"America's Greatest Philosopher/Theologian" Finding "Sweetness"

Today I came across the following in Jonathan Edwards' Diary: 

“Lord’s day, Dec. 26. Felt much sweetness and tenderness in prayer, especially my whole soul seemed to love my worst enemies, and was enabled to pray for those that are strangers and enemies to God with a great degree of softness and pathetic fervour. In the evening, rode from New-Haven to Branford, after I had kneeled down and prayed with a number of dear christian friends in a very retired place in the woods, and so parted.
“Monday, Dec. 27. Enjoyed a precious season indeed; had a sweet melting sense of divine things, of the pure spirituality of the religion of Christ Jesus. In the evening, I preached from Matt. 6:33. ‘But seek ye first,’ &c. with much freedom, and sweet power and pungency: the presence of God attended our meeting. O the sweetness, the tenderness I felt in my soul! if ever I felt the temper of Christ, I had some sense of it now. Blessed be my God, I have seldom enjoyed a more comfortable and profitable day than this. O that I could spend all my time for God!" 2:331.

Many more days could be found with similar entries which suggests to me the following

First: Whatever may be said about Edwards' great mind and his skill as theologian, it is clear from this little typical cross-section of his life that his religion placed a high priority on feeling.  His formal proof of this, and encyclopedic analysis of the subject, may be found in his incomparable treatise, The Religious Affections ("Doct. True religion, in great part, consists in holy affections"), but my point here is that this was not mere theory with him.  Look again at the terms: "felt much sweetness and tenderness," "seemed to love my worst enemies" (i.e., this indicates feelings of love for them, not merely the common mythical notion of love as a willful determination to do them good regardless of feeling), "softness and pathetic fervour," "sweet melting sense," "sweet power and pungency," "O the sweetness, the tenderness," and a "felt . . . temper of Christ."  This should not be surprising; Edwards, no more than anyone else has reason to be, was a man obsessed with God.  He had received into his heart a "divine and supernatural light" by which he had come to a spiritual apprehension of the beauty of Christ, had "tasted that the Lord is gracious" through the word of the gospel, and, believing in Him had come to "rejoice with joy unspeakable and full of glory."  My point is that for this most eminent of defenders of the old biblical Calvinistic orthodoxy, this greatest of "philosopher theologians." Christianity was a deeply personal, heart-felt, experiential relationship with God in Christ through the Holy Spirit.

Second: This made him a man of prayer.  Real prayer.  In prayer he was keenly sensible of his desperate need of the assistance of the Holy Spirit even to pray, joyfully sensible of that assistance when present, and painfully sensible of its absence.  This assistance was not merely a matter of personal happiness, it was a sine qua non for his public ministry.  Like his friend, George Whitefield, he earnestly coveted a "sense" of God's presence, his "anointing" upon the occasions of public ministry, his preaching and the public prayers.  My point: they, Edwards, Whitefield, and their fellows in the Great Awakening, did not merely, dutifully, faithfully, observe the "means of grace" with a conviction that they were God's normal way of meeting with His people,  No, much more than that they understood that God's blessing on those means, those ministrations, were sovereignly bestowed according to His will and were careful not to take them for granted.  God had promised to bless His church, but that blessing was not so tied to the means of grace that the means worked "ex opere operato."  In other words, the grace of God coming through the means of grace was not so tied to those means as to always render them effectual per se, but they were made effectual by that grace as it was bestowed according to His sovereign occasional and distinguishing administrations.  Some modern opponents of revivals argue that God works through the normal means of grace and that therefore revivals are not to be desired or expected.  This is more akin to a sacerdotal view of the means of grace than a Reformed view, which would always recognize the sovereign and free will of God in the exercise of His power and the bestowal of His favor.
 
Thirdly, let us examine ourselves as to our own spiritual experience.  A few days after writing this, Edwards writes of "spiritual conflicts . . . unspeakably dreadful, heavier than the mountains and overflowing floods. I seemed enclosed, as it were, in hell itself: I was deprived of all sense of God, even of the being of a God; and that was my misery."  In a few days more, this was all past and Edwards was enjoying the sweet light of God's countenance again.  Let's face it, we do not like the ups and downs.  However, I wonder sometimes (I sense the tendency in myself and detect it in comments from pulpits and in Christian conversation) whether we have not talked ourselves out of feeling anything.  The older writers used to speak, like Edwards, of being under "desertions."  I wonder if under our modern teaching we would know the difference or would simply tell ourselves we live by faith without taking any pains to determine whether there might be some reason for such a divine exercise or without bestirring ourselves to have the light of His countenance restored to our souls.  We have been so well coached not to walk by feeling but by faith that we have, I fear, become content to feel nothing, to expect nothing, and even to be very suspicious of feeling anything so long as our doctrine is right and our works are good.  Edwards was as well aware as we, or much more than we, that there are natural changes in our physical/psychical "frames," that we have deceitful hearts, that there are "seducing spirits." and many other things, God-ordained things, that affect our feelings, and we must be on guard.  Even so, as he unassailably demonstrates in "Religious Affections," Christians are meant to feel many things.  Strongly. Toward God and toward man.