The New Year Quote by Jonathan Edwards

Austere and almost combative, Edwards frames faith not as a mood but as a contract signed in solitude. The blunt numbering does more than organize piety; it mimics legal language, turning devotion into a binding statute. Resolution One plants the flag: life is to be aimed, not drifted. Resolution Two sharpens the blade: even if the crowd defects, the vow holds. The subtext is less “personal inspiration” than spiritual triage in an age Edwards believed was thick with complacency and self-deception.

Context matters. Edwards, a major voice of the First Great Awakening, preached in a colonial world where church attendance could be social habit as much as conviction. Revivalism erupted amid that nominal religion, demanding an inward, felt encounter with God. These lines read like a preemptive strike against performative belief: don’t borrow your seriousness from other people. If your neighbors cool off, if your family shrugs, if the village consensus turns lukewarm, your obligation does not.

The intent is also psychological. “If no one else does” anticipates isolation, shame, the fear of being excessive. Edwards is rehearsing loneliness so it won’t surprise him. It’s a strategy for moral endurance: build a self that can withstand disapproval. There’s a hard Protestant individualism here, but not the modern “be yourself” variety; it’s the self as accountable creature, standing before an all-seeing judge.

The rhetoric works because it refuses comfort. It offers certainty at the price of social belonging, and in doing so reveals the real engine of Edwards’s project: to make faith costly enough that it can’t be faked.