There was a mystical strain within the early evangelical movement that imagined God as pure, overpowering, blinding love. Because evangelicals believed that the Holy Spirit dwelled within those who had been born again, they yearned to experience moments of full communion with God—to lose the boundaries of the self in ecstatic unity with Christ. The Reverend Timothy Allen remembered feeling “even swallowed up in God,” and Sarah Prince Gill longed to be “absorbed in the ocean of immensity,” to have “no Will of my own,” to be “swallowed up in him who is the brightness of the father’s glory.” Sarah Osborn wanted to become a new self in Christ—to be engulfed in something larger than herself. As she meditated on the words of Psalm 32 (“Blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered”), she felt “swallowed up with Love to the immaculate Lamb.” “The frequent language of my soul was this,” she wrote, echoing another Psalm; “Whom have I in heaven but thee? and there is none upon earth I desire besides thee.” Although these mystical moments of unity with God were rare, they were the reason that she refused to succumb to “despair.”52
In contrast to Enlightenment thinkers who taught that the heart of Christianity lay in its teachings about morality, Sarah believed that her faith called her to something more. It was not enough to live virtuously. A true Christian was someone who loved God more than anything in the world, including one’s self. She was willing to be called a “fool” because she, like Paul, believed that the faithful were often despised as a “spectacle unto the world.” Writing to the Corinthians (1 Cor. 4:10), Paul had proclaimed, “We are fools for Christ’s sake.”
To justify the rising evangelical movement, to create a new self, to glorify God, to express her love for him, to “trust in the Lord and never despair of his mercy”—these were the reasons that Sarah decided to write her life story. In the years ahead she would reread her memoir again and again, scribble notes in the margins, underline sentences she liked, scratch out lines she regretted writing, and even tear out some pages (unless someone else mutilated her manuscript at a later date). But she never felt compelled to write an entirely new version of her story. Unlike James Lackington, a British Methodist who wrote two versions of his narrative because of his changing understanding of his life (the first after renouncing his Methodist faith and proclaiming himself a self-made man, the second in his old age after renewing his commitment to Christ), Sarah never wavered in her understanding of what she wanted her life to mean.53
The story that Sarah chose to share would shape her identity for the rest of her life. As we shall see in the pages ahead, it was a story about the inevitability of human sinfulness, the redemptive nature of suffering, and most of all, the power of God’s love.
Chapter 2
The Name of Christ
Oh god the father god the son and god the holy ghost who has so wonderfully contrived and wrought out my redemption and tho thou hast thro infinite wisdom hid these things from the wise and prudent yet thou hast reveald them to babes and even to me the most ignorant and vile of all creatures whose deep rooted enmity against thee and thy Laws broke out into action as soon as i was capable of any the first i can remember of actual sins which i was guilty of was telling a lie O but that text of scripture oft rung in my ears all Lyars shall have their portion in the lake that burns with fire and brimstone i was frequently under the striveings of the spirit of god pressing me to for sake sin repent and perform duties but sometimes found them very burdensome to me such as praying and saying many other good things which i was frequently taught Blessed be god however for such instructions sometimes i loved them and was much affected with them but my corruptions prevailed dreadfully i remember partook of an angry ungratefull temper stirring in me especially when corrected by my mother but must acknowledge to the glory of god that he preserved such a tenderness of concience in me that if at any time my mother convinc’d me that she did it because it was her duty for my sin against god i could bear it patiently and wilingly yea thankfully.1
The most ignorant and vile of all creatures. Enmity. The lake that burns with fire and brimstone. Corruptions. These were some of the images that came to Sarah’s mind when she remembered her life as a child.
There were many ways that Sarah could have begun the story of her childhood. Besides recording the basic facts that would have appeared in the church register, including her date of birth and her parents’ names, she could have tried to articulate her earliest, most vivid memories of growing up. Reaching back in time, she must have been able to salvage many memories, both sweet and bitter, from the ruins of the past. Perhaps she remembered running through the grass on a warm summer evening, or quarreling with her brother, or crying over a broken toy. Or perhaps she remembered sitting next to her father, her hands clasped and her head bowed in prayer, as he gave thanks for their evening meal. Some of her memories must have taken her back to a world almost before language, a sensory world of sights, sounds, and tastes: a beam of sunlight through the trees, a soothing lullaby, a drink of cold water from the well.
Yet at a time when many Americans had begun to ask questions about the doctrine of original sin—were children fallen from the very moment of birth?—Sarah began her narrative by recounting her early memories of sin. Without even pausing to record her birthdate, she immediately lamented her “stubborn and rebellious” childhood, castigating herself with such strong language that her images of corruption, repeated again and again, become almost numbing. Besides being tainted with “original” sin, the sin she had inherited from Adam and Eve, she had committed “actual” sins at an early age. (Actual sins were those that she had deliberately committed in defiance of God’s law.) She was “a monster in sin,” a “liar,” and “the most ignorant and vile of all creatures.” Her “base ingratitude,” her “deep-rooted enmity” against God, her “angry ungrateful temper,” and her dreadful “corruptions” made her entirely unworthy of God’s love.2
Sarah’s account of her early life is by far the most fragmentary part of her memoir. Because she lived long before the psychological fascination with childhood, she dismissed most of her early experiences as insignificant. We know very little about the details that modern psychologists would consider crucial, especially her infancy and her early experiences of illness or loss. Nor do we know much about the fabric of her everyday life as she grew older.3
Most important, Sarah wrote her memoir at the age of twenty-nine, long after her childhood had ended, and she inevitably brought her adult concerns and experiences to her memories of the past. She was no longer a child, but a grown woman who had been married, widowed, and then married again, and she was the mother of a ten-year-old son and three teenaged stepsons. It was impossible for her, just as it is for us, to bring back the young girl who had once sat on a parent’s lap. Rather than a transparent reflection of her past, her memoir was a conversation with it, a dialogue with her childhood self. “A self distended in time, never reaches complete reunion with itself . . .”4
Nevertheless, Sarah’s memoir offers an evocative glimpse of both her early life and her adult attitudes toward children. Looking back, she remembered herself as a sinful, disobedient child and a rebellious “youth” (the term adolescent was not coined until the twentieth century) who had needed to be “corrected” for her own good. Rejecting the growing faith in human goodness, she turned her life into a lesson about the inherent sinfulness of children, the importance of childhood obedience, and the wrath of God.
The Wicked Are Estranged from the Womb
When Sarah looked back on her childhood in search of the person she would become, hoping to find the moment when the door of childhood had opened to let the future in, she remembered a day when her whole life had changed. She could not have been more than four or five, but of all the stories she could have told about her childhood, this was the one that she chose to tell first. “The first I can remember of actual sins which I was guilty of was telling a lie,” she wrote. “O, but that text of scripture oft rung in
my ears, ‘all Liars shall have their portion in the lake that burns with fire and brimstone.’” In retrospect, she believed that committing her first “actual” sin had forced her to recognize the precariousness of the human condition—the reality of both her “deep-rooted” corruption and God’s blazing wrath. Her childhood, she confessed, had proven the dark wisdom of the Psalms: “The wicked are estranged from the womb: they go astray as soon as they are born, speaking lies.”5
Raised in a pious household, Sarah first learned about her sinfulness from her parents. Her mother, Susanna Guyse Haggar, and her father, Benjamin Haggar, were Congregationalists (also known as Independents or Dissenters) who traced their religious heritage back to the Puritans. Benjamin was a tanner (leather worker) who remained a church member for his entire life; Susanna was the daughter of a deacon in the Congregationalist Church of Hertford, England, and the sister of John Guyse, a well-known minister who led churches in both Hertford and London. Congregationalists were a religious minority in England, making up only 1.1 percent of the population in 1700, and because of their opposition to the Anglican establishment, they were not allowed to hold political office. But their small numbers and their sense of persecution only heightened their devotion to their distinctive theology. Besides objecting to “popish” forms of worship such as stained-glass windows and special priests’ vestments, they complained that the Church of England had watered down the doctrine of God’s sovereignty. Influenced by John Calvin and sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English Puritans, they emphasized that humans could not earn salvation through good works, but only through God’s grace.6
When Sarah was born in 1714, her parents knew what sort of child they wanted her to be: a good Christian who would obey God’s law. They brought her to be baptized in her infancy, and when she learned her first words, they taught her to pray and “to forsake sin.” Since most people assumed that children were too young to experience conversion, they probably did not expect her to be “born again” until her adolescence or adulthood, but they still considered it important to ground her in the Christian tradition. If they shirked their duties, they might pay a terrible price. “You must know, Parents, that your Children are by your means Born under the dreadful Wrath of God,” warned Cotton Mather. “And if they are not New-Born before they Die, it had been good for them, that they had never been Born at all.” By teaching Sarah to pray and to say “many other good things,” her parents hoped to prepare her for conversion. Perhaps not surprisingly, she sometimes found her religious duties “very burdensome,” but in retrospect she thanked God for giving her such pious parents. “Blessed be God for such instructions,” she wrote.7
Sarah seems to have learned the outlines of Calvinist theology at an early age. The Westminster Shorter Catechism, which was published in scores of editions in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, listed 107 questions and answers that young children were expected to memorize. To the very first question, “What is the chief end of man,” children were instructed to respond: “Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and enjoy him forever.” By repeating the same words every night, children were trained to accept the Christian story as the truth: a sovereign, majestic God had created the world; he had made a “Covenant of Law” with Adam and Eve requiring them to obey his commands; he had exiled them from the Garden of Eden after their willful disobedience; and as punishment, he had decreed that all their descendants would inherit the stain of original sin. From the moment of birth, humans were inherently depraved, fallen from grace. (Jonathan Edwards believed that children’s first moments of life symbolized their spiritual corruption: “Children’s coming into the world naked and filthy, and in their blood, and crying and impotent, is to signify their spiritual nakedness, pollution of nature and wretchedness of condition with which they are born.”) But as the Catechism explained, a merciful God had refused to abandon humans despite their sins. Because they could not possibly atone for their crime against him—no mere mortal could make amends for an offense against an infinite being—he had intervened in history to send his only son, Jesus Christ, as a sacrifice. Through his suffering on the cross, Jesus had repaid their debt and saved them from eternal death. God made a new covenant with the world, a “Covenant of Grace.” As the apostle John wrote, “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”8
Looking back, Sarah remembered being overwhelmed with feelings of love and gratitude when she learned about Christ’s sacrifice on the cross. “The name of Christ was sweet to me,” she wrote. Although she was still too young to understand all the subtleties of Calvinist theology, she knew that Christ was a “dear redeemer” and “beloved savior” who wanted to save her from sin. She also knew that he loved little children and had welcomed them into his arms. “Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not,” he had said to his disciples. “For of such is the kingdom of God.”9
Yet even though the young Sarah found many parts of Reformed theology comforting, she was also alarmed by it. As she learned, Christ’s death had not redeemed all of humanity but only a small group of the “elect.” (As she grew older, she would learn to say that Christ’s atonement had been “limited” rather than “general.”) Calvinists interpreted Paul’s words to the Ephesians, “He hath chosen us in him before the foundation of the world,” as evidence that God had decided who would be saved at the beginning of time. Although God had predestined some people to spend eternity in bliss, he had also sentenced others to eternal torment in hell. Predestination, as John Calvin had admitted, was a “dreadful” decree, but humans could do absolutely nothing to sway God’s transcendent will. They could not earn salvation by going to church, confessing their sins, or doing good works. With no power to save themselves, they were completely dependent on a transcendent and uncontrollable God.10
Since ministers did not believe in being “kind” to children by sugarcoating the truth, they wrote catechisms that are startlingly blunt. Contrary to what many historians have argued, they did not treat children as miniature adults who were expected to understand complicated theological ideas, and they tried to tailor their religious instruction to fit the unique needs of “infants” (those under the age of seven), “children” (ages seven to fourteen or sixteen), and “youth” (ages sixteen to twenty-five).11 Still, they thought that it was crucial for even the youngest to be exposed to the concepts of original sin, heaven, and hell. By explaining the Bible in plain, childlike language, they tried to convey a sense of God’s infinite power. When Isaac Watts (a friend of Sarah’s uncle John Guyse) published his First Catechism in 1730, he included a frank set of questions and answers about damnation.
Question: And what if you do not fear God, nor love him, nor seek to please him?
Answer: Then I shall be a wicked Child, and the great God will be very angry with me.
Question: Why are you afraid of God’s Anger?
Answer: Because he can kill my Body, and he can make my Soul miserable after my body is dead. . . .
Question: What must become of you if you are wicked?
Answer: If I am wicked I shall be sent down to everlasting Fire in Hell among wicked and miserable creatures.
This catechism was explicitly designed for children who were three or four years old.12
Even when Sarah read children’s books or sang children’s songs, she learned about God’s hatred of sin. During the 1740s and 1750s parents began to buy amusing, entertaining books for their children like The Little Pretty Pocket Book or Nurse Truelove, but before then children’s literature was almost entirely religious and didactic. The New-England Primer, the most commonly used schoolbook, mixed the alphabet with a strong dose of Calvinist theology. When children learned the letter “U,” they were taught to recite the verse, “Upon the Wicked God shall rain an horrible Tempest.” “A” reminded them that “In Adam’s fall, we sinned all.”13
Children’s hymnbooks
were similar. Isaac Watts’s immensely popular Divine and Moral Songs for the Use of Children, which was printed more than seventy-five times in eighteenth-century America, mixed soothing images of God’s “goodness,” “power,” “mercy,” and “love” with more severe pictures of divine wrath. A typical example is the song “Heaven and Hell”:
There is beyond the sky
A heaven of joy and love;
And holy children, when they die
Go to that world above.
There is a dreadful hell,
And everlasting pains:
There sinners must with devils dwell
In darkness, fire, and chains.
The New-England Primer. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.
Although Sarah never recorded the exact names of the books she read as a child, she may have owned a copy of Watts’s hymns. As she remembered, she was delighted when a minister kindly gave her a “Little book of spiritual songs.”14
Two of the stories that Sarah decided to tell in her memoir, both dating from the age of seven or eight, suggest that these vivid images of divine love and divine wrath made a lasting impression on her. In the first story, she remembered her growing sense of God’s “sweetness” after her mother sent her to a boarding school eight miles outside London. “I was constantly taught things that was religious and they all become sweet to me,” she wrote. “I verily thought I lived a heaven upon earth. Oh how sweet was sabbaths, and for secret prayer I would not have omitted it for all the world.” Often she would break down in fits of weeping as she thought about her sins.15
Yet as she also confessed, her overwhelming sense of God’s sweetness was tinged with fear. Remembering her dread of God’s wrath, she explained that she never would have dared to commit the “monstrous” sin of going to sleep without first saying a prayer: “The sin appeared so monstrous that I durst not lie down without it, for I should have been afraid the devil would have fetched me if I had.”16
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