Sarah Osborn's World

by Brekus, Catherine A.

  At a time when radical evangelicals boasted that they had seen Christ in dreams, trances, or visions, Sarah offered a tamer, more scriptural description of how her heart had been changed. As she narrated her spiritual journey, she made it clear that every turning point had been precipitated by reading the Bible. When she thought she was too sinful to be saved, she had been comforted by a verse from Corinthians. When she feared that she would never be able to renounce the world for Christ, she had been strengthened by a verse from Isaiah. Even when she imagined Christ knocking at the door of her heart, she alluded to a biblical text (“Behold, I stand at the door, and knock”). Yet because so many evangelicals boasted about their “Dreams, Trances, Visions, Revelations, Impulses,” she wanted to make sure that no one could tar her with the brush of “enthusiasm.” When she wrote, “I saw my dearest Lord in his bitter agony in the garden,” she began the sentence with “I thought.” “I pretend to no visions or revelations,” she testified.48

  Sarah seems to have been especially nervous about being associated with the Separates. In some ways she seems to have been drawn to their sense of assurance, and her hostility toward them may have been an attempt to deny her attraction. But she did not believe that God communicated directly with people through voices and visions, and when Joseph Fish, one of her closest friends, became embroiled in conflict with an angry group of Separates in his Connecticut congregation, she immediately took his side. In response to Fish’s complaint that the Separates in his church were determined to “corrupt the pure, undefiled religion of the gospel, and cast out the very bowels of vital piety,” Sarah wrote sympathetically: “That the church will be overspread with errors: this indeed is a very melancholy thing, but as Luther said, it is Christ’s cause. Let him see to it.”49 In the future, all her references to the Separates would be sharply negative.

  Besides her desire to distance herself from the Separates, Sarah may have tried to be especially circumspect in her language because she was young and female—two traits that critics of the revivals associated with enthusiasm. According to Charles Chauncy, most of the people who fainted, or cried out during the revivals were “Children, Women, and youngerly Persons. . . . ’tis among Children, young People and Women, whose Passions are soft and tender, and more easily thrown into a Commotion, that these things chiefly prevail.” Even Jonathan Edwards, one the most prominent defenders of the revivals, implied that women were so “silly” that they easily lost control of their emotions. In Some Thoughts on the Present Revival, he justified crying out during church services by including an example of a “man of solid understanding” who had cried out, not just “a silly woman or child.” Although the revivals blurred the distinctions of gender, they did not completely erase them, and Sarah Osborn knew that as a woman she was particularly likely to be accused of irrationality. At the end of her memoir she scrawled a note of clarification in case anyone had misinterpreted her language. “Once more I would mention that wherever I have spoke of seeing such or such things I meant no other but with the eyes of my understanding or seeing by an eye of faith. Likewise, of hearing as it were a voice, I would not be understood any real voice.”50

  Yet when Samuel Hopkins edited Sarah Osborn’s memoir for publication after her death, he tinkered with her language in order to remove any doubts about her meaning. Because her descriptions of Satan were especially vivid and immediate, he toned them down so it did not sound as if she had actually seen or spoken to the devil in the flesh. For example, she wrote that Satan “told me it was too late for me to find mercy,” but Hopkins clarified that this conversation had taken place only in her mind: “And as it had been often suggested to me, I believe from Satan, that it was time enough for me to repent hereafter, it was now strongly impressed on my mind, that it was now too late for me to find mercy.” Similarly, Hopkins replaced her assertion “Satan assaulted me furiously with new temptations” with the milder “I was furiously assaulted with new temptations, by Satan I believe.” Despite his belief in the reality of Satan, Hopkins did not want her to be associated with radicals who claimed to have literally seen or spoken to him.51

  Like Sarah Osborn, though, Hopkins believed that true religion was “experimental,” and he did not change her descriptions of her tears, outcries, and bodily weakness. Nor did he try to tone down her expressions of joy. In the first part of her memoir she almost never used the word joy, but as she searched for the right language to describe her mystical encounter with God, she found herself drawn to the apostle Peter’s words: “ye rejoice with joy unspeakable and full of glory.” She not only remembered “great” joy but described “ecstasies of joy” and “tears of joy” that had made her feel as though the Holy Spirit were with her. Her rebirth in Christ had made true joy possible—not just happiness, which could be superficial and short-lived, but the deep contentment of knowing that she was a child of God.52

  The Bitter Remains

  Like other eighteenth-century evangelicals, Sarah Osborn sounded certain about when and where her spiritual transformation had taken place. She remembered vivid details about Clap’s terrifying sermon, her inability to eat or sleep for a long, distressing week, and her unspeakable joy when she realized that Christ loved her. There seemed to be no room for doubt: she had been born again on a Saturday night in January 1737, a night that she could remember as keenly as if it had been yesterday. If she had ended her memoir by describing her new sense of God’s love, it would have seemed to be a natural conclusion to her story. A sinful, rebellious child had grown into an adult who, after being chastened by affliction, had finally found her way to God.

  But Sarah’s pilgrimage had been more complicated than that, and as she continued writing, she admitted that she had “backslid” and doubted the reality of her former experiences. “Oh! The woeful, bitter remains of total depravity and contrariety to God,” she wrote in the margins. “Lord, was there ever such a heart as mine?” Although she blamed Satan for her doubts, she blamed herself more: if not for her corruption, he would not have been allowed to torment her. “After all this I began by degrees to grow more conformed to the world,” she explained. She continued to attend church, but she decided that “there was a time for all things, and singing, dancing, and now and then playing a game at cards, and telling stories with a particular friend, was all innocent diversions.” (At some point she crossed out the sentence about cardplaying and gossiping, perhaps because she did not want others to know how low she had sunk.) By 1740 she had “lost almost all sense of my former experiences. I had only the bare remembrance of them and they only seemed like dreams or delusion.”53

  Sarah understood her crisis in religious rather than psychological terms, but if she had lived in a different era she might have wondered whether the words that Satan supposedly spoke to her were actually her own. Ever since childhood she had feared that she was unworthy of God’s love—that it was impossible for her to be saved. Perhaps it is not surprising that even after her mystical experience of God’s grace, she found it hard to believe that she could be forgiven.

  By the time George Whitefield arrived in Newport in the fall of 1740, soon afterward followed by Gilbert Tennent, Sarah’s faith had shrunk to only a small part of her life. Although she went to church on Sundays, on the other days of the week she played cards with her friends, went to dances, or sang the latest songs. She loved to sing, and as she recalled later, “I could sing a hundred songs of which I had wrote the first Lines in a List.”54 She was too busy gossiping with her friends, teaching school, and caring for her son to spend much time alone with her thoughts (which seems to have been the way she wanted it), but whenever she slowed down she felt empty. The joy that had once uplifted her was gone.

  This may have been why she joined the throngs of people who went to hear Whitefield preach—or perhaps she just wanted to catch a glimpse of the famous man in person. Even the Rhode Island legislature adjourned in order to attend his sermon. For the past year newspapers had been filled with accounts o
f his preaching that seemed almost too extraordinary to be true. Not only had he supposedly preached to more than fifty thousand people in the fields of London and six thousand on the Philadelphia Common, but he had left staggering numbers of new Christians in his wake. Sometimes people cried out so loudly that they drowned out his voice. In Newport he reportedly preached to three thousand in Trinity Church, Sarah among them, and then to another thousand who followed him to the doorstep of a friend’s house. (Although Whitefield probably exaggerated his audience—the entire population of Newport in 1740 was less than six thousand—all agreed that no one had ever seen such throngs in one place before.) Everyone who met him, whether friend or foe, marveled at his charisma. “I can assure you,” warned one of his critics, “he is qualified to sway and keep the affections of the multitude.” In Newport, like everywhere he traveled, his listeners wept.55

  Sarah’s encounter with Whitefield marked a turning point for her. “God in mercy sent his dear servant Whitefield here which something stirred me up,” she remembered. As she watched people crying and following him through the streets, she seems to have realized that she had lost her sense of God’s presence. Whitefield preached a faith that no longer seemed to be her own.

  When Gilbert Tennent arrived shortly afterward, she spiraled into an agony of doubt about her salvation. Tennent was less polished than Whitefield, and even one of his admirers commented that “he seemed to have no regard to please the eyes of his hearers with agreeable gestures, nor their ears with delivery, nor their fancy with language.” But his straight-talking sermons were terrifying. “When he sounds forth the Thunders of the Law,/He strikes the Soul with Trembling and with Awe,” rhymed a Boston poet. Sarah did not record Tennent’s exact words in Newport, but he often railed against hypocrisy, and after his departure she feared that she was not truly a Christian after all. “O! ye wretched, fair-faced, smooth tongued, but foul false-hearted Hypocrites!” he warned in a sermon published in 1741. “You are the Bane and Pest of Christianity. O! Ye whited Sepulchers! It’s you, who under a Pretence of Friendship, wound Religion to the Heart, and leave it bleeding and gasping for Life. Pull off your Paint and Masks, ye Hypocrites, and appear like what ye are, incarnate Devils; it’s better for the People of God to have to do with roaring, raging Devils, than Devils in Disguise; what can such as ye expect but to be cut asunder by the Sword of God’s Justice, and sunk in the Damnation of Hell.” For the entire winter after he left, Sarah felt as though she “had not one spark of grace.” She was surrounded by converts who confidently proclaimed their salvation, but she could not be sure of God’s love for her. “A dreadful uncomfortable Life it was,” she remembered.56

  Even though Sarah talked to the Reverend Clap about her doubts and renewed her covenant to God, nothing brought her comfort. Her anxiety was heightened by the unexpected death of her brother, who she feared had not been converted.57 Although she claimed that her mourning was quickly overshadowed by her resignation to God’s will, she could not help wondering about his fate, and even more alarming, her own.

  Sarah visited Tennent when he returned in March 1741 to preach twenty-one sermons (a number that she carefully recorded, perhaps because she attended all of them), and at first she was comforted by his acknowledgment that Christians did not always feel God’s love as intensely as they had at the moment of conversion. But when he delivered yet another of his hellfire sermons—this time against singing, dancing, playing cards, and “foolish jesting”—his words shattered her frail security. “He would not say there was no such thing as dancing Christians,” she remembered, “but he had a very mean opinion of such that could bear to spend their precious time so when it is so short and the work for eternity so great.”58 Shamed by his words, she feared that if her conversion had been real she would not have slipped into her old, immoral habits so easily.

  Exhausted by months of anxiety, Sarah finally decided to write down her religious experiences and ask Tennent to evaluate them. Was she a genuine Christian or not? Could he find biblical precedent for what she had experienced? She may have gotten the idea to write a letter from Tennent, who believed that he had a duty to make judgments about the souls in his care. Despite urging his fellow ministers to use “great Caution . . . in expressing our Opinion concerning others’ States towards God, lest by rash judging, we strengthen the Presumptuous” or “discourage the Sincere-Hearted,” he thought that he could usually determine whether someone had been reborn in Christ. The test, of course, was experience. “If their Experiences be agreeable to the Holy Scriptures,” he explained, “and they be also Sound in the main Doctrines of Religion, and both be confirmed by a holy conversation, then we should judge charitably of their State.” In Sarah’s case, he sent her a kind letter that belied his reputation as a “son of thunder.” “My dear friend,” he addressed her, “I Like your experiences well. They seem to me to be scriptural and encouraging, and I think you may humbly take comfort from them and give God the glory of his pure grace.” After affirming that she had “a sure interest in the great salvation,” he tried to help her overcome any lingering fears by quoting several biblical passages, including a verse from Jeremiah: “Thou hast played the harlot with many lovers; yet return again to me, saith the Lord.”59

  Sarah’s reliance on Tennent’s guidance suggests that historians may have overstated the anti-authoritarian strain of the revivals. On the surface the revivals seem to have damaged the prestige of the clerical establishment, pitting ministers against one another. But underneath the controversies deference had not entirely disappeared. Although the laity could be contemptuous of ministers who disagreed with them, they still relied on popular religious leaders to validate their experiences. (In the nineteenth century, evangelicalism and demagoguery would often go hand in hand.) Since Sarah was well-versed in the Bible, she almost certainly knew the “precious texts” that Tennent transcribed for her, but she was reluctant to interpret them on her own. If not for his intervention, she might never have surmounted her fears. “I was as one restored as it were from the grave,” she remembered.60

  Determined to create a new Christian identity, Sarah changed almost everything about her life. She had been so unhappy before the revivals that she wanted to close the door on her past. Not only did she renounce “such vanities as singing [and] dancing,” but she searched for positive ways to demonstrate her faith to others. “I earnestly pleaded with God that he would suffer me to Live no Longer an unprofitable servant,” she remembered, “but would find out some way that I might be useful in the world and that I might now be as exemplary for piety as I had been for folly.” She visited the sick, shared the story of her religious experiences with others, and agreed to serve as the leader of the women’s society, a group that met weekly for prayer and Bible-reading. Religion became the “chief business” of her life.61

  As Sarah reinvented herself, she made several new evangelical friends, none closer than Susanna Anthony, or “Susa,” as she called her, whom she seems to have met around 1740.62 Since Newport was a compact city, they may have been acquainted before then, but they were separated by both age and religion. Susa was twelve years younger than Sarah, so she was only about fourteen years old when they met, and she had been raised as a Quaker. In 1740, though, when Whitefield came to Newport, she joined the huge throngs gathered to hear him preach. Her sister had died recently, and in the agony of her loss, she felt as though she were “entangled in a labyrinth of darkness and confusion.”63 But after hearing Whitefield, she began a slow, tortured journey toward the evangelical movement, and in 1742 she joined both the First Church of Christ and Sarah’s prayer group.

  For reasons that are not entirely clear, Susa was a deeply troubled young woman whose self-loathing went far beyond anything Sarah ever expressed. We know only what Susa chose to tell us about herself, but based on her words it is hard not to wonder whether she had suffered traumas beyond her sister’s death. Her self-hatred was so violent that she deliberately injured herself. “I
seemed as though I should have twisted every bone out of its place,” she confessed in her memoir. “And have often since wondered that I never disjointed a bone, when, through the violence of my distress, I wrung my hands, twisted every joint, and strained every nerve; biting my flesh; gnashing my teeth; throwing myself on the floor.” She also starved herself. “Satan set in to persuade me I had sinfully indulged my appetite,” she admitted. “And when I attempted to eat, it would be suggested, that I was then increasing my condemnation.” She finally stopped punishing herself when she came to understand Christ’s unconditional love, but throughout her life she suffered from bouts of melancholy. In order to devote herself to prayer she chose to remain single. Though she earned a small wage by sewing and teaching, she lived with her parents for most of her life.64

  It is no surprise that Sarah and Susa were drawn to each other. Both knew what it meant to despise oneself, and both had experienced the healing power of God’s love. “By every letter I receive from you,” Sarah wrote, “I think, something more of my own heart is discovered to me.” She seems to have loved and admired Susa more than almost anyone in the world. “Lord, thou knowest there is no creature upon earth more dear to me,” she testified in later years in her diary. “Thou hast made her as my own soul Precious to me.”65

  Sarah also became close friends with Joseph Fish, who preached in Newport during the revival. (His cousin’s husband Benjamin Church, the deacon of her church, may have introduced them.) Although Sarah had always admired and respected ministers, her feelings for Fish went much deeper. There was a spark of sympathy between them, a feeling of knowing and being known, that was religious in its intensity. As she confessed in a letter to him, “There is, as Mr. Whitefield expresses it, a sacred something that has Knot my Heart to you with stronger bonds than that of natural affection.”66 He was only eight years older than she, and although she never admitted it to herself, she seems to have been in love with him. “May faith bring home some clusters of grapes for you to feed upon, while you travel through this wilderness, this vale of tears,” she wrote in a sympathetic letter. “O my very heart is melted within me with ardent desires for you: and happy shall I think myself if God will own and bless the poor weak endeavors of a feeble worthless worm to refresh you, who knows she is not worthy to wash the feet of the servants of my Lord—and blushes at the review of the freedoms I have used with one so much my superior in all respects.” She always addressed him with deference but also with deep affection. In return, he called her his “dear sister” and promised that she would always be in his prayers. If not for the fact that he was already married, they might have allowed themselves to fall in love, but instead they poured their feelings into an enduring friendship that eventually included their families. “In my thoughts I am with you daily,” she assured him, “and sometimes till thought itself is swallowed up and I am as it were forced to break off abruptly.”67 His spiritual guidance helped her to remember that she had become a new self, a pilgrim on the way to the promised land.