extremely religious which made them believe that this was true since they thought god was involved in everything.Also, it shows the lack of knowledge in medicine in the world because they were going clueless on what caused the disease. This made the belief more common which encouraged churches and others to believe that the most ideal and practical answer was that they were being tested on for their cruelty. Those who thought God was disciplining them thought that the cure was to pray and punish themselves until they got back on God’s good side which reapplies to the idea of people being super religious during the 1300’s. Religiously Committed Catholics would whip themselves and would cry for God’s forgiveness showing that they believed this belief by a lot.
“ I will cause fear....do I swear inextinguishable hatred....I will work at your destruction....you shall curse the hour of your birth....fiendish rage animated him ”. (Pages 133 and 134 Lines 32-3) Between these two passages, it is seen that the creature is loving and evil at the same time. The creature was made to love and to be able to have feelings just as a human being; despite this, he ultimately chooses the path of evil instead of good. To pick a life of evil instead of good is terrible. This further shows that the wretch is a monster because a life full of revenge and evil is