Which specific metaphors and similes in the sermon "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" were probably the most persuasive?

Two
metaphors (comparisons that do not use like or as) in Edwards's sermon that probably were
particularly effective are as follows:

The corruption of
the heart of the man is immoderate and boundless in its fury; and while wicked men live here, it
is like fire pent up by the course of nature; and as the heart is now a sink of sin, so, if sin
was not restrained, it would immediately turn the soul into a fiery oven, or furnace of fire and
brimstone.

Fire is a word we immediately understand, and
brimstone is sulfur that has been struck by lightning so that it smokes and gives off a
stinking, unpleasant odor. In the Book of Revelation, there is a lake of brimstone into which
Satan and his followers are cast by God. In Genesis, God destroys Sodom and Gomorrah (sinful
towns) with fire and brimstone.

In the quote above, the heart of a sinful
person, who has not turned to Jesus, is compared to fiery oven that would burn the entire person
up immediately if he did not restrain his evil impulses. A sinful soulthat could explode and
engulf our bodies in the agony of fire and brimstone, as if we had doused ourselves with
gasoline and lit a matchis not a soul we want to have.

A quote I gravitate
toward every time I write about this sermon is the following:

Unconverted men walk over the pit of hell on a rotten covering, and there are
innumerable places in this covering so weak that they will not bear their weight, and these
places are not seen.

Here, Edwards uses theof comparing
the journey of a person unconverted to Christianity to a perilous trip over a raging pit of fire
on a weak, rickety, rotting wooden bridge that could collapse at any time. This is a vivid and
terrifying image and one that sticks with a person.