Was Samuel in heaven or in hell? This question haunts every sentence of Sarah’s narrative, even the sentences that do not explicitly mention him at all.
Suffer Me to Weep
When Sarah returned from her walk in the fields, she found her friends preparing Samuel’s body for burial. They gently took off his blood-stained clothes, straightened his limbs, washed him, dressed him in his grave clothes (probably the best clothes that he owned), and lifted him into a plain wooden coffin. Then they took turns sitting next to his body to make sure there were no unexpected signs of life. Because embalming was uncommon in early America, burials usually took place within a day or two, but first it was customary to watch over the body to guarantee that the person was truly dead. After Hannah Heaton buried her eighteen-month-old daughter only a few hours after death, she was haunted by fears that she might have buried her alive. “It would dart into my soul your child was not cold,” she agonized in her diary. “It might have come to again.”55 If Sarah’s friends had hoped to spare her the same anxiety, they would have made sure that someone was always at Samuel’s side until the final prayer had been offered and the coffin lid had been nailed shut.
Despite the solemn sight of her son lying lifeless in his coffin, Sarah claimed that in the hours before the funeral she was so “composed and comfortable” that she feared people might think her “void of natural affection.”56 While a psychologist today might interpret her stoicism as a form of denial (a common stage in grief), Sarah attributed her serenity to her abiding sense of God’s presence. Even in the midst of the most wrenching loss she had ever endured, she emphasized her quiet resignation to God’s sovereign will.
Since all that we have are Sarah’s written words, it is impossible to know whether she was as “composed and comfortable” as she maintained. But it is clear that in her closing pages she was still trying to discern God’s goodness in her suffering, and she found it in her spirit of resignation. Desperate to make sense of Samuel’s death, she claimed that God had taken her son for two reasons: to make her more dependent on his divine grace and to show other Christians how to accept their afflictions without “murmuring.”
Influenced by ministers, the books that she read, her friends, and the larger transatlantic evangelical community, Sarah seems to have deliberately tried to suppress her grief. Given the number of people who died prematurely in early America, whether because of childhood diseases, epidemics, or accidents (“This World is a Weeping World,” one minister wrote forlornly), it is not surprising that ministers urged their congregants to bear their losses patiently. Although the Reverend Henry Gibbs denied that Christianity taught “Stoical Apathy,” he also warned that grief must not become “exorbitant; bursting forth in unbecoming speeches and actions.” “We are to Mourn without Murmuring, and Weep without repining,” he urged, “not entertaining any hard thoughts of God, not allowing any swellings of spirit against His disposals.” Other ministers stated the point more roughly. “Be dumb,” warned the Reverend Nathaniel Appleton, “and open not your mouths, in the least Murmurings under this severe Correction of our heavenly Father.” (He was quoting from Psalm 39:9: “I was dumb, I opened not my mouth, because thou didst it.”) If they “murmured,” they might suffer the same fate as the Israelites who had been punished for murmuring against God in the wilderness. (Because of their bitter complaints, God had sentenced them to wander in the wilderness for forty years before allowing them into the promised land.)57 In hundreds of sermons published in the decades before Samuel’s death, ministers urged Christians to “regulate” or “moderate” their mourning. They were told to imitate the examples of Aaron, who had “held his peace” after his two sons were devoured by the Lord’s fire; Job, who covered his mouth with his hand after realizing that an all-powerful God had willed his suffering; Joseph, who had not condemned his brothers for selling him into slavery because it had been God’s will; David, who had meekly testified that God could “do to me as seemeth good unto him”; and Christ himself, who, as Isaiah foretold, “was oppressed, and afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth.”58
There were several reasons for ministers’ strict prohibitions on “excessive” mourning. Because of their emphasis on God’s sovereignty, they interpreted complaining about the loss of loved ones as a challenge to his will. “Christians should quietly Submit to the Holy Sovereign Will of GOD, under all the sore Afflictions they ever meet with,” advised Benjamin Wadsworth. Although it was natural to grieve over the loss of loved ones, Christians would be guilty of the worst kind of hubris if they questioned God’s right to decide who should live and who should die. Did they dare to imagine that they knew better than God how to govern the world?59
Ministers also feared that if Christians succumbed to their grief, they would forget that their suffering was supposed to be “profitable.” In the midst of mourning, they should remember that God had chosen to afflict them for their own good. As Nathanael Appleton explained, God “does not afflict willingly nor grieve his Children, but only when he sees they need to be in heaviness, then he corrects them for their Profit, to make them Partakers of his Holiness.” If they honestly believed that God had ordained their sorrows “as “Physic, as Medicine for the good of their Souls,” then Christians should swallow their grief in order to praise God for his mercy.60
Most important, ministers warned that Christians who indulged in too much mourning might not be genuine Christians at all. Real Christians loved God more than anything or anyone else in the world—even more than children, friends, spouses, or parents. As the Reverend Thomas Skinner explained, we should not “set our Hearts and Affections too much upon our near Relatives, those pleasant enjoyments.” Although Christians should love their families, they should not anger God by loving them “immoderately and excessively.” Indeed, parents who spent too much time mourning the loss of children were almost certainly guilty of “idolatry.”61
Although ministers generally agreed that Christians had to regulate their mourning, some were stricter than others. According to John Flavel, Christ had not meant his words “weep not” to be interpreted as “an absolute prohibition of tears and sorrow.” “Christ would not have his People stupid and insensate,” Flavel declared. “He only prohibits the excesses and extravagancies of our sorrows for the dead, that it should not be such a Mourning for the dead as is found among the Heathen, who sorrow without Measure, because without Hope, being ignorant of that grand relief by the Resurrection which the Gospel reveals.”62 Although Flavel insisted that Christians must submit quietly to God’s will, his tone tended to be relatively gentle and comforting. By using the heathen as his antitype, he implicitly reassured his readers that their own tears were unlikely to be sinful. Even the weakest of Christians would not fall into the same “extravagancies” of despair as those who never had heard of Jesus. In contrast, Benjamin Wadsworth used more severe language by comparing excessive mourning to “Sedition or Mutiny.” He envisioned a genuinely “Christian” mourner as utterly submissive, almost impossibly so. “Let us . . . lye quietly at Gods Foot,” he exhorted, “under all the blows of his holy hand.”63
Christianity, as the philosopher Charles Taylor has noted, has always been torn by conflicting attitudes toward everyday life. While Christians have affirmed the essential goodness of creation—in Genesis, God never creates anything, whether grass, stars, animals, or humans, without seeing that “it was good”—they have also believed that they must be willing to sacrifice this world’s goodness for God. Ambivalent about how much they should value ordinary life, they have sometimes feared that marriage, parenthood, and work might interfere with their ability to be true Christians. Medieval Catholics, for example, claimed that priests and nuns were closer to God than the laity because of their spirit of renunciation, for they embraced poverty, celibacy, and charity in order to serve God alone. Yet in the wake of the Protestant Reformation, growing numbers of Christians insisted that it was possible to glorify God within the rhythms of ordinary
life. As Taylor explains, they claimed that “the fullness of Christian existence was to be found within the activities of this life, in one’s calling and in marriage and the family.” Although the transformation was not immediate (as Sarah Osborn’s story confirms), the Reformation gave birth to an affirmation of everyday life that has become one of the distinguishing features of the modern Western world. Enlightenment philosophers insisted that the meaning of human life could be found here on earth, not in a faraway heaven.64
But in the eighteenth century, when the affirmation of everyday life was still contested, many Christians seem to have feared loving their families too much. In 1753, for example, Experience Richardson, a Congregationalist from Massachusetts, worried that her continuing sorrow over her child’s death was sinful. Confiding her feelings to her diary several months after her four-year-old son, Luther, had died, she fretted, “I fear I have sinned against God in distressing myself about the state of my child that is dead.” She, like Sarah Osborn, seemed to be afraid that her son had not been saved. “I pray to God to give me a right spirit about this thing,” she wrote plaintively. Similarly, when Hannah Heaton became severely ill, she was afraid that God was punishing her for “bitterly” mourning the deaths of her two children, an eighteen-month-old toddler and a three-week-old infant. Reflecting on her illness, she wrote in her diary, “I was in extreme misery and I believed it was for my wicked carriage under the rod.” She was healed only when she promised God “never” to mourn for her children again. Although these examples may sound extreme, they were typical of many believers’ experiences. Eighteenth-century evangelicals (like their Puritan ancestors) viewed losing a loved one as a spiritual test—a test that was dangerously easy to fail. When Sarah Prince Gill learned that her father was seriously ill, she knew that she should accept his impending death with “full resignation,” but as she confessed to her diary, she could not do it. “Can’t feel willing—My views are inexpressibly horrid,” she wrote in anguish. More than a month later, as he continued to linger in “the valley of the Shadow of Death,” she was still struggling with mixed feelings of sorrow, despair, and anger. “A Stubborn will raged within,” she wrote. “I felt an Enmity rise against God in this his Dispensation.” Only in the last half hour before his death did she accept God’s will, finally proving to herself that she was a worthy Christian. “My Will [was] melted and brought to comply, and a happy Calm ensued.”65
Sarah Osborn, too, prayed that God would give her the strength to accept her loss calmly, but as she gazed at Samuel in his coffin, his small body wrapped in a shroud, she began to lose her earlier composure. During her “last farewell at his funeral,” all her repressed emotions suddenly flooded to the surface, and despite her attempts at self-control she began weeping. We can only imagine her thoughts as she looked down at his body, her cheeks wet with tears. Perhaps she remembered the small things—the way he had looked while carrying wood into the kitchen or the quiet conversations they had shared over her needlework in the evenings. Or perhaps she was haunted by the memory of his labored breathing as she had begged him to repent. “I found the bonds of natural affection very strong,” she confessed, “and I wept much.”66 Although she wanted to be like David, who had accepted his child’s tragic death in silence, she could not deny how deeply she had loved her son.
Although Sarah did not describe Samuel’s funeral in detail, it was probably like others of the time: a simple affair that was held at a private house, with no sermon, no singing, and no testimonials. Following the example set by the Puritans, eighteenth-century Congregationalists tried to make funerals as plain as possible, stripping away all the rituals that could distract mourners from the stark reality of death. Wealthy families sometimes gave away mourning gloves, scarves, or rings as tokens of remembrance, but Sarah and Henry could not afford such expensive luxuries, and they may have marked the solemnity of the ceremony with nothing more than simple black clothing or black ribbons tied to their sleeves. After being called together by the tolling of a church bell, they and the other mourners would have listened quietly while a minister said a brief prayer, and then, after draping a pall over Samuel’s coffin, they would have carried it in a slow procession to the graveyard.67
As she walked behind the pallbearers, weeping with every step, Sarah begged God to forgive her tears. Heartbroken at the loss of her son, she seems to have feared that God might abandon her as well, “hiding his face” from her as he had done many times before. “As I followed to the grave,” she remembered, “I pleaded thus with God, ‘Lord, I adore thee still as my sovereign. I do not repine at thy hand. But dear Lord, pity me, and suffer me to weep under the smart of thy rod; it is my only son.’” Praying that God would not be angered by her weakness, she searched her memory for a scriptural text that might ease her distress. “Then I thought on Psalm 53,” she remembered. ‘As a father pitieth his children, for the Lord pitieth them that fear him.’ This comforted me.” Still fearful that her tears might be “sinful, and the effect of an unresigned will,” which she “dreaded most of all,” she continued to pray for mercy until remembering that Jesus himself had wept over the loss of a loved one. “I was comforted again by reflecting, that when Martha and Mary wept for their brother Lazarus, the blessed Jesus was not angry, but wept with them.” By the time that she stood at the edge of Samuel’s freshly dug grave, watching the last shovels of earth cover his coffin, her thoughts had turned away from God’s wrath to his humanity in Jesus. Imagining Jesus weeping over Lazarus just as she was weeping over her son, she wrote, “O, then again I adored a sympathizing savior, a glorious high priest, who was sensibly touched with the feeling of my infirmities.” Strengthened by the knowledge that God still loved her despite her failings, she was finally able to dry her tears. “These and such like were the exercises of my mind, while following and laying my dust into the grave,” she recorded. “And ever since I have been kept composed and cheerful.”68
Just as she had done earlier in her narrative, Sarah filled her terse description of Samuel’s funeral with biblical allusions, and this time almost all her references were hopeful. By echoing Job’s cry “Have pity upon me, have pity upon me,” she may have been implicitly reminding herself (and any friends who read her narrative) that God had finally answered Job’s prayer, blessing him with a new family to take the place of those he had lost. (While many modern theologians tend to be troubled by Job’s story, which portrays a sovereign God ruthlessly afflicting a perfectly just man, eighteenth-century evangelicals read it much more hopefully.) Just as God had taken pity on Job, he would take pity on her.
Most significant, Sarah also alluded to several biblical texts that seemed to offer hope for Samuel as well as herself. Her references to these texts were buried in sentences addressing her own relationship to Christ, not Samuel’s, and she may not have been fully aware of what she was doing. When she described being comforted by Psalm 103 (“as a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth them that fear him”), for example, it is not clear whether she was remembering that only four verses later the psalm promised that God would extend “his righteousness unto children’s children.” (Once again, she may have been quietly raising the possibility that Samuel had shared her covenant.) Given her biblical expertise, it is hard to believe that she was not aware of the hopeful references that lay submerged beneath her text, but perhaps she could not admit, even to herself, that she was still searching for evidence of Samuel’s salvation—this time not in his personal experiences, but in the Bible.
Sarah’s brief, mournful reference to Samuel as her “only son” was especially laden with meaning. Perhaps she was remembering the words of the prophet Jeremiah, “O daughter of my people, gird thee with sackcloth, and wallow thyself in ashes: make thee mourning, as for an only son, most bitter lamentation,” or Amos, “I will turn your feasts into mourning . . . and I will make it as the mourning of an only son.” But she may also have been thinking of the many “only sons” whom God had chosen to re
scue from death, including his “only begotten son,” Jesus Christ, who had been resurrected. From reading the Bible, Sarah also knew that God had spared Isaac, Abraham’s “only son,” as he lay upon the altar of sacrifice, and Jesus had granted the prayer of a distressed man whose only son had been possessed by an evil spirit. When the man had cried out, “Master, I beseech thee, look upon my son: for he is mine only child,” Jesus had healed the child. Perhaps most meaningful for Sarah, Jesus had also taken compassion on a widow who had lost her “only son.” When Jesus saw her weeping beside the funeral bier, he was so moved by her sorrow that he brought her son back to life. If Sarah was meditating on this text in the aftermath of Samuel’s death (or while she was walking with a heavy heart to his grave), she may have wondered whether he, too, had been given a new life.
Yet despite the glimmers of hope lurking beneath the surface of her words, she never dared to speculate openly about what had happened to her son. All her hopes—and all her fears—about his salvation were hidden beneath her focus on her own individual relationship to God. Much of the power of her complex, multilayered narrative lies in the words that she could not bring herself to write.
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