An effective persuasive speaker is genuine, expressing an emotion that leaves the audience a common corridor to connect with the speaker on a personal level. Jonathan Edwards’s congregation experienced his emotion with every stroke of the frightening images he painted, of an angry God and a dim future in these “sinners” impressionable minds. Edwards’s images conveyed an immediate need for change in the Puritan’s devotion to God, if they wished to receive a fate greater than that of a “loathsome insect” dangling over a pit of fire held up only by the pity of an angry and inpatient God, who also hangs overhead with an impending storm “full of the dreadful storm, and big with thunder.” In an attempt to revive Puritanism in the presence of growing unorthodoxies, Jonathan Edwards used his emotion, qualifications, audience, and the occasion in his fire and brimstone approach to persuade his audience to repent with his sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”. Edwards a well qualified, Yale-educated Puritan, came from a long line of ministers including a well liked grandfather, and father who gave him the advantage of an audience with a high willingness to listen and trust in what he preached. As an intelligent man, Jonathan Edwards also recognized the weaknesses of his audience, the New England Puritans, during the occasion of an early eighteenth century Great Awakening including: their desire to be one of the elect, their fear of an omnipotent God, and their vulnerability