88. Osborn mentions taking medicine “for the salt rheum in my hands which I have been exercised with this twelve years” (SO to JF, May 4, 1747, AAS). On rheumatoid arthritis, see the Web site of the Arthritis Foundation: http://www.arthritis.org/disease-center.php?disease_id=31. On multiple sclerosis, see the Web site of the National Multiple Sclerosis Society: http://www.nationalmssociety.org.
89. SO, Memoir, 36.
90. Samuel Shaw, The Voice of One Crying in the Wilderness (1665; rpt. Boston: Rogers and Fowle, 1746), 65.
CHAPTER FOUR. AMAZING GRACE
1. SO, Memoir, [57–58].
2. Ibid., [76].
3. Ibid., 38.
4. Ibid., 13, 21–22, 28, 31.
5. Westminster Assembly, The Confession of Faith, Together with the Larger Catechism (Boston: S. Kneeland, 1723), 31; William Perkins, Works (Cambridge: J. Legat, 1616), 1: 637. See also Jerald C. Brauer, “Conversion: From Puritanism to Revivalism,” Journal of Religion 58, no. 3 (July 1978): 234.
6. Solomon Stoddard, A Treatise Concerning Conversion (Boston: Franklin, 1719), 78, 85; Cotton Mather, Christianity Demonstrated (Boston: Timothy Green, 1710), 23, 26. See also James Spencer Lamborn, “Blessed Assurance? Depraved Saints, Philosophers, and the Problem of Knowledge for Self and State in New England, 1630–1820” (Ph.D. diss., Miami University, 2002), 212.
7. Cotton Mather, Reason Satisfied and Faith Established (Boston: J. Allen, 1712), iii, 39; Mather, Christianity Demonstrated, 47.
8. Robert Middlekauff, The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596–1728 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 306–7.
9. On Mather’s “experimental religion,” see Middlekauf, Mathers, 305–19. Gilbert Tennent, Remarks upon a Protestation (1741), reprinted in The Great Awakening: Documents Illustrating the Crisis and its Consequences, ed. Alan Heimert and Perry Miller (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967), 171, 173.
10. The Result of a Council of the Consociated Churches of the County of Windham (Boston, 1747), 7, 17; Andrew Croswell, A Letter from the Revd Mr. Croswell, to the Revd Mr. Turell, in Answer to His Direction to His People (Boston: Rogers and Fowle, 1742), 10, emphasis mine; Ebenezer Frothingham, The Articles of Faith and Practice, with the Covenant, That Is Confessed by the Separate Church of Christ in General in This Land (Newport: J. Franklin, 1750), 114. On the Separates, see C. C. Goen, Revivalism and Separatism in New England, 1740–1800: Strict Congregationalists and Separate Baptists in the Great Awakening (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962).
11. On the Toleration Act, see Harry S. Stout, The New England Soul: Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 111.
12. See T. H. Breen and Timothy Hall, “Structuring Provincial Imagination: The Rhetoric and Experience of Social Change in Eighteenth-Century New England,” American Historical Review 103, no. 5 (December 1998): 1411–39; T. H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).
13. JE, A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections, in WJE 2: 93–461; JE, “Personal Narrative,” in WJE 16: 792. Bruce Kuklick describes Edwards as “an experimental Calvinist”: he believed that the “supernatural was conveyed in experience” (Churchmen and Philosophers: From Jonathan Edwards to John Dewey [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985], 32).
14. Barbara E. Lacey, ed., The World of Hannah Heaton: The Diary of an Eighteenth-Century New England Farm Woman (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press 2003), 16; JE, Life of David Brainerd, in WJE 7: 161; SO, Diary, July 8, 1753.
15. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690; rpt. London: Awnsham and J. Churchill, 1706), 1: 51. See Avihu Zakai, Jonathan Edwards’ Philosophy of History: The Re-Enchantment of the World in the Age of Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003). Leon Chai, Jonathan Edwards and the Limits of Enlightenment Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).
16. See, e.g., Robert H. Sharf, “Experience,” in Critical Terms for Religious Studies, ed. Mark C. Taylor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 95; Wayne Proudfoot, Religious Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985); Ann Taves, Fits, Trances, and Visions: Experiencing Religion and Explaining Experience from Wesley to James (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).
17. JE, Life of David Brainerd, 143.
18. Edwards A. Park, ed., “Memoir of Samuel Hopkins,” in WSH 1: 16; Sue Lane McCulley and Dorothy Zayatz Baker, eds., The Silent and Soft Communion: The Spiritual Narratives of Sarah Pierpont Edwards and Sarah Prince Gill (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press 2005), 25.
19. Joseph Tracy, The Great Awakening: A History of the Revival of Religion in the Time of Edwards and Whitefield (Boston: Tappan and Dennet, 1842), 161, 138. See Taves, Fits, Trances, and Visions, 48–50.
20. JE, Distinguishing Marks, in WJE 4: 230. For Sarah Edwards’s account of her religious experience, see McCulley and Baker, Silent and Soft Communion, 1–16.
21. A True and Genuine Account of a Wonderful WANDERING SPIRIT (1741), in Heimert and Miller, Great Awakening, 149.
22. Michael Crawford, “The Spiritual Travels of Nathan Cole,” William and Mary Quarterly 33, no. 1 (January 1976): 92. On the new understanding of conversion, see Kenneth P. Minkema, “A Great Awakening Conversion: The Relation of Samuel Belcher,” William and Mary Quarterly 44 (January 1987): 121–26.
23. D. W. Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989), 43.
24. McCulley and Baker, eds., Silent and Soft Communion, 88; Crawford, “Spiritual Travels of Nathan Cole,” 101.
25. SO, Memoir, [71].
26. Ibid., 49.
27. Ibid., 39.
28. See J. Sears McGee, “Conversion and the Imitation of Christ in Anglican and Puritan Writing,” Journal of British Studies 15, no. 2 (Spring 1976): 24–25.
29. SO, Memoir, 40.
30. On Newport’s First Church of Christ, see Horace S. Brown, “Congregationalism in Newport, Rhode Island,” 6, typescript, Vault A, no. 1646, NHS.
31. On Clap, see Sibley’s Harvard Graduates, ed. Clifford K. Shipton (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1933), 4: 36; SO, Memoir, 41–42.
32. Cotton Mather, The Nightingale: An Essay on the Songs Among Thorns (Boston: B. Green, 1724), 3; SO, Memoir, 42–43; Crawford, “Spiritual Travels of Nathan Cole,” 94.
33. SO, Memoir, 44, 17.
34. James Turner, Without God, Without Creed: The Origins of Unbelief in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 44; SO, Memoir, 46–47, citing Proverbs 18:14.
35. SO, Memoir, 49–50.
36. Ibid., 50.
37. Ibid., 51–52.
38. Tennent quoted ibid., [79];George Whitefield, The Marriage of Cana (1742) in Bushman, GA, 33.
39. Elizabeth Rowe, Devout Exercises of the Heart in Meditation and Soliloquy, Prayer and Praise, 4th ed. (Boston: Rogers and Fowle, 1742), x–xi. Compare SO, Memoir, 51, to SH, Memoirs, 28.
40. George Whitefield’s Journals (London: Banner of Truth Trust, 1960), 452–53; SO, Memoir, 8, 54–55.
41. Joseph Stevens, Another and Better Country, Even an Heavenly (Boston: S. Kneeland, 1723), 55.
42. SO, Memoir, [57].
43. Ibid., [62].
44. Ibid., [62–63]; 1 Corinthians 11:29; John 20:28. Osborn’s account echoed ministers’ advice to imagine Christ as really present at the table. See Jabez Earle, Sacramental Exercises, for the Christian’s Employment Before, At, and After the Lord’s Supper (Boston: Fleet, 1725).
45. Compare SO, Memoir, [64], to Thomas Doolittle, A Call to Delaying Sinners (Boston: Benjamin Eliot, 1700), 140.
46. SO, Memoir, [64].
47. John Bunyan, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 1986), 40, citing Luke 14:22; SO, Memoir, [65–67], quoting Isaiah 54:4–10.
48. SO, Memoir, 51, [141], quoting Revelation 3:20;
Andrew Croswell, A Letter from the Revd Mr. Croswell, to the Revd Mr. Turell (Boston: Rogers and Fowle, 1742), 11.
49. JF to SO, December 20, 1743, Benjamin Silliman Family Papers, Group 450, Series 1, Box 1, Manuscripts and Archives, SML; SO to JF, November 9, 1743, AAS.
50. Charles Chauncy, Seasonable Thoughts on the State of Religion in New-England (Boston: Rogers and Fowle, 1743), 104–5; JE, Some Thoughts Concerning the Present Revival, in WJE 4: 312; SO, Memoir, 141 (this page is ripped).
51. Compare SO Memoir, 42, 47 to SH, Memoirs, 21–22, 25.
52. SO, Memoir, [65], [58], [62], [69], quoting 1 Peter 1:8. I have borrowed this language from Grant Wacker, Heaven Below: Early Pentecostals and American Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 67.
53. SO, Memoir, [70–71].
54. Ibid., [80].
55. Tracy, Great Awakening, 86, 59; Thomas S. Kidd, The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 45–47; George Whitefield’s Journals, 452–55. On Newport’s population, see Elaine Forman Crane, A Dependent People: Newport, Rhode Island in the Revolutionary Era (New York: Fordham University Press, 1985), 76.
56. Thomas Prince, An Account of the Revival of Religion in Boston (rpt. Boston, 1823), cited in Edwin S. Gaustad, The Great Awakening in New England (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1957), 33; On the Reverend Mr. Gilbert Tennent’s Powerful and Successful Preaching (Boston, 1741), in Heimert and Miller, Great Awakening, 193; Gilbert Tennent, The Espousals; or, A Passionate Perswasive to a Marriage with the Lamb of God (Boston: Thomas Fleet, 1741), 39–40; SO, Memoir, [76], [78].
57. SO, Memoir, [87].
58. Ibid., [78–80].
59. Gilbert Tennent, The Examiner, Examined; or, Gilbert Tennent, Harmonious (Philadelphia: William Bradford, 1743), 98; SO, Memoir, [84]. Tennent was quoting Jeremiah 3:1.
60. SO, Memoir, [86].
61. Ibid., [81], [87], [89].
62. Susa did not become a member of Sarah’s church until 1742, but Elizabeth Hopkins claims that they were corresponding as early as 1740. See FL, 2.
63. SH, Life and Character, 18
64. Ibid., 22, 25.
65. FL, 31; SO, Diary, October 13, 1754.
66. SO, Diary, May 29, 1753. See also 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.
67. SO to JF, May 29, 1753, January 27, 1755, AAS.
68. SO, Memoir, [122–25], [128].
69. Ibid., [72]. In a passage that she later crossed out, Sarah claimed that she “was so comfortable with the belief I had that his change was out of a world of sin” that she could not mourn, but felt “secret joy that he was released” (ibid., 72). She may have crossed out this passage because she did not want to sound like radicals who claimed to know whether others had been saved.
70. Ibid., [92], [95–96].
71. Ibid., [92–98].
72. Ibid., [98–100].
73. Ibid., [101].
74. Ibid., [103].
75. Ibid., [106], [105].
76. Ibid., [106–8].
77. Ibid., [94], [109].
78. Ibid., [93], [125–26], 9.
79. Ibid., [119–21], citing Romans 8:30. Since she had recently decided against joining Trinity Church, her critic may have been its rector, the Reverend James Honeyman, who opposed the revivals.
80. SO, Memoir, [74–75], [90–91], citing 2 Corinthians 6:14. These passages are crossed out in her memoir and only some sentences can be deciphered.
81. Information about Henry Osborn and his family comes from Alden Gamaliel Beamon, comp., Rhode Island Vital Records, New Series, vol. 11: Births, 1590–1930, from Newport Common Burial Ground Inscriptions (East Princeton, Mass.: Rhode Island Families Association, 1985), and James N. Arnold, Vital Record of Rhode Island, 1636–1850. First Series: Births, Marriages and Deaths, vol. 4 (Providence: Narragansett Historical Publishing, 1893). Henry was born in 1685 and married his first wife, Margaret Miller, in 1721. She died on September 22, 1741, at the age of forty-one. One of their children, Samuel, died at the age of a year and ten months.
82. SO, Memoir, [110]; Benjamin Wadsworth, The Well-Ordered Family (Boston: Benjamin Green, 1712), 24–25; William Kidder, “The Diary of Nicholas Gilman” (M.A. thesis, University of New Hampshire, 1972), 375.
83. SO, Memoir, [110–11].
84. Ibid., [111], [114].
85. Ibid., [129–31].
86. Ibid., [132–33], citing Micah 6:8.
87. Ibid., [133], quoting Hebrews 13:5.
88. Ibid., [114–15].
CHAPTER FIVE. THE LORD GAVE, AND THE LORD HATH TAKEN AWAY
1. SH, Memoirs, 65–67.
2. On the affirmation of everyday life, see Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 211–33.
3. SO, Diary, November 17, 1760; Psalm 13:1.
4. Psalm 102:2.
5. SO, Memoir, [112].
6. See W. J. Rorabaugh, The Craft Apprentice: From Franklin to the Machine Age in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 6.
7. Ibid., 11. See also Carl Bridenbaugh, The Colonial Craftsman (New York: Dover, 1990).
8. SH, Memoirs, 65.
9. Edmund S. Morgan, The Puritan Family: Religion and Domestic Relations in Seventeenth-Century New England, rev. ed. (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), 77. See also John Demos, A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 71–75.
10. Jane Fletcher Fiske, Gleanings from Newport County Files, 1659–1783 (Boxford, Mass.: n.p., 1998), nos. 125, 710.
11. SH, Memoirs, 66.
12. Ibid., 65. On Epaphroditus, see Philippians 2:27. On Hezekiah, see 2 Kings 20, 2 Chronicles 32:24, and Isaiah 38:1.
13. SH, Memoirs, 65–66; 2 Peter 1; Jeremiah 30:7–8; Psalm 86:5–7.
14. SH, Memoirs, 66.
15. Ibid., 66.
16. SO, Memoir, 30. See Cotton Mather, Help for Distressed Parents (Boston: John Allen, 1695), 13.
17. Esther Edwards Burr to JE, November 2, 1757, cited in David E. Stannard, The Puritan Way of Death: A Study in Religion, Culture, and Social Change (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 150.
18. Thomas Hooker, The Unbeleevers Preparing for Christ (London, 1638), quoted in Ross W. Beales, “In Search of the Historical Child: Miniature Adulthood and Youth in Colonial New England,” American Quarterly 27, no. 4 (October 1975): 386.
19. CH (June 30, 1744): 137.
20. Thomas Prince, “The Great and Solemn Obligations to Early Piety,” cited in Sandford Fleming, Children and Puritanism: The Place of Children in the Life and Thought of the New England Churches, 1620–1847 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1933), 97.
21. JE, “Sermon on 2 Kings 2:23–24” (1741), Jonathan Edwards Collection (1696–1972), BL.
22. John Webb, Twenty-Four Sermons (Boston: J. Draper, 1726), 25.
23. Gilbert Tennent, A Solemn Warning to the Secure World, from the God of Terrible Majesty (Boston: S. Kneeland and T. Green, 1735), 171; Charles Drelincourt, The Christian’s Defence Against the Fears of Death, with Directions How to Die Well (Boston: Thomas Fleet, 1744), 15; Samuel Moodey, The Gospel Way of Escaping the Doleful State of the Damned (Boston: S. Kneeland and T. Green, 1739), 10.
24. See WJE 14: 27–28.
25. JE, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, in WJE 22: 411–12; Stephen Williams, Diary, July 8, 1741 (typescript), cited in George M. Marsden, Jonathan Edwards: A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 220.
26. Norman Fiering, Jonathan Edwards’s Moral Thought and Its British Context (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981), 204. See also Perry Miller, Jonathan Edwards ([New York]: Sloane Associates, 1949), 155.
27. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (London, 1651), and John Tillotson, Of the Eternity of Hell Torments (London, 17
08), cited in Philip C. Almond, Heaven and Hell in Enlightenment England (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 150, 156.
28. See Edward M. Griffin, Old Brick: Charles Chauncy of Boston, 1705–1787 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980), 127; Charles Chauncy, The Mystery Hid from Ages and Generations, Made Manifest by the Gospel Revelation; or, The Salvation of All Men (London: Charles Dilly, 1784).
29. SH, Memoirs, 66.
30. Joseph Alleine, An Alarm to Unconverted Sinners (Philadelphia: B. Franklin, 1741), ii, 54, 94.
31. Ibid., 139–40.
32. Ibid., 13.
33. SH, Memoirs, 67; Alleine, Alarm to Unconverted Sinners, 109.
34. Thomas Prince, The Sovereign God Acknowledged and Blessed, Both in Giving and Taking Away. A Sermon Occasioned by the Decease of Mrs. Deborah Prince (Boston: Rogers and Fowle, 1744), 29–32. Sarah knew Thomas Prince; see SH, Memoirs, 157.
35. SH, Memoirs, 66.
36. Ibid., 66–67.
37. B. A. Gerrish, “‘To the Unknown God’: Luther and Calvin on the Hiddenness of God,” in Gerrish, The Old Protestantism and the New: Essays on the Reformation Heritage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 144.
38. SH, Memoirs, 67.
39. Gerrish, “‘To the Unknown God,’” 148; FL, 84. The same imagery of “the apple of his eye” appears in Deuteronomy 32:10.
40. FL, 85.
41. SH, Memoirs, 67.
42. Ibid.
43. SH, Memoirs, 68, citing Psalm 55:22.
44. Ibid., citing 1 Samuel 8.
45. Charles Chauncy, Early Piety Recommended and Exemplify’d (Boston: S. Kneeland and T. Green, 1732), 19.
46. SH, Memoirs, 68, citing 2 Samuel 12:20.
47. Ibid., citing Psalm 71:7–8.
48. Ibid.; Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love (London: Methuen, 1901), 57.
49. SH, Memoirs, 69.
50. Ibid., citing Hebrews 12:8 and Psalm 119:75.
51. Ibid., 68.
52. Cotton Mather, Nehemiah (Boston: Bartholomew Green, 1710), 4. The biblical text is Genesis 17:7; see also Hebrews 8. SH, Memoirs, 68.
Sarah Osborn's World Page 48
