When evangelicals protested that suffering, sin, and even hell were signs of God’s compassion rather than his wrath, they revealed how deeply the humanitarian movement had influenced them. Instead of arguing that a sovereign God had willed the existence of hell, Hopkins felt compelled to proclaim that it was “a real good” that increased the joys of saints in heaven. When the saved looked down at the torments of the damned, they gained a greater sense of their own happiness: “The generous, benevolent mind, which desires and seeks the greatest good of the whole, the glory of God, and the greatest glory and happiness of his kingdom, must choose and be pleased with that just, eternal misery of the wicked, which is so necessary to promote this to the highest degree, and the greater and more generous and benevolent the mind is, the more pleasure will it take in such a plan.” Hell was not “cruel”; it was a rational and good part of God’s creation that was reserved for a small number of sinners. Like his friend Joseph Bellamy, who estimated that the ratio of the saved to the damned would ultimately be 17,000: 1, Hopkins made the utilitarian argument that Christianity was spreading so rapidly across the globe that it would soon be the most popular religion.74 At the end of the world the happiness of the majority would far outweigh the suffering of the few.
Historians tend to portray Hopkins’s stark understanding of affliction as the product of abstract theological speculation, but his ideas seem to have emerged at least partially out of popular evangelicalism. Even before he became famous (or infamous) for portraying suffering and evil as a rational part of a larger good, lay people made the same claim in their diaries and letters. For example, when Sarah Prince Gill was ill in 1744, she claimed that her suffering was “best” for her, a reason to “rejoice,” and when Nathan Cole lay in bed for several months with a wounded leg, he declared that he “could not be thankful enough” for God’s “Fatherly Corrections”: unless he were purged of his sinfulness, he would never achieve real happiness—the kind of happiness that lay only in Christ. “Blessed be God for his rod,” Susannah Anthony exclaimed. “How dear the sweet scourges that have quickened my too slothful place! Welcome, my father, thy chastening hand!”75
Sarah Osborn echoed this positive understanding of suffering as medicine or purification. “O, strike in what way else thou Pleasest,” she wrote to God during an illness. “I’ll adore and Kiss the Hand, the dear Hand, that smites. . . . O purge and purify me though in a furnace of affliction.” Instead of shunning pain as an evil, she welcomed it as a sign of God’s love: “For thy Loving kindness thou wilt not take away, nor suffer thy faithfulness to fail.” In later years when a close friend lost her child, Sarah urged her to “kiss the rod and cling to the dear Hand that Has Held it and struck the blow.”76 Although this was exactly the kind of language that humanitarians despised, it seems to have been common among early evangelicals. Preaching during a severe drought, Jonathan Edwards explained to his congregation, “We must kiss the rod and Give Glory to God under the Calamity.”77
Sarah said relatively little about her first husband’s death in her memoir (perhaps the pain was still too great), but in later years she described her loss in more positive terms. As she reflected in a diary entry, “What wise and blessed steps hath he taken, though once afflictive. When in my young and tender years, my heart was much set on the husband of my youth, he rent him from me, and likewise bereaved me of almost all that was dear to me according to the flesh, whereby he broke off my dependence on those streams for comfort, and led me to the mountain. O, ‘happy rod, that brought me nearer to my God.’” (She was quoting from a hymn.) Even though Samuel’s death had seemed evil at the time, in retrospect she could see that it had increased her happiness by bringing her closer to God.78
Sarah imagined suffering as a means of grace, a fiery furnace in which sinners were purified. “Whom the Lord Loves, He rebukes and chastens,” she read in Hebrews. Although she was not a masochist—she did not enjoy her suffering—she longed for it in the same way that a child longs for parental attention: as a tangible sign of love.
The Widow’s God
When Sarah remembered the months following Samuel’s death, she praised God for sustaining her during her sorrow. With a small child to feed and clothe, she wondered how she would be able to make ends meet, but she tried to keep her faith in the “widow’s God.” Alluding to a verse from the Psalms, “the Lord preserveth the strangers; he relieveth the fatherless and widow,” she explained, “I had then the promises of a widow’s God to plead and seemed to cast myself more immediately upon his care, verily believing he would provide for me with my fatherless babe.” With gratitude, she remembered that God had mercifully answered her prayers. “As before this affliction everyone seemed to be enemies to me, so now from that time all became friends.” Even her parents softened. “My parents used me very tenderly, and God inclined every one that knew me to be kind to me.” In what seemed like a stroke of providence, her brother finally decided to come to America, and because he was single, he and Sarah “went to housekeeping together.”79 In exchange for a roof over her head, she cooked his meals, cleaned his house, and washed his laundry.
When her brother decided to get married only three months later, Sarah feared that she would not be able to support her child on her own, and once again she prayed to God for help. “I could see no way at all how I could get a Living,” she recounted. “All doors seemed to be shut. But I verily believed that God would point out a way for me.” Like many indigent women in the city, she may have hoped to earn a few shillings by working in a tavern or sewing, washing, and ironing clothes, but she may have also worried that she might have to ask for poor relief. The General Assembly had created a special fund in 1730 for impoverished sailors and their families (captains were required to deduct twelve pence out of sailors’ wages every month in case they fell on hard times), and she may have already asked the town for help. But on November 19, 1734, the day that she decided to move out of her brother’s house, she met a “stranger” who offered her a job as a schoolteacher. “A stranger to my case who kept a school a Little way off came to me and told me she only waited for a fair wind to go to Carolina, and if it would suit me I should have her chamber, scholars, and all together.”80
Sarah’s meager salary as a teacher was not enough to pay all her bills, but she also found a job as a housekeeper. In her memoir she mentions being “placed” in a family, which may mean that she had asked the town for poor relief and that the overseers of the poor had arranged a suitable position for her rather than giving her cash. It was common for the able-bodied poor to be sent to board with families who were in need of household help. Luckily for Sarah, the family she went to live with “discovered a great deal of affection for me and in all respects used me as tenderly as if I had been a near relation.” She marveled, “Thus the widow’s God remarkably provided for me.”81
But as Sarah soon discovered, God had not finished afflicting her. In May 1735 “it pleased God . . . to Lay his afflicting hand on me by a sharp humor that broke out in my hands so that for three months every finger I had was wrapped up in plasters, and [I] could help myself but very Little.” While her friends took turns teaching the school, her parents probably cared for her son, who was now three.82
Gravely ill, Sarah decided to consult a doctor rather than a midwife about her treatment. Midwives still tended to handle women’s most common complaints, but they had begun to face increasing competition from male doctors, who claimed to be better educated and more professional. Besides charging higher fees, doctors offered more heroic treatments that were designed to force the body back into health. Influenced by Galen’s ancient medical theory, they believed that the body consisted of four humors or fluids that needed to be in balance: choler (yellow bile), melancholy (black bile), blood, and phlegm. Since an excess of any of these humors caused illness, doctors used bloodletting, blistering, and cathartic drugs like ipecac (which induced vomiting) to purge the body of extra fluids. “Under the doctor’s hands in th
e fall I was taken with violent fits,” Sarah remembered, “and was quite deprived of sense by them five days. I was blistered almost all over by the doctor and my hands and arms was all raw from my fingers’ ends up above my elbows and a great fever.” Blistering was a painful procedure that involved applying a caustic, burning substance to the skin (often a mustard plaster). The doctor then lanced and drained the blisters to get rid of the body’s excess humors.83
According to Samuel Hopkins, Sarah was also given large doses of mercury, a poisonous element that was commonly used in both the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Doctors seem to have been attracted to mercury because of its visible, dramatic effects on the body, and as a Boston physician remarked in the 1730s, many administered “unbelievable doses” to cure everything from syphilis to pneumonia.84 After ingesting mercury or having it rubbed into their skin, patients would salivate uncontrollably, vomit, and be seized with violent diarrhea. If they were given too high of a dose and their kidneys could not handle the burden of trying to excrete it from the body, they would die. In 1733 a British surgeon warned that patients treated with mercury often suffered “Fevers, violent Colics, Diarrheas, Dysenteries, Swellings and Erosions of the Glands, terrible Headaches, Vertigos, Tremors, Deliriums, Convulsions.” Other common symptoms included loosening of the teeth, kidney disease, mental illness, and insomnia.85 Although Sarah survived her treatment, her choice of phrasing suggests that her “violent fits” were a direct result of the care she received “under the doctor’s hands.” Mercury poisoning may have been the reason she fell into convulsions and was virtually comatose for five days.
We do not know the identity of the illness that led to Sarah’s treatment, but it was the first bout of a disease that plagued her for the rest of her life. As she wrote in her memoir, “My fits, the humor, continued at times very violent for some years, and indeed still returns at some seasons.”86 The symptoms began in her hands but later included headaches, weakness, fatigue, and difficulty both walking and seeing. By the time she was sixty, her illness had progressed to a stage where walking was difficult and she was almost completely blind. Samuel Hopkins believed that her symptoms were caused by her exposure to mercury, “the weakening and painful effects of which attended her to the day of her death,” but a single treatment with inorganic mercury, even a large quantity of it, should not have caused lifelong health problems. It can take years for the body to excrete mercury, but usually not decades, and Sarah does not seem to have suffered from either hand tremors or renal failure—two of the most prominent symptoms of chronic mercury poisoning.87
Sarah’s chronic health problems were probably not caused by her exposure to mercury at the age of twenty-one. Since she later complained about the “salt rheum” in her hands, the most likely diagnosis is rheumatoid arthritis, an autoimmune disease that damages the joints. Rheumatoid arthritis tends to afflict women more than men, and the first symptoms can include swollen inflamed joints in the hands. In the most common form of the disease, patients can spend months or even years in remission between attacks, but the symptoms grow progressively worse with each flare-up. All Sarah’s symptoms fit a diagnosis of rheumatoid arthritis, especially her difficulty walking during the last twenty years of her life and her diminishing eyesight. Yet it is impossible to make a diagnosis with certainty, and all we can know is that she suffered from a chronic illness that began at the age of twenty-one and continued until her death at the age of eighty-two. Another possible diagnosis is multiple sclerosis, an autoimmune disease that damages the central nervous system and that can begin with feelings of numbness or tingling in the hands and arms.88
Whatever the precise nature of her illness, Sarah wanted her readers to know that she had not succumbed to despair. “All this time of illness God wonderfully provided for me. I wanted for none of the comforts of life. Neither was I cast down for his mercy held me up.”89
By the time she recovered, Sarah had gained new insight into the beneficial nature of physical and psychological suffering. Just as God’s punishments had helped her to grow in grace, her painful medical treatments had eased the worst symptoms of her disease. As with her moments of religious despair, her illness had led her to the hard truth that there could be no salvation without suffering. As one minister explained, God could be compared to a surgeon and sin to a disease. To honor his “skill,” we should “quietly suffer the corrosive plasters to lie on, and . . . not offer to pluck them off, notwithstanding the smart they put us to.”90 Even though God had taken away her husband, consigned her to poverty, and afflicted her with illness, he had meant it all for her good.
One of Sarah’s favorite biblical passages was from Lamentations. The third chapter begins with a cry of despair—“My strength and my hope is perished from the Lord: Remembering mine affliction and my misery, the wormwood and the gall”—but ends with trust: “The Lord is my portion, saith my soul: therefore will I hope in him.” As Sarah sat at her desk writing the story of her life, she tried to mold her experiences into the confident, upward ascent of those verses. She hoped that if she could accept her suffering as a medicine that would bring her closer to God, then perhaps she would no longer be haunted by the temptation to doubt his goodness. Writing her memoir was an act of hope, a flight from despair, an affirmation of a life she had once wanted to destroy. There could be no real tragedy in a world that was completely controlled by God.
Chapter 4
Amazing Grace
Surely my heart reacht forth in burning desire after the blessed jesus oh how was i ravisht with his Love and when examining my self thrice puting the question to my soul as christ put to peter tell me oh my soul Lovest thou the Lord Jesus how did my heart melt and my eyes flow with tears in appealing to him Lord thou knowest all things thou knowest i Love thee and when inquiring into the cause of this Love I felt and from whence it flowed it still overcame me more because I could say Lord I Love thee because thou first Loved me this caused me to Loath my self and cry out Lord what a trator have I been and yet thou hast freely Loved me oh why me Lord why me why not in hell why among the Living to praise thee Lord there can be no other reason but because where my sins has abounded thy grace has much more abounded o amaising grace hast thou snatcht me as a brand out of the burning.1
1740 god in mercy sent his dear servant whitfield here which something stird me up but when mr tenent came soon after it pleasd god to bless his preaching so to me that it paused me but I was all the winter after exercised with dreadfull doubts and fears about my state I questiond the truth of all I had experienced and feard I had never yet past through the pangs of the new birth nor never had one spark of grace . . . i was coverd over with thick clouds for months together.2
In the last section of her memoir, Sarah Osborn explained that the story of her life was worth sharing only because of what it revealed about divine grace. She had written about her childhood sinfulness and her sufferings because they had prepared her for the greatest moment of her life: her rebirth in Christ.
Sarah’s conversion was not like Saint Paul’s on the road to Damascus or Augustine’s in the garden of Milan. She did not suddenly hear God’s voice calling her to repent or suddenly become a new self in Christ. Her conversion had not been that dramatic—or that easy. After an emotional religious experience in 1737 when she was twenty-three, Sarah believed that she had been born again, but by 1740, when Gilbert Tennent and George Whitefield arrived in Newport to preach the gospel, she was no longer sure. Had her earlier sense of God’s love been real? Had she deluded herself?
Sarah’s account of the emotional peaks and valleys of her conversion is by far the longest part of her memoir. She had written about her childhood sinfulness and her later struggles with affliction in order to show her readers (and perhaps herself) that God had always been invisibly working on her heart, but in her rush to get to the heart of her story, she had compressed the first twenty-four years of her life into forty pages. In contrast, as she began writing about her gro
wing sense of Christ’s love in the wake of her terrible illness, the pace of her narrative slowed. It would take her another hundred pages to recount the next five years. She wanted to record every thought, every feeling, and every verse of scripture that had brought her closer to God. Despite her struggles against doubt, she had finally realized that she had been truly born again. Her conversion was the reason she wrote her memoir—the reason her life mattered. She was no longer simply an ordinary woman; she was a Christian who had been given the gift of true grace.
Christians throughout history have sought conversion (“except a man be born again,” Jesus testified in the Gospel of John, “he cannot see the kingdom of God”), but eighteenth-century evangelicals placed more emphasis on conversion than almost any group of Christians before them. Earlier Christians had defined conversion in multiple ways—it could mean changing one’s life by going to church regularly, taking communion, studying the Bible, or living according to the Ten Commandments—but for evangelicals it meant an immediate, heartfelt change. True religion, they claimed, was “experimental.” Influenced by the Enlightenment emphasis on personal experience as the foundation of knowledge, evangelicals did not view conversion as an intellectual assent to the truths of the Bible or as a slow, imperceptible turning to God; for them it was a “new sense” that was as real as the physical senses of seeing, hearing, or tasting. Because people could actually feel and know whether they had been born again, they could be virtually sure of their salvation.
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