Since the older Samuel was still at sea, he did not see his child until he returned to Newport the next spring. By then he had been away for many months, and unless he had met someone from home in a far-off port, he would not have known whether he was the father of a boy or a girl or, most important, whether Sarah and his child were both alive and healthy. He must have been immensely relieved to find her waiting for him with his son, who was now at least five months old. We can only imagine how many stories they must have rushed to tell each other—stories about towering waves at sea, foreign people in far-away lands, or cold winter nights nursing a child.
But Samuel could remain at home for only a few months. After spending the spring and summer of 1733 in Newport, he prepared to leave on another vessel in the fall. The merchant trade was thriving. Like many sailors, he may have traveled to other American ports such as Philadelphia or Boston, but given the length of his voyages he probably went to the British or French West Indies in order to exchange fish, lumber, and horses for molasses and sugar or, even more dangerous, all the way to West Africa to trade rum for slaves. Fragmentary evidence suggests that he may have been part of the crew of the Bonadventure, a sloop that left Newport in October 1733 on its way to Barbados and then Africa.52 Neither he nor Sarah seems to have had any qualms about the justice of slavery, and he may have hoped to support his family with the profits of the slave trade. Sarah may have worried that he might become ill at sea or be captured by privateers or shipwrecked, but she tried to put her faith in God’s protection. All she could do was wait, pray, and watch the harbor in search of his returning ship.
Six months later on April 1, 1734, Sarah was startled out of her sleep by an urgent knock at her door. For a brief moment she may have thought that Samuel had finally come home, but after unlatching the door and peering into the darkness she came face to face with her worst fears. “I went to bed in a house all alone, my child being at my father’s, and about eleven or twelve o’clock at night was waked to hear the heavy news,” she remembered.53 It had not been possible to get word to her earlier, but her husband had died at sea the previous November. During all the months she had prayed for him, he had already been dead.
As she later groped for the right words to describe her feelings after her husband’s death, she emphasized her resignation to God’s will. If she had cried uncontrollably, or refused to believe that Samuel was really dead, or imagined that she saw his face in a crowd of strangers—all typical symptoms of grief—she decided not to admit it. As she knew, she was not supposed to spend too much time lamenting the loss of loved ones. In the words of John Flavel, the bereaved “must keep due bounds and moderation in [their] Sorrows, and not be too deeply concerned for these dying, short lived things.” If the faithful found it difficult to accept their loss, they should beg God for greater submission. Charles Drelincourt, a seventeenth-century Calvinist, wrote a special prayer for Christians to say after losing a “beloved Person”: “The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away, grant me therefore Grace to put an end to all these Sighs, Groans and Tears, and spend my Time no longer in lamenting the loss of my beloved Object, but that I may employ myself to prepare for my removal out of this Earthly Tabernacle, into thine Eternal Rest. Amen.” No matter how painful it was to lose a husband, a child, a parent, or a friend, the faithful could not succumb to despair.54
Whether Sarah had read Drelincourt’s book by 1743 (she had definitely read it by 1760), she had heard enough sermons about death to know what she was supposed to say and feel. She admitted that “the Loss of my companion, whom I dearly loved, was great,” but she also claimed to have accepted his death with a resignation that bordered on stoicism. After remembering the night she had heard the “heavy news,” she continued: “But God wonderfully appeared for my support. I see his hand, and was enabled to submit with patience to his will. I daily Looked around me to see how much heavier God’s hand was laid on some others than it was on me, where they was Left with a great many children and much involved in debt, and I had but one to maintain, and though poor, yet not so involved. Others I see had their friends snatched from them by sudden accidents. The consideration of these things, together with the thoughts of what I deserved, stilled me.” Just as Drelincourt had recommended, she tried to imitate the example of Job—not the Job who had cursed the day of his birth but the Job who had quietly accepted the death of his seven sons. She had “deserved” worse. “With Job I could say, the Lord gave and the Lord has taken and blessed be the name of the Lord.”55
The only clue to her sorrow is that once again, just as she had done when describing her suicidal feelings and her battles with her parents, she briefly slipped into the present tense. Remembering her sense of God’s presence, she wrote, “I see his hand.” Even six years after Samuel’s death, her memories of that midnight knock on the door were so vivid that the boundary between past and present disappeared.56
Whom the Lord Loves, He Chastens
Sarah Osborn believed that she not only had to submit to Samuel’s death; she needed to accept it as a sign of God’s goodness. “The common Lot of good Men in this present evil World, is to meet with much Evil,” Cotton Mather explained. But “GOD has meant it unto Good.”57
Christians throughout history have struggled with the question of how an all-powerful, good God could have created a world that includes evil, but the problem of suffering loomed especially large in the eighteenth century. In the midst of a scientific revolution, Enlightenment thinkers found it difficult to reconcile the existence of suffering with Isaac Newton’s image of a rational, orderly universe. If God was like a clockmaker who had created the universe to run according to fixed laws, then why did suffering exist? As David Hume posed the dilemma in the 1750s, “Is he willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is impotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil?”58
Sarah Osborn’s understanding of suffering was shaped by a long Christian tradition that emphasized God’s goodness even in the midst of evil. According to Augustine of Hippo, whose view of suffering became the dominant one in Christian communities for more than a thousand years, evil did not reflect anything in God’s nature but only human sinfulness. Distinguishing Christians from the Manicheans, who portrayed God and the devil as two equal forces battling for control, Augustine insisted that God was the supreme ruler of the universe and that everything he created, from the angels to the smallest creatures in the sea, was essentially good. Although evil was real, it did not exist as a positive force or have an independent power of its own. It was best understood as a loss, a lack, a breakdown in the excellence of God’s creation, or in Augustine’s evocative phrase, privatio boni—a privation of the good. If Adam and Eve had not rebelled against God in the Garden of Eden, evil would not have entered the world, but God had refused to allow sinners to spoil his creation. By punishing them for their transgressions, he upheld the moral perfection of the universe. “The penal state is imposed to bring [the universe] into order,” Augustine explained. “The penalty of sin corrects the dishonor of sin.”59
Evangelicals echoed Augustine’s interpretation of suffering as the penalty for sin, and, influenced by John Calvin, they also claimed that a sovereign God had predestined the evil and suffering that took place in the world. (Although Wesleyan evangelicals in England believed in free will, most American evangelicals were Calvinists until the nineteenth century.) Humans were incapable of making any decisions that were not controlled by God. “God not only foresaw the fall of the first man, and in him the ruin of his descendants,” Calvin explained, “but also meted it out in accordance with his own decision.” While people might question why God had chosen to create a world filled with anguish and loss, a world where some had been sentenced to eternal damnation even before birth, they could do nothing to change God’s will. For reasons that only the almighty God could understand, he had preferred to create a universe in which humans would sin and suffer.60
Humanitarians argued that God’s most important characteristic was benevolence. Although God was omnipotent, he never deliberately inflicted either physical or psychological pain. According to the third earl of Shaftesbury, the appeal of Calvinist ideas could be explained in psychological terms. “We see Wrath, and Fury, and Revenge, and Terrors in the DEITY when we are full of Disturbances and Fears within,” he explained, but God is actually “truly and perfectly Good.” God was the very definition of compassion, the embodiment of love.63 Indeed, benevolence was one of the most popular words of the eighteenth century, a shorthand for a constellation of assumptions about God’s mercy and the rationality of the universe.64
Humanitarians also objected to the belief that suffering was the result of divine decree. Since they argued that God had given humanity the gift of free will, they explained “moral evils” like theft or murder as the misuse of human freedom. (This argument raised hard questions about why people would commit evil acts if they had been born with an inclination to virtue, but, influenced by John Locke, humanitarians answered that children were corrupted by nurture rather than nature.) As for “natural evils” like earthquakes and tornados, humanitarians saw them as an inextricable part of a larger whole that was unquestionably good. Influenced by Newton’s view of the universe as a finely tuned piece of machinery, they argued that natural evils must be crucial to the functioning of the entire system. “If the whole and its parts be taken together,” wrote the Anglican theologian William King, “none could be changed but for the worse.” (King’s treatise, On the Origin of Evil, originally published in Latin, was translated into English and reprinted three times before 1740.) In his popular poem “An Essay on Man,” Alexander Pope proclaimed, “Whatever is, is right.”65 Rather than being flawed or fallen, the world was the best one possible.
The key word for humanitarians was happiness. According to John Tillotson, “the great End which Religion proposeth to itself is Happiness,” and since God’s glory was intertwined with human happiness there could never be any competition between the two. (Skewering Calvinists, he derided their view of a jealous God as “senseless.”)66 Matthew Tindal, a British deist, argued that since God was “infinitely satisfied in himself,” he did not create humans out of a selfish desire for glory. Tindal asked, “Do we not bring God down to ourselves, when we suppose he acts like us poor indigent Creatures, in seeking Worship and Honor for his own sake?” If humans broke the moral laws governing the universe, then God needed to punish them in order to set things right, but only in proportion to the particular transgression and never in a spirit of anger. “Your common systems of divinity,” Tindal complained, “present him full of Wrath and Fury, ready to glut himself with Revenge for the Injuries he has suffered by the breach of his Laws,” but “the ultimate End of all God’s Laws, and consequently, of all Religion, is human Happiness.” If humans suffered, it was because they had broken laws that had been designed for their own good, not because an angry tyrant sought revenge against them. “All punishment for Punishment’s sake is mere Cruelty and Malice,” he objected, “which can never be in God.”67 (When Thomas Jefferson declared in 1776 that all men had an unalienable right to “the pursuit of happiness,” he built on an idea with deep roots in religious liberalism.)
If the celebration of God’s benevolence had been limited to a few intellectuals or radicals, evangelicals could have ignored it, but images of both God and human nature were shifting in the eighteenth century. The humanitarian movement began among the elite and well-educated, but partly because of economic developments it gained widespread support among the middling sorts as well. Although humanitarian ideas were not caused by the consumer revolution (and, in fact, they predated it), the greater availability of material goods seems to have strengthened the growing faith in divine benevolence. As objects like candles, mirrors, lamps, and stoves ceased to be luxuries, people in the eighteenth century increasingly prized the virtue of being “comfortable”—a word that symbolized the new quest for material pleasures. In a world of consumer abundance filled with new amenities that their parents or grandparents had never enjoyed, many found it hard to believe that God wanted them to suffer. In later years, Sarah would thank God for making her “comfortable as to outward things.”68
Deliberately setting themselves against the spirit of the age, evangelicals insisted that God had created the world to glorify himself, not to promote human happiness. At first glance, this distinction may seem minor, especially because evangelicals assumed that divine glory and human happiness often went hand in hand: when saints rejoiced in heaven, they testified to both their own happiness and God’s almighty power. But in fact there was a gulf between these two understandings of human life that could not be bridged. If God had created the world to display his glory, then sin, suffering, and even the existence of hell could be explained as a demonstration of his power and majesty. But if God had created the world to make humans happy, then suffering was a problem that could not be explained by simply pointing to God’s sovereign will. Sensing this danger, Gilbert Tennent argued that since God was the “best of Beings,” it would be illogical for him to prefer anything inferior to himself as his “last End.” If humans dared imagine that their own happiness was the reason God had created the universe, they would be guilty of “Blasphemy and Idolatry”; “To make our subjective Happiness our last End, and not the Glory of God,” he warned, “is to love our Pleasures more than God.”69 Although Sarah Osborn often wrote about her desire to be “happy,” she made it clear that God, and God alone, was her “only portion and happiness.” As she reminded herself, “happiness . . . is not to be found in all this world. None but God alone can fill and satisfy.”70
In response to the humanitarian critique, evangelicals echoed the Puritan argument that God was the ultimate cause of everything that happened, even things that appeared evil. In 1706, when a promising young merchant, the son of a leading Boston family, was murdered in London, two Puritan ministers assured his grieving family that his death had been ordained by God. Warning them not to blame their sufferings on “wicked men” or the devil, the ministers insisted that God was ultimately responsible: he “Wounds and Heals as he pleaseth.” As the Reverend Benjamin Wadsworth explained, the devil was only a “rod in God’s hand,” an “instrument” of the divine will. He was helpless to do evil without God’s permission. Repeating the words of the prophet Amos, Samuel Willard asked, “Is there any Evil in the City, and the Lord hath not done it?”71
Although it might seem callous to tell bereaved parents that God had wanted their child to be murdered, these ministers meant their words to be comforting. Instead of portraying the world as a chaotic, arbitrary place where the devil ran free, they insisted that God was in control. Nothing happened without a reason—not even murder. As Willard admitted, it was hard to understand why God allowed evil to exist, but faithful Christians had no choice but to trust in him. Unlike the “wicked,” who should expect damnation, true believers knew that God punished them for their own good. Usually he afflicted them in retrib
ution for their sins, but sometimes he was motivated by other purposes: to test their faith, to make them more humble, to “wean” them from the world, to demonstrate his power, to purify them. Their afflictions were like a potent, caustic medicine that brought intense pain but also salvation. Reflecting on the fate of the young man who had been murdered, Willard promised his family that his sufferings—and their own—had been designed for their benefit: “a Godly Person shall meet with no Evil in this Life, but what shall turn to his great advantage in the issue.” Because the young man had been “godly,” they had “just grounds” to believe that he was safe with Christ. Quoting from Paul’s letter to the Romans, Willard wrote, “I reckon that the Sufferings of this present time, are not worthy to be compared with the Glory that shall be revealed in us.”72
Evangelicals were deeply attracted to this Puritan language of resignation, but perhaps fearing that it was too tame, they also turned humanitarian ideas upside down by making the more dramatic (and counterintuitive) claim that suffering increased human happiness. Exaggerating the rationalist tendencies that had begun to creep into late-seventeenth-century Puritanism, they made the startling assertion that the world was actually better off because of the existence of evil. (Although the Puritans had argued that God could bring good out of evil, they did not make the radical argument that an imperfect world was the best world possible.) “Upon the whole,” Samuel Hopkins explained, “there is more good than if there had been no evil.” If the biblical Joseph had not been sold into slavery, he would not have been able to save his people from famine, and if Jesus had not been crucified, he would not have been resurrected. In a controversial tract titled Sin, Through Divine Interposition, an Advantage to the Universe, Hopkins argued that sin and suffering always served a greater good: “He who rules supreme in the heavens . . . will bring good out of all this evil; and, therefore, permits it, because it is the best, the wisest way to accomplish his benevolent designs.”73 Although Hopkins was criticized for suggesting that God took pleasure in suffering and sin (an impossibility for a perfect being), he insisted that his theology was rational. Evil existed only to make the universe a better place.
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