Self-love may be the foundation of a supposed love to God

Self-love, through the exercise of a mere natural gratitude, may be the foundation of a sort of love to God many ways. A kind of love may arise from a false notion of God that men have some way imbibed, as though he were only goodness and mercy and not revenging justice, or as though the exercises of his goodness were necessary and not free and sovereign, or as though his goodness were dependent on what is in them and as it were constrained by them.

Men, on such grounds as these, may love a God of their own forming in their imaginations when they are far from loving such a God as reigns in heaven.

—Jonathan Edwards
The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 1, 276.

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