Sarah Osborn's World

by Brekus, Catherine A.

  When describing her horseback journey to Rehoboth, Sarah continued to weave comforting biblical allusions into her narrative. After remembering her powerful sense of God’s goodness, she wrote, “And those precious promises which in the morning had supported me, still continued as a refreshing cordial; even these. ‘Call upon me in the day of trouble, and I will hear thee. This poor man cried, and the Lord heard him; and saved him out of all his troubles.’” Besides alluding to the apostle Peter’s assurance that God had made “exceeding great and precious promises” to save humankind from sin, she also remembered how God had pledged to save Jacob in his time of trouble. Most comforting, she recalled the calming words of Psalm 86: “For thou, Lord, art good, and ready to forgive; and plenteous in mercy unto all them that call upon thee. Give ear, O Lord, unto my prayer; and attend to the voice of my supplications. In the day of my trouble I will call upon thee: for thou wilt answer me.”13 As Sarah explained, these words “supported” her, holding her up on the long road to Rehoboth.

  Yet when Sarah began to describe her reunion with Samuel, she lost her tone of composure. She would never be able to forget her first, shocking glimpse of her son on his deathbed. “I found my son much swelled with a dropsy,” she wrote, “and pined to a mere skeleton with the jaundice, scurvy and consumption, all combining. He rattled in his throat, like a dying person, laboring for every breath.”14 His skin had turned yellow because his liver was not functioning properly; he had rickets because of malnourishment; his thin body was grotesquely swollen with excess fluid that his kidneys could not eliminate; and he was feverish and coughing up blood because of tuberculosis. As his lungs slowly filled with fluid, he had begun to make the ominous rattling sound that often precedes death. The doctor told Sarah what she could plainly see and hear: there was no hope.

  While Samuel’s doctor and his friends “lamented him, and did the best for him in their power, as to the body,” Sarah tried to look beyond his physical pain in order to minister to his spiritual needs. Others could express their love by caring for Samuel’s body—bathing his feverish forehead with a cool cloth, helping him take small sips of water, changing his sweat-soaked sheets—but only she could prepare him to meet his creator. “My great concern was for that precious jewel, his immortal soul,” she wrote.15 Nothing was more important than his relationship to God.

  Sarah had been praying for Samuel’s salvation ever since she had felt his first fluttering movements during her pregnancy. Closely identifying herself with the biblical Hannah, whose son had become a prophet, Sarah had “dedicated” her son to God after his birth, and she had also brought him to her church to be baptized. Although she knew that not all baptized infants would be saved, she believed with other Congregationalists that most would become “children of the covenant.”16

  Many bereaved parents seem to have found this covenant theology deeply reassuring. When Esther Edwards Burr, Jonathan Edwards’s daughter, lost an infant, she never seems to have doubted that her child had ascended to a “glorious state.”17 Despite her grief, she could imagine her child rejoicing in heaven because of her faith in God’s covenantal promises.

  But Samuel was no longer an infant, and Sarah could not share this optimism. Although her memories of bringing him to the baptismal font may have brought her a small measure of comfort, she needed something more. Samuel was almost twelve years old, an age when he could be expected to affirm his identity as a child of the covenant, but he had not yet experienced conversion. There had been no passionate confessions of sinfulness, no tears of repentance, no overpowering joy.

  If Samuel had lived a century earlier, few Congregationalist ministers would have suggested that he was old enough to be capable of true conversion. Writing in 1638, the Reverend Thomas Hooker claimed that a child of ten or twelve years lived the “life of a beast” and lacked the capacity “to consider of the mysteries of life and salvation.”18 Yet during the revivals of the 1730s and 1740s, many ministers claimed that God had poured out his grace on children as well as adults. They seem to have viewed children’s extraordinary conversions as proof that the revivals were genuine. How else could they make sense of the sight of “Children of about ten, twelve, and fourteen Years old” crying aloud or rejoicing in Christ?19

  Since we do not have diaries or letters written by evangelical children, it is impossible to know how they felt about the revivals. If some may have felt empowered by the message that they, like adults, were capable of genuine, life-transforming faith, others may have faced intense pressure to convert. In special children’s sermons, they heard that if they did not repent, they would spend eternity in hell. “You are both by Life and Nature most abominable and guilty Sinners,” thundered the Reverend Thomas Prince, “and out of Christ God utterly abhors you and is angry with you.”20 Jonathan Edwards was equally blunt. In a sermon preached to children (probably between the ages of seven and sixteen) in his congregation in 1741, he argued that “God is very angry at the sins of children,” angry enough “to cast them into hell to all eternity.” If they did not convert they deserved “to burn in hell forever.” He ended his sermon with a chilling question: “If you should die while you are young, and death should come upon you and find you without any love to Christ, what will become of you?”21

  We do not know whether Samuel was ever asked to answer such an alarming question, but Sarah clearly believed that children, like adults, could be damned. As she sat beside Samuel’s bed, listening to the rattle of his breathing, she was tormented by anxiety about his salvation. What if God had not chosen him as one of the elect? Protestants did not believe in Purgatory, and she could not hope that he might ascend to heaven after being cleansed of sin. He was destined either to be saved or to be damned: there was no intermediate place of purification. As a Boston minister explained, “At Death the SOUL of every Man enters immediately into a State of unspeakable Joys, or unsufferable Torments.”22 If Samuel were not ready to meet God at the moment of his death, he would suffer for eternity. Although Sarah could not bring herself even to write the word in her diary, she was terrified that he might go to hell.

  Sarah and other evangelicals did not imagine hell as a metaphor for the sinner’s alienation from God; it was a horrifyingly real place where the wicked were punished. According to Gilbert Tennent, who had revived her faith during his 1741 visit to Newport, only the foolish would doubt the reality of hell. They would soon discover the enormity of their mistake. Imagining the damned, he wrote, “Hear how loudly they roar, how frightfully they screech and yell; see how they rage and foam, and gnash their teeth with desperate madness; and look how the malicious Devils torment and rack those forlorn damned Castoffs.” Searching for the words to convey the terrible anguish of the damned, another minister wrote: “Fancy to yourselves a Man devoured with Worms, burning in Flames, in whose Wounds kindled brimstone is poured without Intermission, with boiling Lead, and burning Pitch, and if there be any pains more grievous, fancy it also. All these give us but an imperfect Image of the State of the Damned.” Hell was “a Place and State of the blackest Darkness, the most exquisite Torment and extremest Horror, Despair, and Raging Blasphemy. A Place of Howling, Roaring, Yelling, Shrieking.”23

  Although Puritan ministers had always preached about hell, eighteenth-century evangelicals seem to have placed even greater emphasis on its torments. During the excitement of the revivals, many ministers used fear to persuade sinners to repent. In his early sermons Jonathan Edwards had tended to emphasize God’s love, but he found that he could bring far more converts into the churches by preaching about hellfire.24 In his most famous sermon, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, he portrayed God as a forbidding judge who had no qualms about throwing the wicked into the flames. “The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked,” he warned. “His wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire; he is
of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight; you are ten thousand times more abominable in his eyes, than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours.” When he preached these words, “there was a great moaning and crying out throughout the whole house. What shall I do to be saved. Oh I am going to Hell. Oh what shall I do for Christ.”25 Terror was clearly an effective weapon in the evangelical arsenal.

  Evangelical ministers may have particularly emphasized the reality of hell because of humanitarian challenges to the doctrine in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As Norman Fiering has commented, “it appears that hell preaching grew in frequency when the orthodox doctrine of the afterlife was seriously challenged.”26 Thomas Hobbes, for example, expressed incredulity that “the Father of Mercies . . . should punish men’s transgressions without any end of time, and with all the extremity of torture, that men can imagine, and more.” More cautiously, John Tillotson admitted that there was biblical support for the doctrine of eternal punishment, but in a clever twist of reasoning he denied that God always carried out his threats. “He that threatens keeps the right of punishing in his own hand,” he explained, “and is not obliged to execute what he hath threatened any further than the reasons and ends of Government do require.”27 Because belief in hell was an accepted part of Christian doctrine, few New England ministers dared question it openly, but some seem to have harbored private doubts. During the 1750s, for example, Charles Chauncy began working on a treatise about universal salvation that he did not dare publish until 1784. (His work was so secret that he and his friends referred to it in code as the “pudding.”)28

  In contrast, Sarah Osborn did not seem to have any doubts about God’s justice in sentencing sinners to damnation. Terrified by the thought of Samuel descending to hell, she tried to be the means of his deathbed conversion. Praying for some sign of faith, she read to him from the Bible (she did not specify which passages) as well as from Joseph Alleine’s popular An Alarm to Unconverted Sinners.29 First published in 1671, this book was frequently reprinted in both England and America throughout the eighteenth century. Perhaps Sarah brought it with her from Newport because of her fears that Samuel would die unconverted; or perhaps she found a copy at his lodgings. Whichever the case, she clearly hoped that Alleine’s “alarming” words would change Samuel’s heart.

  Alleine’s book was addressed to all the “miserable souls”—“the Ignorant, Carnal, and Ungodly”—who had not yet experienced conversion. Hoping to persuade sinners to repent and seek salvation, Alleine lamented that they would never go to heaven without the help of God’s grace. Stringing together quotations from Revelation, Matthew, and the Psalms, he warned, “The unconverted Soul is a very Cage of unclean Birds . . . a Sepulcher full of corruption and rottenness . . . a loathsome Carcass, full of crawling Worms, and sending forth a hellish and most noisome Savor in the Nostrils of God.” Anyone who secretly hoped to be saved without being spiritually reborn was deluded. “I must tell you,” he protested, “Christ never died to save impenitent and unconverted sinners.” Indeed, God hated sinners so much that he would rejoice at their suffering. “He laughs in himself, to see how thou wilt be taken and ensnared in the evil Day,” Alleine wrote in a particularly harrowing passage. “He sees how thou wilt come down mightily in a Moment, how thou wilt wring thine Hands, and tear thine Hair, and eat thy flesh, and gnash thy Teeth for Anguish and Astonishment of Heart, when thou seest thou art fallen . . . into the Pit of Destruction.” Unless they turned to God while there was still time, sinners would “dwell with everlasting Burnings!”30

  Not all of Alleine’s book was this frightening. In his closing chapters, he tried to lead his readers from despair to hope. After describing God’s wrath and the horrors of hell, he vowed that even the greatest sinner could be converted and welcomed into heaven. “Verily, if thou wouldst but come in,” he assured his readers, “the heavenly Host would take up their Anthems, and sing, Glory be to God in the Highest; the Morning-Stars would sing together, and all the Sons of God shout for joy, and celebrate this new Creation as they did the first.”31 But there was no time to waste. Sinners had to begin seeking God now, before death and damnation.

  It is not clear what sections of Alleine’s book Sarah read to her son as he lay dying. But given her anxieties about his salvation, she probably chose passages that were designed to convince him of his sinfulness and his need for God’s grace. Although some people may have thought she was cruel to fill his last days with thoughts of hell, she clearly believed that she was being a good mother. The ultimate fate of his soul was far more important than any qualms about frightening him. As Alleine explained to his readers, he did not want to hurt them, but he was like a “Surgeon” who had to “cut off a putrefied Member from his well-beloved Friend; which of force he must do, but with an aching heart, a pitiful Eye, a trembling Hand.”32

  Sarah, like Alleine, may have trembled, but she knew what she had to do. The scene is almost too painful to imagine. While Samuel lay gasping for breath, she sat by his side reading the book aloud, praying for some small sign of conversion. She was desperate, frightened, overwhelmed, “crushed” by grief. “I did not so much as once, in all his sickness, pray for his life,” she remembered, “but for some evidence that his soul might live. And for want of this, I sometimes seemed to be crushed down, having a sense of his doleful case, if not reconciled to God.” As for Samuel, it is impossible to know whether he even understood what his mother was reading to him; her words may have skimmed the surface of his physical pain. Perhaps he slipped in and out of consciousness as he clung to life. But if he did understand, he may have spent his last days in fear. Many of Alleine’s words sounded as if they could have been written especially for him: “What if the Thread of thy life should break? (Why thou knowest not but it may be the next Night, yes, the next Moment.) Where wouldst thou be then? Whither wouldst thou drop?”33

  Because Sarah had heard many stories of people joyfully turning to Christ in their dying moments, she seems to have clung to the hope that Samuel’s life would end on a triumphant note. Just a little more than a month earlier, Deborah Prince, a twenty-one-year-old Boston woman who was probably one of Sarah’s acquaintances, had experienced a dramatic conversion on her deathbed. According to her father, the Reverend Thomas Prince (a well-known revivalist), she had been in despair during her final illness, which had lasted more than seven weeks, because of her sense of distance from God. “She could not come to Christ,” she lamented to her father. “She could not trust in Him, she could not believe.” But just when she “seemed to be dying away,” leaving her family in anguish, she suddenly opened her eyes and began speaking a “new Language” of Christian love. “I Believe in him! I Rejoice in Him!” she exclaimed. When she took her last breaths, her family was too overjoyed to mourn. “Never did I see so much Distress, especially round a dying Bed, on a sudden turn into so much Joy,” her father marveled later.34 Regardless of whether Sarah had heard this particular story, she certainly had heard many others like it, and she prayed that God would show her and her son the same mercy.

  Samuel lingered on the edge of death for seven agonizing days. Each day, Sarah pleaded with God for some hard, undeniable “evidence” that her son would be saved. In a new evangelical world, in which converts claimed to know the exact moment of their spiritual rebirth, she wanted nothing less than empirical proof of Samuel’s salvation. Remembering the story of Jacob, who had finally received a blessing after wrestling with God all night, she resolved to “plead and wrestle” for Samuel’s salvation until winning her “evidence”—perhaps a gentle smile as he listened to a biblical passage or, even better, a few last words expressing his love for Christ.35

  But an all-powerful, mysterious God refused to divulge his will. “God was pleased to hide his dealings with him altogether,” she wrote sorrowfully. “For I could discern no evidence of a work of grace wrought on his soul, for which I did plead from day to day.”36

  Sarah’s confrontation with t
he hiddenness of God brought her to the brink of despair. While she believed that God had revealed himself in Christ, she also believed that God had not revealed everything: predestination, in particular, was ultimately mysterious. No mere human could fathom God’s secrets. But to move beyond an understanding of God’s revealed will, as the theologian Brian Gerrish has explained, “is to find oneself in a terrifying darkness, a maze without exit, a pathless waste, a bottomless whirlpool, inextricable snares, an abyss of sightless darkness.”37 Sarah stood on the edge of the unfathomable, terrified by the chasm between her small human life and the immensity of God. She had spent her life trying to know God, and yet in this moment God was hidden. If he had heard her prayers for Samuel’s salvation, he “was pleased” not to answer. God was silent, inscrutable, uncontrollable, majestic, incomprehensible. Terrifying.

  Sarah felt as though both she and her son had been forsaken. “I was just ready to give up, and sit down discouraged,” she remembered. “My heart even almost died with fear of what would become of him.”38

  Gerrish has argued that for the Christian believer the only possible response to the hiddenness of God is to embrace Christ, who “was destined to take upon himself the agony of a man forsaken by God.” This was the same advice that Susanna Anthony, in Newport, gave to Sarah in a letter. Sarah seems to have written to her friend soon after arriving in Rehoboth, describing herself as “crushed” by her “Burthen.” In response, Susa urged her to put her complete faith in Christ. “Has our God and Father put this cup into your hand? Then drink it, my dear, with submission, love, and fear;—forget the cup, while you behold the hand which gives it to you.” Christ had not abandoned her, she promised. “Hath he not said, you are as the apple of his eye—and will he hurt that? No! Surely, he will not!” (Susa clearly knew that Psalm 17:8—“Keep me as the apple of the eye, hide me under the shadow of thy wings”—was one of Sarah’s favorite texts.) She urged Sarah not to give up hope but to continue praying. “O, arise, and by faith cast your child upon Christ,” she wrote. “Tell him he is your only son, and you want a pardon for him; and will not he, who is an inexhaustible fountain,—a boundless ocean of infinite fullness, be as ready to pity the soul of your son, as he was to pity the bodies of those who came to him for healing, in the days of his flesh? Verily, the promises are to believers and their children.”39