Her narrative showed another suggestive parallel to her earlier suicidal temptation. Both times her depression seems to have been precipitated by conflicts with her mother. Her sleeplessness and anxiety had begun on the night that her mother had rebuked her for worshiping with the Anglicans. Opening old wounds, her mother had made her feel as “ignorant” as a child. Sarah seems to have felt angry and unloved, worthless in the eyes of both her mother and God.
Whatever triggered it, Sarah’s crisis forced her to confront her deepest questions about the meaning of her life. At a time when “disbelief in God remained scarcely more plausible than disbelief in gravity,” she did not question whether God actually existed, but she struggled to understand why she had been born. What was the meaning of her suffering and her sorrow? What was God’s plan for her? Although she wanted to believe in a merciful God, she could not help worrying that her troubles were a sign of his anger or, worse, his hatred. Her deepest fear was that God despised her so much that he had predestined her to hell. When she dared hope that she might be one of the elect, Satan tormented her with doubts. “Satan assaulted me furiously,” she remembered, “and told me not to flatter myself with the thoughts I should be a child of God, for I was not elected and therefore could not be saved.” The thought was almost too much for her to bear. Was it possible that she had been created in order to be damned? Although she had suffered many painful ailments during her life, she claimed never to have experienced greater anguish. “Sure I am,” she testified, “no affliction or pain of body whatsoever is to be compared to what I then underwent.” Her burned hand, the pains of childbirth, her exposure to mercury, her raw, blistered arms—all her physical suffering paled in comparison to her torment within. “The spirit of a man will sustain his infirmity,” she quoted from Proverbs, “but a wounded spirit who can bear?”34
After six days of agony Sarah finally found a verse of Scripture that brought her comfort. On the eve of the Sabbath, faint with hunger and exhaustion, she read a passage from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians that made her see her despair in a different light: “There hath no temptation taken you but such as is common to man: but God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able; but will with the temptation also make a way for you to escape, that ye may be able to bear it.” Even though she had heard many Christians describe moments of spiritual anguish, especially before conversion, she had been too consumed by her own pain to imagine that her doubts could be “common.” Only “a minute before,” she explained, “I had been thinking that there never had any been tempted Like me.” Breaking down in tears of relief, she realized that a faithful God had not forsaken her. “God was pleased that moment, I see it, to give me faith, to Lay hold on it and claim it as my own,” she rejoiced. “Oh how it did fill my heart and mouth with praises and my eyes with floods of tears.”35
Sarah’s description of her new sense of grace was intensely physical. Overpowered by God’s love, she had felt the change not only in her heart but in every part of her body, and as she wept and trembled she found herself crying out words of praise. “My transport of joy was so great that it was more than my poor feeble frame was well able to contain,” she remembered, “for my nature even fainted with excessive joy.”36
After another sleepless night, Sarah returned to church the next morning, and this time she was overwhelmed by joy instead of fear. It was sacrament day, the monthly communion service, and after the regular meeting she stayed to watch the full members of the church gather around the table to share the bread and wine. Although Congregationalists rejected the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, they still believed that Christ was spiritually present in the sacrament, and as the Reverend Clap and the congregation quietly passed the plate and drank from the cup, the mood was solemn. Alone in the gallery looking down, Sarah was “filled with such a mixture of joy and grief” that once again she felt as though she might lose control of her body. (Considering that she had hardly slept or eaten in a week, she may have been close to fainting.) “I was not able to contain myself but was obliged to get down on the floor and to Lean on the bench,” she remembered, “for I could neither sit nor stand.” She could practically see Christ in front of her, “a crucified savior pouring out his precious blood to redeem his people from their sins.” Although she was careful to explain that she had seen him only “by faith” (meaning in her mind), she felt as though the boundaries between heaven and earth had virtually disappeared. “Oh, how did my heart melt and my eyes flow with tears when I thought I saw my dearest Lord in his bitter agony in the garden, and then crowned with thorns, spit upon, buffeted, beaten black and blue, and at Last nailed to an accursed tree, and all to free me from the torments I had so Lately dreaded. It caused me bitterly to reflect upon myself and cry out, my sins, my sins, oh Lord, have been the procuring cause of thy bitter sufferings.” Suddenly she knew that Christ had died for her and, even more astonishing, that he longed for her love in return. “Oh, when I considered how oft he had stood knocking till his head was filled with the dew and his Locks with the drops of the night but could have no entrance into my hardened heart, I was astonished at myself that I could possibly be so cruel, and astonished at free grace and redeeming Love that I was spared to see that happy day.” Borrowing the intimate language of the Song of Solomon, she exulted, “He appeared Lovely, the chiefest among ten thousands, and was ten thousand times welcome to me.”37
Sarah Osborn’s description of Jesus as an impassioned lover linked her to many other evangelicals, but a few ministers had begun to express discomfort with this kind of romantic language. On one hand, Gilbert Tennent did not hesitate to describe God as a bridegroom who “kissed” the soul “with the kisses of his Love,” and George Whitefield urged his listeners to “come to the Marriage.—Do not play the Harlot any longer.”38 On the other, Isaac Watts feared that such language sounded too earthy. When he edited Elizabeth Rowe’s letters for publication in 1742 (they became immensely popular under the title Devout Exercises of the Heart in Meditation and Soliloquy, Prayer and Praise), he expressed regret about her “passionate” language drawn from the Song of Solomon. This, he argued, was not “the happiest language in which Christians should generally discover their warm Sentiments of Religion.” Because evangelicals expressed their faith in physical ways—sighing, groaning, and fainting—they were often suspected of being sexually immoral, and Watts seems to have feared that Rowe’s words might be “perversely profaned by an unholy construction.” (In other words, he thought they might become the target of crude jokes.) As he reassured readers in the preface to the book, “In these meditations there is no secret panting over a mortal Love in the Language of Devotion and Piety.” Fifty years later, when Samuel Hopkins edited Sarah Osborn’s memoir, he was so discomfited by her description of Christ as an ardent lover, drops of dew glistening in his hair, that he decided not to apologize for her imagery but simply to delete it. In the seventeenth century, Puritans had often described Christ in fervent language as a bridegroom, but in the eighteenth century, under the influence of the Enlightenment, evangelical leaders began to draw sharper boundaries between the sacred and the profane. Although Sarah could not have realized it, future generations of evangelicals would be embarrassed by the capaciousness of her religious imagination. She not only envisioned Christ as a prophet, priest, and king, but as a lover.39
Only a few days after her ecstasies during communion, Sarah steeled herself to visit Reverend Clap to ask to be admitted to full membership in the church. Clap was notorious for his strictness, but he also had a gentle side. When George Whitefield met him a decade later, he praised him as “the most venerable man I ever saw in my life,” “a good old Puritan” who “abounds in good works; gives all away, and is wonderfully tender of little children.” (Indeed, he had given Sarah a book during her childhood.) Although Sarah may have been afraid to describe her religious experiences to him, she also admired and trusted him, and she knew that if she wished
to participate in the Lord’s Supper she would have to convince him of her worthiness. While the First Church allowed anyone to come to services and listen to sermons, it limited communion to “visible saints” who could offer convincing evidence of their conversion. Not surprisingly, many seem to have been intimidated by this requirement, and the number of full communicants in Congregational churches tended to be small. During the 1690s many churches were so discouraged by dwindling membership that they decided to open the Lord’s Supper to all adults of good moral character. But the strictest churches, including Newport’s First Church, feared that open communion would dilute their religious purity. Besides demanding that prospective members make a public profession of faith to the entire congregation, they asked probing questions about their moral character. While they did not think that people could earn salvation by performing good works, they still assumed that the elect would be particularly virtuous. When Sarah wept in Clap’s parlor as she tried to explain why she had come, he treated her “Like a tender father to a Little child,” but he also warned that he would “inquire into” her reputation before recommending her to the rest of the church. Wiping away her tears, she assured him that she had been “kept from open scandalous sins.”40
Of all the twists and turns in Sarah’s memoir, this one is especially surprising. Although it may have been technically true that she had not committed any “open” sins that had scandalized the public, she certainly knew that Clap would have been troubled by her theft from her parents. Perhaps she worried that he would counsel her to make a full confession to her mother, or maybe, despite her earlier tone of repentance, she was not yet fully convinced that her theft had been a sin. Whatever the reason for her silence, she deliberately misrepresented herself, and as she continued writing her memoir she never acknowledged to either herself or her readers what she had done. But as we have seen, Samuel Hopkins decided to strike out every passage alluding to that theft. He did not want to tarnish her reputation by letting readers know that she had not only stolen from her parents but deceived her pastor.
The evening after Sarah’s visit to Clap, she stayed up all night (yet again) to read a book he had given her: Joseph Stevens’s Another and Better Country, Even an Heavenly. She was “so delighted with it” that she read it two or three times, savoring Stevens’s descriptions of a world beyond suffering. “God shall then wipe away all tears from their Eyes,” Stevens promised, quoting from Isaiah, “and there shall be no more Death, neither sorrow nor crying, nor shall there be any more Pain.”41 Inspired by this book, Sarah felt an overwhelming sense of Christ’s love for her. “Oh, how was I ravished with his Love,” she remembered. “Surely my heart reached forth in burning desire after the blessed Jesus.” After years of feeling worthless and alone, she was so stunned by her sense of God’s presence that she asked, “Why me? Why me? Why [am I] not in hell?” But she fell mute as she realized that a mysterious God had always loved her despite her weakness, sinfulness, and unworthiness. “What a traitor have I been,” she marveled, “and yet thou hast freely Loved me.”42 Her new vision of reality was so astonishing that she could barely believe it: God had loved her even when she had been unable to love herself.
On February 6, 1737, Sarah Wheaten was admitted to full membership in the First Church of Christ after her spiritual narrative was read aloud to the entire congregation. “I wrote my experience to the church,” she explained. (Unfortunately Sarah’s account does not survive in either her own personal papers or the church records, but she probably drew on it while writing her memoir.) Unlike men, who were required to make their own professions of faith, women were forbidden to speak publicly. Citing Paul’s words to the Corinthians, ministers insisted that women must “keep silence in the churches” and “learn in silence with all subjection.” If they were not literate enough to write their own conversion accounts, ministers would transcribe their words for them. In a symbol of her feminine submission, Sarah sat silently as the Reverend Clap recited the words she had so carefully chosen. She would never be allowed to raise her voice in her own church except to sing or respond to a prayer.43
At the end of the meeting, Sarah joined the other members of the church around the table for the Lord’s Supper, a ritual that had always both awed and frightened her. Like many Protestants, Sarah was alarmed by Saint Paul’s warning that “he that eateth and drinketh unworthily, eateth and drinketh damnation to himself,” but she also believed in her “duty” to worship Christ in the sacrament. As the members of the church passed her the bread (“children’s bread,” she called it) and then the wine, she rejoiced at the thought of Christ’s real presence in them. Christ was actually there with her at the table. “It was indeed sweet to me to feed by faith on the broken body of my dearest Lord,” she remembered, and when she held the cup in her hands she felt as if she had been virtually transported to the foot of the cross. (During the Reformation, Catholics and Protestants had fought over whether the laity could have access to Christ’s blood as well as his body, and even two centuries later Protestants like Sarah were especially devoted to the cup.) Usually she imagined God as distant and sovereign, but in this intimate moment of communion she saw him in his suffering, human form, his wounds clearly visible. Echoing the words of the apostle Thomas, who had refused to believe in Jesus’s resurrection until he actually put his finger in the wounds, she wrote, “When I come to take the cup, and by faith to apply the precious properties of the blood of Christ to my soul, the scales of unbelief seemed all to drop off, and I was forced to cry out, ‘my Lord and my God,’ when I behold the hole in his side and the prints of the nails.” (Her original sentence had concluded with the words “and hear the blessed Jesus say, ‘daughter, thy sins are forgiven thee,’” but she crossed them out at some point because she did not want to imply that she had literally heard Christ’s voice.) Her nearness to Jesus, her vision of his brokenness, filled her with an “ecstasy of joy.”44
Sarah confirmed her commitment to Christ by writing a personal “covenant” with him, a Puritan practice that continued to be popular into the eighteenth century. For guidance she imitated a covenant included in the Reverend Thomas Doolittle’s Call to Delaying Sinners, first published in 1698. Instead of copying Doolittle’s covenant, Sarah reworded it to emphasize her spirit of self-denial, and in place of the resolution to “forsake all that is dear unto me in this World, rather than to turn from thee to the ways of sin,” she substituted, “I will Leave, Lose, and deny all that was dear to me when it stood in competition with God, even Life itself, if he should be pleased to call for it, rather than to forsake him and his ways.”45
Yet as she remembered later, this sentence was so distressing to write that she had to put down her pen. When she thought of everyone and everything she loved in the world, she feared that she would not be able to keep such a painful promise. “Satan in a rage flew upon me and furiously assaulted me,” she remembered. “He told me that I was now a Lying to God.”46 Sarah seems to have worried that her love for her family and friends was so intense that it verged on “Idolatry,” as Doolittle called it, and the thought of being forced to choose between God and her loved ones was terrifying. What if God decided to take away her son, Samuel, just as he had taken away her husband? Would she be able to keep her faith if God demanded the sacrifice of all that mattered to her?
Her unfinished covenant before her, Sarah prayed that God would give her “real and persevering grace,” and in response a verse of scripture was “powerfully set home” on her mind: “My grace shall be sufficient for thee.” Then she opened her Bible at random and waited for the Holy Spirit to lead her eyes to a text (a common Puritan and evangelical practice). The result was a reassuring verse from Isaiah, “Fear not; for thou shalt not be ashamed.” Like earlier generations of Puritans, Sarah may have believed that parts of the Bible had been literally written with her in mind. When John Bunyan read a verse from Luke, “And yet there is room,” he concluded that “when the Lord Jesus did speak these wo
rds, He then did think of me.” In Sarah’s case, she found Isaiah’s prophecy “so adapted to every particular of my circumstances” that she transcribed every word in her memoir. In the years ahead, she would cling to this fragment of scripture as if it were a raft that would keep her from sinking. Isaiah had promised:
For thou shalt forget the shame of thy youth, and shalt not remember the reproach of thy widowhood any more. For thy Maker is thine husband, the Lord of Hosts is his name, and thy redeemer the Holy One of Israel, the God of the whole earth shall be called. For the Lord hath called thee as a woman forsaken and grieved in spirit, and a wife of youth, when thou wast refused, saith thy God. For a small moment have I forsaken thee; but with great mercies will I gather thee. In a little wrath I hid my face from thee for a moment but with everlasting kindness will I have mercy on thee, saith the Lord thy Redeemer.
Sarah’s feelings of shame, her widowhood, her grief, her fear of being abandoned by God—all had been foretold by Isaiah, and yet he had urged her not to be afraid. Encouraged by this verse, she finished writing her covenant with God and, to seal her promise that she would always be faithful to him, she signed it with her name. Once again, she was so overwhelmed by joy that she thought she might lose control of her body. “It seemed to me that all heavens rung with acclamations of joy that such a prodigal as I was returned to my God and father,” she remembered, “and my joy was so great that my bodily strength failed and I was for some time as one whose soul was ready to break Loose and wing away into the bosom of my God.”47 In future years she would honor this date, March 1, 1737, by renewing her commitment to forsake everything for Christ.
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