The Value of Trials

Jonathan Edwards writes of three benefits of trials in The Religious Affections:

1. Such trials. . . above all other things, have a tendency to distinguish between true religion and false and to cause the difference between them evidently to appear.
2. They not only manifest the truth of it, but they make its genuine beauty and amiableness remarkably to appear. True virtue never appears so lovely as when it is most oppressed.
3. Another benefit that such trials are of to true religion is that they purify and increase it. They not only manifest it to be true, but also tend to refine it, and deliver it from those mixtures of that which is false which encumber and impede it.