The Highest Beauty

Jonathan Edwards on God's holiness:

Holiness is a most beautiful, lovely thing.

Men are apt to drink in strange notions of holiness from their childhood, as if it were a melancholy, morose, sour, and unpleasant thing; but there is nothing in it but what is sweet and ravishingly lovely.

‘Tis the highest beauty and amiableness, vastly above all other beauties; ‘tis a divine beauty.

—Jonathan Edwards, "The Way of Holiness," in Works of Jonathan Edwards, 10:478-79.