Sarah Osborn's World

by Brekus, Catherine A.

  Although Gill described her sensations of grace as inward, many converts claimed to have physically felt the power of the Holy Spirit on their bodies. They cried out in fear or ecstasy, wept, trembled, and sometimes fell into “fits” or fainted. As a minister reported in The Christian History, the periodical that reprinted revival narratives from all over the transatlantic world, “Hundreds of souls were at one time in the meetinghouse . . . crying out in the utmost concern, what they should do to be saved!” Another minister testified that the members of his congregation had been so terrified by his sermon about Judgment Day that “the joints of their loins were loosed, and their knees smote one against the other. Great numbers cried out aloud in the anguish of their souls. Several stout men fell as though a cannon had been discharged, and a ball had made its way through their hearts. Some young women were thrown into hysteric fits.” In contrast to the Puritans, who had associated anything beyond tears of repentance with “enthusiasm” (especially Quakerism), evangelicals believed that conversion was written on the body as well as in the heart. It was a tangible, physical, and sometimes violent experience that bore witness to a deeper spiritual transformation.19

  Because of longstanding suspicions of groaning, trembling, and fainting, evangelical ministers were ambivalent about the sheer physicality of the revivals. While radicals insisted that bodily agitations were a genuine sign of the influx of grace, moderates like Jonathan Edwards tended to be more cautious. Edwards argued that “tears, tremblings, groans, loud outcries, agonies of body, or the failing of bodily strength” could not be interpreted as proof of conversion, but neither could they be dismissed as nothing more than delusion. His own wife, Sarah Pierpont Edwards, had cried out, leapt for joy, and come close to fainting during an emotional religious experience that lasted almost a week. Choosing a middle path between the skepticism of the revivals’ opponents and the zeal of the Separates, Edwards reasoned that when sinners grasped the reality of hell and the boundlessness of Christ’s love, they could not help feeling so overwhelmed by terror or joy that their bodies were affected.20 On the popular level, however, few ordinary believers seem to have heeded his careful distinction between the natural and supernatural effects of the awakening. Those who had been born again often pointed to their bodily experiences—their tears, groans, and swoons—as undeniable proof of conversion. As a result, their critics accused them of treating “Wry-Faces and Grimaces, Contortions of the Body and vocal Energy, Faintings and Cryings, delusive Voices and frantic Visions” as “undeniable Evidences of Conversion, of coming to JESUS and the Power of God.”21

  What made evangelicals unique in the eighteenth century was their confidence about their ability to recognize true grace. Unlike the Puritans, who had assumed that their judgment was impaired by sin, evangelicals insisted that with the help of the Holy Spirit they could be practically certain—or in the case of the Separates, absolutely certain—of their salvation. Many were able to pinpoint the exact time and place that they had been born again. Nathan Cole began his memoir with the words, “I was born Feb 15th 1711 and born again Octo 1741.”22 As David Bebbington has explained, “Whereas the Puritans had held that assurance is rare, late and the fruit of struggle in the experience of believers, the Evangelicals believed it to be general, normally given at conversion and the result of simple acceptance of the gift of God.”23 Of course, the older language of anxiety and doubt did not entirely disappear. In a dark moment, Sarah Prince Gill wrote: “I find myself at an Utter Uncertainty about my spiritual state,” and Nathan Cole continued to be plagued by worries about his salvation.24 In general, though, religious expectations had shifted. Among seventeenth-century Puritans the mood tipped toward anxiety (with some converts expressing certainty), but among eighteenth-century evangelicals it tipped toward assurance (with some converts still continuing to express doubts).

  Because of her struggles against despair, Sarah Osborn was deeply attracted to the evangelical language of assurance. She wanted the certainty of knowing that her life pointed to something greater and more meaningful than herself. She wanted what would always lie just outside her grasp: to be sure.

  Sarah’s lengthy description in her memoir of her discovery of God’s love must be read with this evangelical context in mind. As we have seen, it is impossible to disentangle her “real” experiences from what she later decided to write about them, and the issue of retrospection is especially acute when considering her description of her conversion. Her language is so powerful and immediate that it can be tempting to imagine that she simply unspooled her life onto the page like a piece of thread, but in reality she stitched together each sentence with care. Because she wrote her memoir for God as well as for herself and other Christians, it is unlikely that she ever deliberately misrepresented her experiences, but understandably she could not help viewing her past through the lens of her new evangelical faith. As she read accounts of the revivals, heard converts’ testimonies, and listened to ministers thundering out their exhortations to repent, she absorbed a new religious vocabulary of experience, assurance, and sensation that colored everything she wrote. Because she wanted to be part of a new evangelical community, she wanted to sound like other evangelicals. She wanted to belong.

  Yet because her conversion had not been a dramatic turning from darkness to light but rather a slow, anguished groping toward something she could only dimly perceive, she sometimes found it difficult to fit her experiences into the popular evangelical framework. As a result, her narrative is filled with contradictions and ambiguities. On one hand, she wrote about a deeply felt religious experience that took place in 1737 as if it were her “conversion” (although she never actually used this word), and she framed it in terms that would have been familiar to evangelicals at the time: it had been a single, unmistakable moment of spiritual transformation that had changed her life. But on the other, she admitted that this experience, despite its profundity, had been followed by so many years of uncertainty that her memories of it seemed like nothing more than “dreams or delusion.”25 Her contradictory statements—her confident tone of assurance and her confusion about the timing of her conversion—reveal both her desperate desire for certainty and her difficulty in achieving it.

  Experimental Religion

  Regardless of whether Sarah Osborn thought that her spiritual crisis of 1737 could be positively identified as the moment of her conversion, she stocked her description of it with words, images, and scriptural references that pointed in that interpretive direction. She claimed that in the course of a week in January something remarkable had happened to her that she had felt in both her heart and her body, something that transcended language and yet demanded to be told. During a weeklong crisis that had been alternately terrifying and liberating, she had seen herself stripped down to what she really was—small, vulnerable, and utterly sinful—and she had suddenly understood the immense gulf separating her from God. She was depraved; he was perfect. She was empty; he was full. She was helpless; he was all-powerful and free. She had confronted the stark truth that she was nothing, and could do nothing, outside God. And yet just at the moment when she had felt most broken in spirit, he had healed her. “It is not possible for me to make anyone sensible what joy I was instantly filled with,” she testified, “except those who experimentally know what it is.”26 As she continued writing her memoir, her challenge was to find the right words to express an experimental religion.

  Sarah’s spiritual crisis had begun at a vulnerable moment in the fall of 1736 when she had almost joined the Church of England. She was boarding with a family who belonged to the Trinity Church, and in November they invited her to attend worship with them. As “high church folks,” they practiced a faith that she had always been taught to revile, but to her surprise she “seemed much affected both with the manner of worship and the sermons too.” (By using the word seemed, she tried to distance herself from her earlier feelings. She had only seemed affected, but in retrospect she insisted that the Angli
cans had not really touched her heart.) Unlike Congregationalists and Presbyterians, who had tried to purge their worship of anything that looked “Catholic,” Anglicans retained much of the old symbolism, including kneeling, lighting candles, and making the sign of the cross. To Sarah, who had worshiped in a plain meetinghouse all her life, their rituals appeared strange but also deeply stirring. She was surrounded by new sights and sounds: the soft colored light that came through the stained-glass windows, the thrilling swell of the organ, the measured rhythms of the prayers that the entire congregation recited together. She was especially moved by their joyous celebration of Christmas, a holiday that her own tradition refused to observe because of its pagan origins. After watching the congregation receive communion on Christmas Day, kneeling at the altar rail and drinking wine out of tall, heavy silver cups, she decided that God had called her to be an Anglican.27

  If Sarah had become a member of Trinity Church, she would eventually have written her life story according to a very different script. It would be a mistake to view Anglicans as less religious than Calvinists (as some historians have insinuated), and it is important to remember that both George Whitefield and John Wesley were ordained Anglican ministers. But many Anglican leaders in the colonies focused more on good behavior than on an existential confrontation with a sovereign God. Rather than imagining a vast gulf separating humans from God, they believed that conversion could occur with relatively little difficulty. Instead of limiting membership to those who had been “born again,” they prided themselves on their moderation and inclusiveness, allowing all adults to join the church as long as they swore to be morally upright. Theologically they envisioned a God who seemed more benevolent than the stern Jehovah of Sarah’s childhood.28

  According to Sarah’s narrative, the only reason she did not become an Anglican was that her mother, a devout Congregationalist, confronted her after hearing neighborhood gossip. When Sarah went to visit her on the Saturday after Christmas, they had exchanged only a few brief pleasantries before the conversation turned combative. “I hear, daughter,” her mother began, “you are turned church woman.” Startled, Sarah replied that she thought she had a “duty” to worship where she was “most affected,” but her mother demanded a more “rational” explanation for such a momentous decision. Why did she want to leave the church of her childhood? Did she object to Calvinism’s core principles? Did she think the Anglicans “Lived more circumspect and agreeable to the rules of the gospel”? When Sarah timidly responded that she “could not profit by the preaching I had sat under,” her mother asked her why she did not simply go to a different Congregationalist church. If she did not like the Second Church of Christ, then she should go to hear the Reverend Nathaniel Clap preach at the First Church of Christ. “Child,” her mother scolded, “I would have you seriously consider what you are about to do, for it is my opinion you are under a strong delusion and as sure as you turn church woman without knowing upon what grounds you turn, so sure you will turn reprobate.” Although Sarah was an adult with a five-year-old son, her mother still had the ability to reduce her to a “child.” She felt “as ignorant as a mere babe.”29

  Trinity Church of Newport, from George Champlin Mason’s Extra Illustrated Reminiscences (1854). Courtesy of the Newport Historical Society.

  As Sarah explained, she decided not to “turn church woman” because of her inability to give a “rational” explanation for her attraction to the Anglicans. Since she wrote her memoir at a time when evangelicals were often stereotyped as wild-eyed enthusiasts, she may have decided to include this detail as a way of defending herself against possible critics. She wanted her readers to know that for her, true faith did not involve only the affections (the feelings), but the understanding as well. (She may have wanted to distinguish herself from the radical Separates, who were fiercely anti-intellectual.) Although she did not believe that she was capable of understanding a mysterious, incomprehensible God by her intellect alone, she still thought she could find a glimmer of him by studying the Bible. If religion were reduced to rationality alone it would wither into a dry intellectualism, but those who could not give a “rational” account of their Christian beliefs were in danger of slipping into superstition. Being “affected” by the sound of an organ or the sight of a stained-glass window was no substitute for reasoned reflection on the “rules of the gospel.”

  After spending a sleepless night pondering her mother’s words, Sarah decided the next morning that she would attend worship at the First Church. Dressed in her Sunday best, she walked along the cobbled streets near the harbor until she came to the plain, rectangular building on Carr’s Lane (now Mill Street), where people had already begun to fill the pews. She had not been there for several years, but before her marriage she had sometimes gone to services there. (As she explained in her memoir, she had always preferred it to her parents’ church, but they had usually insisted that they all go to meeting as a family.) This time, though, she saw the church with new eyes. She may have admired its arched windows and its soaring steeple that pointed up to God, but after seven weeks at Trinity she may have also thought that it looked surprisingly austere. After taking her seat in the gallery on one of the special benches reserved for visitors, she looked down upon rows of unpainted pews, bare walls, a sanded floor, and a high wooden pulpit. This was the way Reformed Protestants chose to worship, with no visual distractions to compete with God’s word.30

  And indeed, it was the word that Sarah Osborn remembered best about that day and the spiritual crisis that followed it. Nathaniel Clap was known as a stern, demanding pastor who held his congregation to a high standard of religious purity, and on that Sunday he railed against their sins. (Clap was so strict that in 1728 he had refused to baptize a child whose parents were “not of sufficiently holy conversation.” In response, half the members left to form the more liberal Second Church of Christ.) Transfixed by his “terrible” words, Sarah remembered feeling as if he were speaking directly to her. He “told me the very secrets of my heart in his sermons as plain as I could have told them to him,” she wrote. “His sermon was very terrible to me.” Slipping between the past and present tenses, she remembered the clarity with which she had suddenly seen her life: “My sins from my cradle was ranked in order before my eyes, and my original sin as well as actual appeared doleful. I see the depravity of my nature and how I was exposed to the infinite justice of an angry God. All my former convictions was brought to my remembrance. I see how I had stifled the motions of the blessed spirit of God and resisted all the kind invitations of a compassionate savior.” (By using the present tense she emphasized that she could still “see” her corruption.) Although she did not record the biblical text of Clap’s sermon, he may have preached on Matthew 12:31: “All manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men: but the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost shall not be forgiven unto men.” By the time she left the church, she was petrified that she had committed the “unpardonable sin.” “I had sinned against Light and Knowledge, even against the convictions of my own conscience,” she grieved. “This I knew I had done, and therefore believed I had committed that sin that could never be forgiven.”31

  For the next week Sarah was haunted by fears of damnation. Since ministers encouraged their parishioners to turn to scripture during times of trouble, she searched the Bible for words of comfort. As Cotton Mather promised, “AFFLICTED People, who seek and who take the Delights which are to be found in the word of GOD, shall not Perish in their Affliction.” But no matter what passage she read, she “could find nothing but terror there.” The more she tried to console herself, the more frantic she became. Her eyes always seemed to land on the most alarming verses. Listing all the passages that had thrown her into despair, she strung together one terrifying text after another. Consider this, she lamented to her readers:

  All Liars shall have their part in the Lake that burns with fire and brimstone. And this: Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire prepared for the
devil and his angels. And this: consider this, ye that forget God, Least I tear you in pieces and there be none to deliver. And this: he that being often reproved hardens his neck shall suddenly be destroyed and that without remedy. And this: ye have set at naught all my counsels and would none of my reproofs. I therefore will laugh at your calamity and mock when your fear cometh. And this: it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the Living God. And this: who among us can dwell with everlasting burnings.

  She felt as though she could not escape from the harsh words of judgment that cursed her from every page. Like Nathan Cole, who admitted that “Hellfire was most always in my mind; and I have hundreds of times put my fingers into my pipe when I have been smoking to feel how fire felt,” she was consumed by visions of hell.32

  Fearful that she would be damned, Sarah fell into a depression that was as severe as the one that led to her earlier brush with suicide. To punish herself for her sins, she began fasting. “I thought myself so unworthy of the Least mercy that I knew not how to eat,” she wrote. Nor did she sleep. “I slept no more than just to keep me alive and when I did at all it was filled with terrors.” She also seems to have thought of killing herself again. Three lines of her memoir are so carefully scratched out that they are impossible to read, so we cannot know what she originally wrote, but she left a few small hints that she had contemplated suicide. As she explained, Satan had tempted her to believe she would only aggravate God by continuing to pray and read the Bible. Perhaps he had also tempted her to believe that she would be better off dead. Immediately after her crossed-out sentences, she wrote: “Oh astonishing grace that God did not strike me down into hell the very moment I thought to do so.” What was it that she had “thought to do”? Whether intentionally or not, her words almost exactly echoed her earlier description of her anguish in the garret. “I thought to do it,” she had written.33