This does not mean that everything about the Enlightenment was positive. Far from it. Yet as Sarah Osborn knew, we live in an imperfect world, and even our best works bear the marks of our human frailties. When evangelicals in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries tried to craft a new kind of Protestantism that would make sense in an increasingly democratic, capitalist, individualistic, and consumer-oriented culture, they may have forsaken parts of the Christian heritage that they should have tried harder to preserve. Yet they also encouraged people to believe in their freedom to create a more just, compassionate world, and they affirmed the goodness of everyday life. As evangelicals absorbed Enlightenment ideas, they stopped seeing their love for family and friends as a dangerous form of idolatry. Instead of feeling compelled to describe loved ones as “empty, broken cisterns,” they argued that their love for others was a reflection of the boundless love of God.11
As much as the evangelical movement has changed since the eighteenth century, crucial features have remained the same. Evangelicals have always struggled to define their relationship to the modern world, but they have never lost their missionary zeal, their sense of assurance, their reliance on the Bible, their determination to draw strict lines between Christians and unbelievers, and their emphasis on a personal relationship with Jesus. Nor have they ever doubted that sinners must be “born again.” For more than two centuries they have shared the same conviction that stood at the heart of Sarah’s life: a broken world needs to be redeemed by Christ.
When we think about the many people in the past who have been praised as “saints,” they have usually been radical in their pursuit of God, taking up their cross with a fervor bordering on the extreme. Sarah Osborn was no exception. Her friends thought of her as a saint because of her humility, her generosity to those in need, her ethic of self-sacrifice, and her patience under suffering. If few tried to emulate her, it was because they were almost frightened by her willingness to sacrifice everything for the glory of God. She had spent her life trying to love God with the intensity that Jesus had commanded—with all her heart, all her soul, and all her mind.12 God was her refuge and her hiding place, her rock and her fortress, her portion, her comforter, her savior.
If Sarah Osborn’s voice still has the power to inspire people today, it is because of her vision of the world as flawed, transient, and yet infused with grace. “Never despair,” she wrote in her memoir. She had experienced many sorrows along her pilgrimage, but even in the midst of illness, poverty, and war, she had never lost her faith in the goodness of creation. Everywhere she looked, she saw evidence of God’s love, proof that a fallen world always trembled on the brink of resurrection.
Abbreviations
ARCHIVAL LOCATIONS
AAS American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.
BL Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut.
BPL Boston Public Library, Boston, Massachusetts.
CHS Connecticut Historical Society, Hartford, Connecticut.
HSP Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
MHS Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, Massachusetts.
NHS Newport Historical Society, Newport, Rhode Island.
RIHS Rhode Island Historical Society, Providence, Rhode Island.
SML Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut.
SARAH OSBORN’S MANUSCRIPTS
Sarah Osborn’s writings have been preserved in the following collections: SO, Diaries, 1753–1772, NHS; SO, Diaries and Memoir, 1757–1769, BL; SO, Letters, 1743–1770, 1779, AAS; SO, Diaries, 1754, 1760–1761, CHS; SO, 5 Letters, 1769–1770, Simon Gratz Manuscript Collection, HSP; and SO to Eleazar Wheelock (May 5, 1742), in the Eleazar Wheelock Papers, Dartmouth College, Hanover, N.H. The diaries are cited by date in the endnotes. For locations, see the list below.
Memoir (1743): BL.
Diaries
July 8, 1753–March 1, 1754 Cover marked “No. 14,” NHS.
March 5 –October 16, 1754 Cover marked “No. 15,” CHS.
January 1–May 7, 1757 Cover marked “No. 20,” NHS.
May 9–November 6, 1757 Cover marked “No. 21,” BL.
February 19–April 2, 1758 No cover, NHS.
November [no date] 1759–April 30, 1760 No cover, NHS.
June 22, 1760 –January 18, 1761 Cover marked “No. 27,” CHS.
September 28, 1761–February 18, 1762 Cover marked “No. 29,” BL.
February 21–April 29, 1762 Cover marked “No. 30,” BL.
January 11–June 2, 1767 No cover, NHS.
FIRST CHURCH OF CHRIST RECORDS
The First Church of Christ in Newport was later known as the First Congregational Church, and its records are catalogued under the later name.
FCCR-BM First Congregational Church, Records of Baptisms and Marriages, 1744–1821, Vault A, no. 832, NHS.
FCCR-CB First Congregational Church Records, Committee Book, 1743–99, Vault A, no. 836B, NHS.
FCCR-418, Folder 4 Records of the First Congregational Church of Newport, MSS 418, Folder 4: Contribution Book, 1763–75, RIHS.
FCCR-418, Folder 5 Records of the First Congregational Church of Newport, MSS 418, Folder 5: Contribution Book, 1775–76, 1780, 1805–7, RIHS.
FCCR-418, Folder 6 Records of the First Congregational Church of Newport, MSS 418, Folder 6, RIHS.
FCCR-418, Folder 9 Records of the First Congregational Church of Newport, MSS 418, Folder 9, RIHS.
FCCR-DRC First Congregational Church Records, Documents Relating to the Church, 1729–99, Vault A, Box 40, Folder 1, NHS.
PEOPLE
JE Jonathan Edwards
JF Joseph Fish
SA Susanna Anthony
SH Samuel Hopkins
SO Sarah Osborn
PUBLICATIONS
Bushman, GA Richard L. Bushman, ed., The Great Awakening: Documents on the Revival of Religion, 1740–1745 (New York: Atheneum, 1970).
CH Thomas Prince, ed., The Christian History: Containing Accounts of the Revival and Propagation of Religion in Great-Britain & America. Periodical (Boston: S. Kneeland and T. Green, 1743–45).
FL Familiar Letters, Written by Mrs. Sarah Osborn, and Miss Susanna Anthony, Late of Newport, Rhode-Island (Newport: Newport Mercury, 1807).
LD Franklin Bowditch Dexter, ed., The Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles, 3 vols. (New York: Scribner’s, 1901).
NM Newport Mercury (Newport, R.I.)
Kramnick, PER Isaac Kramnick, ed., The Portable Enlightenment Reader (New York: Penguin, 1995).
SH, Memoirs Samuel Hopkins, Memoirs of the Life of Mrs. Sarah Osborn (Worcester, Mass.: Leonard Worcester, 1799).
SH, Life and Character Samuel Hopkins, comp., The Life and Character of Miss Susanna Anthony (Worcester, Mass.: Leonard Worcester, 1796).
SO, Nature Sarah Osborn, The Nature, Certainty and Evidence of True Christianity (Boston: Samuel Kneeland, 1755).
WJE Works of Jonathan Edwards, 26 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957–2008), Perry Miller, John E. Smith, and Harry S. Stout, general editors.
WJE Online Works of Jonathan Edwards Online (Jonathan Edwards Center, Yale University, 2008–), http://edwards.yale.edu/archive
WSH Edwards Amasa Park, ed., The Works of Samuel Hopkins, 3 vols. (Boston: Doctrinal Tract and Book Society, 1865).
Notes
All quotations from the Bible are from the King James Version, which was in common use in eighteenth-century New England.
INTRODUCTION
1. SO, Memoir, [135]. Osborn’s memoir is paginated only to page 53, but I have specified later page numbers so that readers can find quotations by counting forward.
2. For other studies of Osborn, see Mary Beth Norton, “‘My Resting Reaping Times’: Sarah Osborn’s Defense of Her ‘Unfeminine’ Activities,” Signs 2, no. 2 (1976): 515–29; Charles E. Hambrick-Stowe, “The Spiritual Pilgrimage of Sarah Osborn (1714–1796),” Church History 61, no. 4 (December
1992): 408–21; Sheryl Anne Kujawa, “‘A Precious Season at the Throne of Grace’: Sarah Haggar Wheaten Osborn, 1714–1796” (Ph.D. diss., Boston College, 1993); Sheryl Anne Kujawa, “Religion, Education and Gender in Eighteenth-Century Rhode Island: Sarah Haggar Wheaten Osborn, 1714–1796 (Ph.D. diss., Teachers College, Columbia University, 1993); Barbara Lacey, “The Bonds of Friendship: Sarah Osborn of Newport and the Reverend Joseph Fish of North Stonington, 1743–1779,” Rhode Island History 45 (November 1986): 126–36.
3. SO, Diary (March 5 –October 16, 1754), undated entry at end of diary. Hopkins gave conflicting accounts of the number of diaries that Osborn wrote, specifying forty-two in a letter to Levi Hart and more than fifty in his memoir of her life. See SH to Levi Hart, January 11, 1797, Simon Gratz Manuscript Collection: American Colonial Clergy, Case 8/Box 23, HSP, and SH, Memoirs, 358. Several of Hopkins’s letters to Osborn are preserved in the Samuel Hopkins Papers, Andover Library, Andover Newton Theological School, Newton, Mass. See also the letter from SO to Eleazar Wheelock (May 5, 1742) in the Eleazar Wheelock Papers, Dartmouth College, Hanover, N.H. A microfilm copy is available at Wheaton College, Wheaton, Ill., Reel 1, item 742305.
4. See Harry S. Stout, The Divine Dramatist: George Whitefield and the Rise of Modern Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1991); D. Bruce Hindmarsh, The Evangelical Conversion Narrative: Spiritual Autobiography in Early Modern England (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); D. W. Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989); Mark A. Noll, The Rise of Evangelicalism: The Age of Edwards, Whitefield, and the Wesleys (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 2003); Thomas S. Kidd, The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007); George M. Marsden, Jonathan Edwards: A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003). See also W. R. Ward, Early Evangelicalism: A Global Intellectual History, 1670–1789 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
5. Hindmarsh, Evangelical Conversion Narrative, 13.
6. SO, Diary, July 20, 1757.
7. Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, vol. 1 (New York: Knopf, 1966), 3. See also Roy Porter, The Creation of the Modern World: The Untold Story of the British Enlightenment (New York: Norton, 2000).
8. See, e.g., Gay, Enlightenment, 338; Paul Hazard, The European Mind: The Critical Years, 1680–1715 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953); Lester G. Crocker, The Age of Enlightenment (New York: Walker, 1969), 1; Robert A. Ferguson, The American Enlightenment, 1750–1820 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 22; Jonathan Irvine Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).
9. J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, vol. 1 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 9. See also Roland N. Stromberg, Religious Liberalism in Eighteenth-Century England (London: Oxford University Press, 1954). Roy Porter argues that the “Enlightenment in Britain took place within, rather than against, Protestantism” (Creation of the Modern World, 99). An excellent resource on the Enlightenment is Alan Charles Kors, ed., Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment, 4 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). On the multiplicity of Enlightenments, see Roy Porter and Mikuláš Teich, eds., The Enlightenment in National Context (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
10. SO, Diary, March 26, 1760, 223. On evangelicalism as a vector of the modern world, see Hindmarsh, Evangelical Conversion Narrative, vi.
11. Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain, 74. On the relationship between evangelicalism and the Enlightenment, see Hindmarsh, Evangelical Conversion Narrative and Noll, Rise of Evangelicalism. See also David Hempton, Methodism: Empire of the Spirit (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 52; Frederick A. Dreyer, The Genesis of Methodism (Bethlehem, Pa.: Lehigh University Press, 1999); and Brian Stanley, “Christian Missions and the Enlightenment: A Reevaluation,” in Christian Missions and the Enlightenment, ed. Brian Stanley (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2001), 1–21.
12. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 4 vols. (1690; rpt. London: Awnsham and John Churchill, 1706), vol. 1, p. 51; see also Roy Porter, The Enlightenment, 2nd ed. (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 2. SO, Nature, 3. On seventeenth- and eighteenth-century attitudes toward experience, see Martin Jay, Songs of Experience: Modern American and European Variations on a Universal Theme (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 9–78.
13. See Bernard McGinn, “The Language of Inner Experience in Christian Mysticism,” Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality 1, no. 1 (2001): 156–71; Susan Elizabeth Schreiner, Are You Alone Wise? The Search for Certainty in the Early Modern Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 209–60. On the Puritans, see Geoffrey F. Nuttall, The Holy Spirit in Puritan Faith and Experience (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946).
14. On the roots of evangelicalism in the seventeenth century, see Ward, Early Evangelicalism.
15. The most commonly cited definition of evangelicalism is David Bebbington’s “quadrilateral”: crucicentrism, Biblicism, conversionism, and activism (Evangelicalism in Modern Britain, 1–17).
CHAPTER ONE. NEVER DESPAIR
1. SO, Memoir, 1–2.
2. Bushman, GA, 52, 128–29.
3. JE, Some Thoughts Concerning the Present Revival, in WJE, 4: 289–530. Charles Chauncy, A Letter from a Gentleman in Boston, to Mr. George Wishart (Edinburgh, 1742), in Bushman, GA, 116–21.
4. SO, Memoir, 1.
5. See Diane Bjorklund, Interpreting the Self: Two Hundred Years of American Autobiography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 7. See also Margo Culley, A Day at a Time: The Diary Literature of American Women from 1764 to the Present (New York: Feminist Press, 1985), 12.
6. Culley, A Day at a Time, 8.
7. SO, Memoir, [86].
8. Ibid., 20, [130–31].
9. Ibid., 1.
10. Ibid., [132], 26, 1. John Flavel, The Mystery of Providence (1678; rpt. London: Banner of Truth Trust, 1963), 220.
11. See Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton, eds., Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 16–49, and Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). See also Tom Webster, “Writing to Redundancy: Approaches to Spiritual Journals and Early Modern Spirituality,” Historical Journal 39, no. 1 (1996): 40; James Olney, “Autobiography and the Cultural Moment: A Thematic, Historical, and Bibliographical Introduction,” in Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, ed. James Olney (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 22.
12. Georges Gusdorf, “Conditions and Limits of Autobiography,” in Olney, Autobiography, 44; SO, Memoir, 2.
13. On Franklin, see Daniel Walker Howe, Making the American Self: Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 28. On evangelical understandings of the self, see D. Bruce Hindmarsh, The Evangelical Conversion Narrative: Spiritual Autobiography in Early Modern England (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). SO, Memoir, 38.
14. SO, Diary, January 12, 1757.
15. SO, Memoir, 1, [58], [62], 9, 15–16. Stephen Greenblatt has argued that self-fashioning “always involves some experience of threat, some effacement or undermining, some loss of self” (Renaissance Self-Fashioning, 9). See also Margo Todd, “Puritan Self-Fashioning: The Diary of Samuel Ward,” Journal of British Studies 31, no. 3 (1992): 263.
16. JE, A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God, in WJE, 4: 148. On fears of religious decline, see Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1939); Miller, The New England Mind: From Colony to Province (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953).
17. Quoted in WJE 4: 6.
18. Edmund S. Morgan, The Gentle Puritan: A Life of Ezra Stiles, 1727–1795 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962), 19. See al
so Gerald J. Goodwin, “The Myth of ‘Arminian-Calvinism’ in Eighteenth-Century New England,” New England Quarterly 41, no. 2 (1968): 213–37. Cotton Mather is quoted in Conrad Wright, The Beginnings of Unitarianism in America (Boston: Starr King, 1955), 9.
19. Wright, Beginnings of Unitarianism, 18.
20. Edwin S. Gaustad and Philip L. Barlow, New Historical Atlas of Religion in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 17.
21. Devereux Jarratt, A Brief Narrative of the Revival of Religion in Virginia (London: R. Hawes, 1778); John Checkley, Choice Dialogues Between a Godly Minister and an Honest Country Man (Boston: Thomas Fleet, 1720), 13.
22. James Honeyman, Faults on All Sides (Newport: E. Nearegras and J. Franklin, 1728), 6.
23. SO, Diary, November 25, 1759.
24. Rebecca Larson, Daughters of Light: Quaker Women Preaching and Prophesying in the Colonies and Abroad, 1700–1775 (New York: Knopf, 1999).
25. Elaine Forman Crane, A Dependent People: Newport, Rhode Island, in the Revolutionary Era (New York: Fordham University Press, 1985), 3. On early Enlightenment ideas in America, see Norman Fiering, “The First American Enlightenment: Tillotson, Leverett, and Philosophical Anglicanism,” New England Quarterly 54, no. 3 (1981): 338; John Corrigan, The Prism of Piety: Catholick Congregational Clergy at the Beginning of the Enlightenment (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).
26. See Jonathan Irvine Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); David Lundberg and Henry May, “The Enlightened Reader in America,” American Quarterly 28, no. 2 (1976): 262–93.
27. See Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, 3 vols. (London: John Darby, 1711); Francis Hutcheson, An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections (London: J. Darby and T. Browne, 1728). On Tillotson, see Frank Lambert, Inventing the “Great Awakening” (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 41–42.
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