God and Gravity

[JULIUS RAPER]

The good reverend's passage speaking of gravity echoes, as I recall, what
Jonathan Edwards wrote in his discussion of correspondences or visible
signs of the invisible world: that gravity signifies God's love drawing
men godward the way gravity orders the planets.   The theory of
correspondences was standard 17th, early 18th century theology.
Feidelson's book on symbolism in American thought likely covers this;
likewise Perry Miller on Puritan Mind, though I don't have my copies
beside me and it's been decades since I looked through them.  The theory
uses signs in a decidedly pre-Lacanian fashion, for what's that worth. JRR