In her closing sentences, Sarah tried to weave together all the disparate strands of her narrative into a coherent story, forcing her contradictory thoughts and emotions into a single framework of meaning. Abandoning her earlier attempt to tell an uplifting story about Samuel’s salvation, she claimed that God had taken her son away in order to purify her, to make her more dependent on his grace, and to show other Christians how to bear the deaths of loved ones without “murmuring.” “The Lord in mercy grant that I may more and more glorify him in this affliction,” she wrote, echoing the words of Job. “O that my sins may be more mortified. Lord, grant I may come out of this furnace as gold purified and fitted for my master’s use.” (Here she echoed Isaiah’s prophetic words, “I have refined thee, but not with silver; I have chosen thee in the furnace of affliction,” as well as the story of the three men cast into the fiery furnace.) Once again her suffering had taught her that a covenant God would never abandon her. Quoting from Ephesians, a text that describes Christ choosing the saved even before the “foundation of the world,” she praised God for sustaining her through his “glorious and special grace.” If not for God’s power in restraining her sinfulness, she surely would have murmured against him, rebelling against his sovereignty. In her words, “If I have behaved in any measure as becomes a child of God and any resignation has appeared in me, Lord, it is owing to the riches of thy glorious and special grace. For hadst not thou by that compelled me to act otherwise, I should have flew in thy face, murmured, fretted and repined at thee; cast away all my other comforts and mercies, and said I had none left, because thou hadst taken one from me.” Concluding her narrative with a simple prayer of gratitude, she wrote, “Lord, these, and more than these, would have been the effects of my perverse nature. Therefore, not unto me, not unto me; but to thy glorious name be all the glory forever and ever. Amen.”69
With these final words, Sarah placed her pen back in its stand, closed her ink bottle, and sprinkled sand on her pages to help them dry. Perhaps she also reminded herself, as she bowed her head in prayer, that she was supposed to be “composed and cheerful.”
Lest My Heart Be Joined to Idols
Because we do not have Sarah’s original manuscript, but only Samuel Hopkins’s published version, there are many questions about her account of Samuel’s death that we cannot answer. Most important, we do not know whether either Hopkins or his friend the Reverend Levi Hart, each of whom had a hand in editing her manuscripts, may have left out anything. In his brief discussion of Samuel’s death, Hopkins implied that he had not published the full narrative. “She has recorded some of her exercises under this trial,” he wrote, “part of which will be here inserted.”70 Although Hopkins does not seem to have made sweeping revisions to Sarah’s manuscripts (tinkering with individual words instead), he sometimes cut entries short.
Out of sympathy for her, we might be tempted to wonder whether Sarah’s original narrative was more optimistic about Samuel’s salvation than what appeared in print. Yet it is unlikely that either Hopkins or Hart would have edited her account to make her sound less hopeful. Although Hopkins defended the reality of hell, he argued that children of the covenant would almost always be saved: God had “determined that real holiness and salvation shall briefly and ordinarily descend . . . from believing parents to their children. Therefore, He has ordered them all to be holy and to be numbered among the saved.” Although Hopkins admitted that this covenant could be broken if parents were “negligent” about catechizing their children, he admired Sarah too much to suggest that she had been a “deficient” or “unfaithful” mother who had contributed to her child’s damnation. Writing in 1792 (four years before he began editing her manuscripts for publication), and italicizing his words for emphasis, he explained, “Real holiness and salvation are secured to the children of believers, by the covenant into which the parents enter with God as it respects their children, if the parents faithfully keep covenant, and fulfill what they profess and promise respecting their children, when they offer them in baptism.”71
As for Levi Hart, who helped Hopkins edit Sarah’s manuscripts, he, too, admired her, but based on his published writings he was probably troubled by her fear of mourning too much. In a sermon delivered in 1789 (before he had seen any of Sarah’s writings), he denied that a verse from Ezekiel, “Forbear to cry, make no mourning for the dead,” should be interpreted as a prohibition against mourning. Placing this passage in a broader context, he claimed that Ezekiel was predicting a time of such terrible divine judgments that “lamentations for deceased individuals should be lost in the general calamity.” Instead of warning mourners to control their grief, Hart urged them to see their sorrows as a reflection of God’s love for them. Just as they mourned over the loss of loved ones, God watched over them as a loving father.72 Although Hart mentioned some of the same biblical texts Sarah had, including the story of Jesus weeping over Lazarus’s death, he shared little of her anxiety about “murmuring.” Almost fifty years younger than she (he was born in 1761), he belonged to a generation that was not as suspicious of the affirmation of everyday life, and he does not seem to have worried that loving one’s family could be a form of idolatry. If he shortened or edited her narrative in any way, he probably tried to make her sound less severe.
The only other evidence that we have of Sarah’s state of mind comes from her later writings. Although she seems to have hoped that writing about Samuel’s death would bring her a sense of closure, it is clear that she continued to agonize over why God had decided to take away her only child. Following ministers’ advice to those who had lost loved ones, she spent the weeks after Samuel’s death subjecting herself to intense scrutiny, asking herself why God had afflicted her. According to John Flavel, an afflicted person should ask, “Lord, what special corruption is it that this Rod is sent to rebuke; what sinful neglect doth it come to humble me for?” The anonymous author of A Pastoral Visit to the Afflicted, which was published two years before Samuel’s death, urged mourners to remember that God always sent affliction for a good reason: “It concerns you to consider what you have been, and done, that has provoked the LORD thus to deal with you.”73 When Sarah wrote her narrative, she humbly confessed that her afflictions had been for her own good, but perhaps because she was still in shock she did not ask why God was afflicting her. What had she done to “provoke” God?
Childhood deaths were all too common in early America—the result of epidemics, accidents, and ordinary illnesses that are easily cured today—and ministers often preached and wrote about how parents should respond to the loss of children. According to the author of A Pastoral Visit to the Afflicted, bereaved parents should ask themselves how they had angered God in relationship to their children. (The question did not seem to be whether they had angered God, but only how.) The possibilities were legion. Parents could be too fond and indulgent, “too worldly, and too solicitous in providing Inheritances for them,” or not grateful enough to God for them.74 The loss of a child (like all other tragedies in life) was never simply an accident; it was always a message from God.
Influenced by a verse from Paul’s letter to the Colossians describing “inordinate affection” as “idolatry,” ministers also warned parents that God would take away their children if they “over-loved them, and over-prized them,” lavishing them with devotion that properly belonged to God alone. “Christians, your hearts are Christ’s royal Throne,” the Reverend Thomas Brooks proclaimed, “and in this Throne Christ will be chief. . . . [H]e will endure no competitor; if you shall attempt to Throne the Creature, be it never so near and dear unto you, Christ will dethrone it, he will destroy it, he will quickly lay them in a bed of dust, who shall aspire to his Royal Throne.” Although Flavel was gentler in his admonitions, he, too, believed that a jealous God would take away children who had been made into idols. Writing to a sister who was “bewailing the death of her dear and only son,” he implied that her child had been taken away so that nothing would stand between her
and God. “If the Jealousy of the Lord hath removed that which drew away too much of your Heart from Him,” he declared, “and [God] hath spoken by this Rod, saying, Stand aside Child, thou art in my way, and fillest more room in thy Parents Hearts, than belongs to thee, O then deliver up all to him and say, Lord, take the whole heart entirely and undividedly to thyself.”75 Although it was sinful for a parent not to love a child, it was also sinful to love a child too much.
When Sarah looked into her heart to ask how her relationship with Samuel might have angered God, she did not berate herself for being too indulgent or too ambitious for his economic success. But she thought that she was guilty of a far worse sin—a sin that she had never been able to conquer. Two years earlier, when she had made her personal covenant with God (using the Reverend Thomas Doolittle’s published covenant as a model), she had balked at writing the words, “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.” “Assaulted” by Satan, she had feared that she was “Lying to God” by promising to love him above everything else. After Samuel’s death, she seems to have believed that God had finally shown her the true contours of her heart. Despite her covenant promises she had violated the First Commandment: “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.”76
This was Sarah’s sin: she had loved her son even more than God. Because she had worshiped Samuel as an idol, God had taken him away. His death was her fault.
In a letter to Susanna Anthony written sometime after Samuel’s death (the date is not clear, but she referred to her “late shock”), Sarah claimed that God had repeatedly taken away her loved ones so that all her love would belong to him alone. If not for her losses, she never would have understood that God was better to her than a husband, a father, a brother, and even an only son. “Sometimes he will visit me with affliction,” she explained to Susa, summing up the story of her life. “He will take away the husband of my youth, and thereby cause me to fly to the Widow’s God, and rejoice in him, as the best of husbands! At another time, he will take away a tender father, and enable me to acquiesce in his dispensation, and rejoice in him, as my father’s God, as my God; and a father of the fatherless! Then he will remove an only brother, and thereby cause me more fully to know, what it is to be resigned to his will, and to adore his sovereignty.” All her losses had strengthened her love for God, including the death of her son. “Again, lest my heart should be joined to idols, he will have an only son! and show me at the same time, that he is better to me, than ten sons! Ah, than ten thousand sons, and all earthly enjoyments!” Although Sarah confessed that she was sometimes tempted to see God as “evil,” she insisted that he had punished her out of love. He brought her “to the greatest extremity, that I may know assuredly, the work of my deliverance must be all his own. And when he hath subdued my stubborn will, brought me to leave all with him, to work in his own way; then he appears on the mount of difficulty, preserves his own honor, causes his name and ways to be well spoken of, instead of evil, as I had feared, delivers me from all my fears, and makes me to rejoice in him.”77 Despite her “idolatry,” there was still reason for joy: God held the world securely in his hands, and he had ordained all the events in her life, even Samuel’s death, for her own good.
Because many early American parents, like Sarah Osborn, sounded stoic when discussing their children’s deaths, historians have sometimes wondered whether they loved their children as much as we do today. Yet Sarah’s story suggests that the differences between our world and hers are about diverging images of God, not disparities of love. There is no doubt that Sarah loved her son, but in a religious culture that warned parents not to make their children into idols, her love was so deep that it frightened her. After his death, her silence about him was not a sign of coldness or indifference, but an indication of her overflowing love—a love so passionate that she was afraid it had been sinful.
If Sarah continued to fret over what had happened to Samuel’s “naked soul,” she never admitted it in her writings. But at some point she reread the section of her memoir that described her hopes for his future, and she was clearly upset by what she had written. When he had been nine years old, she had spent a day “wrestling with God for blessings for my only son,” pleading that he would be saved. “O, I think I felt the pangs of the new birth for him,” she rejoiced: “Having had such a sense of his miserable state by nature and what it would be if he died Christless and such a discovery of the sufficiency of Christ for him, I continued agonizing with God in prayer for a considerable time. At Last was quieted by this portion of scripture adapted and sweetly applied: all thy children shall be taught of God and great shall be the peace of thy children. Oh, this caused me to bless and praise my God that he had . . . put this poultice into my mouth to plead on behalf of my own son.” The scripture that came to her mind was from Isaiah 54, perhaps her favorite chapter in the Bible. After her husband Samuel’s death, there had been many times when she had felt as though Isaiah’s words had been written just for her: “Fear not,” he had prophesied, “for thou shalt not be ashamed . . . and shalt not remember the reproach of thy widowhood any more.” This time, as she prayed for her son, she remembered Isaiah’s comforting promise to the children of the covenant: “All thy children shall be taught of the LORD; and great shall be the peace of thy children.” Longing for assurance that her beloved son would find “peace” in Jesus, she claimed to have received evidence of his future salvation.78
Sometime later when Sarah returned to these words, she scratched them out so thoroughly that they are almost impossible to decipher. (They can just be made out with the help of patience and a magnifying glass.) In the margins she explained, “I don’t think I was free from impulses here.” (This, too, she eventually crossed out, but not as completely.) Apparently she questioned whether she had truly felt the “pangs of the new birth” for Samuel, or whether she had been sadly deluded. Perhaps she edited her words in the eight months between finishing her memoir and Samuel’s death, but it seems more likely that she made these changes afterward. She may have been afraid that her words proved that she had loved her son too much, even as an idol.
The sentence that remained after her crossings-out and emendations was far bleaker than her original words. In the new version there is no redemption, but only Sarah imagining “his miserable state by nature and what it would be if he died Christless.” She still describes herself as “agonizing with God in prayer for a considerable time,” but this time her prayers go unanswered.79
In all of Sarah Osborn’s surviving manuscripts, there is only a single diary entry ever recorded on September 14, the anniversary of Samuel’s death. In 1753, on a Friday morning (the same day of the week that he had died), she lamented her sinfulness. Although she did not mention Samuel by name, she may have been thinking about him when she asked her soul, “Canst thou never be diligent but when the rod or frown drives thee to thy knees?” In other diary entries written around the anniversaries of his death, she often sounded depressed. Each September as the summer slowly turned to fall and the days grew shorter, she may have remembered her vigil by Samuel’s deathbed. “Everything seems to have lost its life and vigor,” she grieved on September 10, 1754. “All is flat and dull. The Bible itself does not reach me!” And on September 18, 1760, she felt as if there were “an awful estrangement betwixt God and my soul. My thoughts Like the Dead fish is carried down the stream by every Petty trifle. All communion with God is broken up.”80
Yet in all these entries, she never mentioned Samuel’s death. Nor, in all of her extant writings, did she ever mention him by name again. She had spent the last week of his life weeping and praying for his salvation, but after finishing her narrative she fell silent. Like Job in the whirlwind, she fell mute before her suffering, awed and humbled by the mysterious sovereignty of God.
Chapter 6
No Imaginary Thing, 1753–1755
I Have thought much on those few Lines you began to write to me; and do not at all wonder that you expect I should improve the Opportunity to relieve you. . . . And Oh that God would now bless the poor weak Endeavours of a worthless Worm to refresh you! If so, it will rejoyce me much: But whether it please him to use a poor nothing Creature as an instrument or no, I am perswaded he will in his own Time revive you, and I rejoyce and praise him on your Behalf, by Grace; that he will turn your Captivity; and that He will bruise Satan under your feet shortly, and make him gladly quit the Field, and leave you to enjoy your God. For blessed be God, Christ Jesus is stronger than He and all his combin’d Legions; and he can’t resist his Power, tho’ he has audaciously struck at his Honour, and endeavour’d to impede his blesed Work in your Soul. Do’s or has the bold-daring Spirit persuaded to insinuate that all Religion, is vain, imaginary, and delusive? Do’s he pretend that none can know they are right?—Tell him from me, He is a Liar, and I am bold to say, I have prov’d him so, for He has told me the same Tale: But blessed be God, I do know that Religion is no imaginary Thing, but a substantial Reality. I do know that there is a GOD of boundless Perfections, Truth and Faithfulness, that will not deceive; no nor forsake the Soul that puts its Trust in him.
But now perhaps you’ll say, Aye, but how do I know this God is mine; and that I myself am not deceived? I answer, by the Evidences of a Work of Grace wrought in my Soul. And now as God shall enable me, my dear Friend, I’ll tell you truly what GOD has done for my Soul, and what I call Evidences of a Work of Grace.1
In June 1753 Sarah wrote an encouraging letter to a friend in the midst of a spiritual crisis. In the nine years since Samuel’s death she had tried to channel her grief into helping others to seek salvation, determined not to let anyone else die without Christ. Counseling her friend not to despair, she promised that “a GOD of boundless Perfections” would never “forsake the Soul that puts its Trust in him.”
Sarah Osborn's World Page 22
