Yet growing old meant coping with the loss of loved ones, and Sarah outlived many of her dearest friends. When Susa died in 1791 at the age of sixty-five, Sarah felt as though she had lost a member of her family, her sister in Christ. They had shared each other’s lives for more than fifty years—praying together, rejoicing together, and comforting each other in times of grief—and their bond had grown stronger with time. In times of spiritual darkness each had felt as though she could see God in the other despite being blind to his presence in her own life. When Sarah learned that Samuel Hopkins had decided to publish a memoir of Susa’s life along with extracts from her diaries, she may have hoped that Susa’s example of self-sacrificing love would inspire others to seek Christ. Someday, she hoped, she and Susa would “have a joyful meeting at Christ’s right hand.”8
When Mrs. Mason died in 1792, Sarah lost not only another cherished friend but one of her most generous benefactors. Though poor herself, Mrs. Mason had helped pay for Sarah’s food and rent, and her loss meant that Sarah had to rely on other friends for charity. The First Church may have given her money (it often gave alms to the “poor of the church”), and the Reverend Levi Hart of Connecticut, a close friend of Samuel Hopkins, frequently sent money as well—sometimes as much as three dollars at a time. (Sarah’s rent was five dollars a quarter, so this was a significant sum to her.) Perhaps Sally and Daniel tried to help, too. Sarah may have been especially touched by the unexpected generosity of strangers who sent money from places as far away as Quebec and the West Indies, inspired by the story of her remarkable life. Their donations reminded her that she was part of a transatlantic religious movement whose boundaries extended far beyond Newport.9
Sarah had never been more vulnerable, but according to Hopkins she also had never been happier or more confident of God’s protection. When friends worried about how she would pay her rent, she is reported to have replied, “I desire to be thankful to God, I do not feel in the least anxious about it. I do not doubt of my having the whole of the money at the time in which it will be due, or near it. God has given me a constant and earnest desire to do justice, and pay when any thing is due. This is a just debt, and God has been pleased hitherto to gratify me by enabling me to pay, when it is due; and I believe he will still continue to do it. Perhaps I shall not live to the end of the quarter. I shall then leave enough to pay this debt. I desire to leave it with God.”10
Title page of Samuel Hopkins, comp., The Life and Character of Miss Susanna Anthony (Worcester, Mass.: Leonard Worcester, 1796). Hopkins published extracts from Susanna Anthony’s devotional diaries after her death. It is not clear whether Sarah Osborn was still alive when the book appeared in print. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.
Although this stilted language does not sound like Sarah’s voice, it is easy to believe that the sentiment was hers. She had always prayed for greater trust in God, and now that she could do nothing for herself she had no choice but to resign herself to his will. According to Hopkins, “She appeared in this last part of her life in a measure to enjoy the happy consequences and reward, of the sore trials, labors and conflicts, through which she passed in former years.” Giving her story a happy ending, he claimed that after many years of struggling against despair and yearning for a “hidden God,” she finally had been blessed with the gift of serenity. “She enjoyed an almost uninterrupted assurance of her interest in the divine favor through Jesus Christ,” he testified.11
This is a comforting vision of Sarah Osborn in her last years, and we can only hope that in its general outlines it was true. But there seem to have been darker episodes in her life as well, times when she felt so despondent that she wanted to die. “Some years before her death,” according to Hopkins, “she said to her friends, she thought the time was now come for them, and for all who knew her, to be quite willing that she should leave the world; for she was become useless in all respects, and was only a charge and burden to those by whom her bodily wants were supplied.”12 Although Hopkins portrayed these words as a sign of her joyful desire to be united with God, her language suggests that she may have feared that her friends had grown tired of caring for her or, worse, that they no longer loved her. Poor, sick, and elderly, she worried that she had become “useless” and a “burden.”
Sarah’s friends insisted that her life still had value, and appealing to her desire to feel useful, they assured her that her prayers had touched the lives of others. Whenever her friends and acquaintances thought of her “alive in her room” and praying for “all the people and churches of Christ,” they felt as though she were holding them up, strengthening them to face their doubts and sorrows.13 Her prayers were a beacon of hope pointing to a better world.
Yet as Sarah grew increasingly tired and weak, she dreamed less of serving Christ on earth and more of being united with him in heaven. After decades of struggling against illness, she longed to leave her sickly body behind in the grave. “Oh what a clog is this Poor crazy body,” she lamented during one of the flare-ups of her disease. (In the eighteenth century, crazy was a synonym for frail.) “O blessed be God I shall Ere Long Shake off this clog.”14 Of all the books mentioned in her diaries, she especially admired Charles Drelincourt’s treatise on death, with its vivid portrait of the body as a “loathsome sepulcher.”15
Sarah’s attitude toward her body was shaped not only by her own suffering but by a long history of Christian ambivalence toward the embodied self. Because of their belief that humans were created in the image of God, Christians saw the body as essentially good, and they emphasized that Jesus himself had taken human form. The resurrection would be physical as well as spiritual. Yet Christians also denigrated the body as an obstacle to the progress of the soul, and they portrayed it as the site of deadly temptations like lust, gluttony, and sloth.16 According to the Puritans, the body was a “a manacle,” “a snare,” “a fetter,” and a “Shell, which [would] soon be broken.”17
Rejecting this dismal view, Enlightenment thinkers and liberal-leaning Protestants argued that the body (like the self) was essentially good. As they dismantled the doctrine of original sin, they emphasized that humans could enjoy the pleasures of the flesh as long as they refrained from overindulgence. According to John Tillotson, God had created humans with bodies as well as souls because he wanted his children to savor “Life and Happiness.” By the middle of the eighteenth century, many liberal Protestants chose to highlight the New Testament’s positive description of the body as the “temple of the Holy Ghost.”18
In some ways evangelicals contributed to these more positive images of the body. Jonathan Edwards assumed that the born again would feel the change in their bodies as well as in their hearts, and by describing the conversion experience in sensual language as a new “taste” and a new “sight,” he made it possible to imagine true religion as embodied. Despite arguing that the body had to be disciplined and purified through fasting, chastity, modest dress, and temperance, many evangelicals hoped that it could be an avenue to communion with God. Writing in her diary, Sarah Osborn assured God that “every room in my heart is thy own and my body is a temple for thy spirit to dwell in.”19
Yet just as evangelicals resisted the growing faith in human goodness, they insisted that the body was “filthy” unless it had been transformed by divine grace. As Edwards explained, “The inside of the body of man is full of filthiness, [and] contains his bowels that are full of dung, which represents the corruption and filthiness that the heart of man is naturally full of.” Describing the body as “a dark covering to the soul,” evangelicals claimed that its “animal spirits” made it vulnerable to satanic temptation. According to Edwards, the devil “can’t produce thoughts, in the soul immediately, or any other way, than by the medium of the body.” Lamenting that Satan took advantage of her “bodily indisposition” to tempt her with feelings of anger or despair, Sarah Osborn denigrated the body as the “animal” part of the self, a “heavy molded . . . lump of flesh and blood” that dragg
ed down the soul like a “dead weight.” She and the women’s society fasted at least once a month in order to “crucify the flesh with its affections and lusts.”20
Ministers encouraged all their members, even children, to discipline their bodies, but their language suggested that women’s bodies were particularly sinful and weak. Thomas Shepard, a Puritan, referred to the body as a “menstruous cloth,” and Peter Bulkeley argued that the damned “are to [God] as the filthiness of a menstruous woman.” To defend the doctrine of original sin, Jonathan Edwards argued that men were inherently “unclean” because they were born of women.21 Although women resisted these negative images, they could not help being influenced by them. Besides comparing herself to the woman with the “bloody issue” who prayed to be made “clean,” Sarah occasionally complained about suffering from “Hysteric disorders,” a stereotypically “feminine” affliction. It is not clear whether she believed that her hysteria was caused by a wandering womb (the traditional interpretation) or by an affliction of the central nervous system (the interpretation that eventually gained acceptance in the eighteenth century), but in either case she claimed that her weak body was responsible for her psychological distress, or in her words, her “Melancholy Gloom.” Being female meant being prone to “hysteria.”22
When Sarah imagined her death she rejoiced at the thought of leaving behind both her body and her gender in union with Christ. At first she would exist only as a spirit, but after the resurrection she would be given a new, perfect body that would never tire or decay. Though heaven would be a place of overflowing love, there would be no courtship, marriage, or sexual desire to interfere with the worship of God.23 Ministers never seem to have speculated on the sexual appearance of resurrected bodies, but perhaps the question was moot. Since there would be no gender differences in heaven, it mattered little whether the saints would be recognizably male or female.
Sarah had often prayed to become more like God, to be transformed into his image. “I am weary of my deformity,” she confessed in her diary. “When shall [I] be Like thee?”24 In heaven, at last, she hoped to be granted the answer to her prayer.
A Better Earth
Since Sarah wrote so little during the last twenty years of her life, we do not know whether her ideas about heaven changed in her old age, but it is clear that in her earlier years she had absorbed new images of heaven as the perfection of everyday life. Influenced by the Enlightenment, the American Revolution, and the rise of merchant capitalism and consumerism, many Protestants no longer hoped to spend eternity in divine contemplation; rather, they envisioned engaging in the activities that had given them the most joy during their lives. During the eighteenth century they gradually created a new understanding of heaven as a better earth, a paradise where humans would continue to work, make progress, advance in knowledge, and spend time with their loved ones.25
When it came to the topic of heaven, the Enlightenment tended to be rather tame. Although a few radical Enlightenment thinkers denied the existence of the soul and the reality of heaven and hell, most continued to defend the idea of an afterlife.26 Whatever doubts they harbored about Christianity, they feared that people would not behave morally unless they believed in a day of judgment. According to John Locke, ancient teachings about virtue had fallen on deaf ears until Christians had promised that good works would be rewarded with eternal life. Even Benjamin Franklin, who was frankly skeptical about Jesus’s divinity, claimed that “the soul of Man is immortal, and will be treated with justice in another life respecting its conduct in this.” The Constitution prohibited religious tests for political office on the federal level, but many states required political officials to believe in a “future state of rewards and punishments.”27 In a new nation that depended on a virtuous citizenry, believing in heaven and hell had never seemed more important.
Yet even though the Enlightenment did not undermine belief in the reality of heaven, it influenced the kind of heaven that people imagined. As Enlightenment thinkers insisted that humans were essentially good and that progress was possible, they blurred the boundaries between heaven and earth. Earlier Christians had imagined heaven as the opposite of earth—a place of rest instead of activity, contemplation instead of work, fulfillment in God instead of in other human beings. But eighteenth-century Protestants began to reconsider these dichotomies. If everyday life were valuable and held religious meaning, then perhaps its best features would look like heaven.
For most of Christian history, people had assumed that they would spend eternity joyfully gazing at God. Medieval artists portrayed the saints sitting in chairs around God’s throne and admiring his majesty; the Protestant Reformers hoped to spend eternity enjoying the beatific vision of God. Even though Calvin and Luther argued that humans should work hard at their callings instead of withdrawing from the world into monasteries, they did not challenge the Catholic understanding of heaven as a place of eternal contemplation. In the long term, however, their emphasis on the value of work set the stage for a new understanding of the afterlife. This change came about gradually, but when Enlightenment philosophers argued that humans should always strive for improvement, many Protestants—both liberal and evangelical—decided that since work was intrinsically good, it would continue to exist in heaven. “The happiness of the redeemed in heaven will not consist in rest and indolence,” Samuel Hopkins insisted, “but the contrary; in activity, and incessant, unwearying labor and service, from which they will not cease or rest.” Although John Murray, the founder of Universalism, disagreed with Hopkins on almost everything, he, too, claimed that even though “the spirits of believers, at death, are said to have entered into rest,” they never stopped exerting themselves. “No, they only rest from their labors—labors that gave pain—weariness—or grief—With respect to vitality and all its exercises, the souls born into the world of glory, may be said only then to begin to live. They do then spring to action with a vigor and alacrity hitherto unknown.”28 The more Protestants prided themselves on their industriousness, the more they resisted the idea of a contemplative heaven.
The crux of the issue seems to have been happiness. Rejecting the idea that heaven would “consist in a perpetual gazing upon God, and in idle contemplation of the glories of that place,” John Tillotson assured his readers that God did not expect the saints to sit passively and adore him. “We need not doubt, but that he who is happiness itself, and hath promised to make us happy, can easily find out such employments and delights for us in the other world, as will be proper and suitable to that state.” As Isaac Watts admitted, he could not imagine that saints could enjoy heaven if they had nothing to do. “I confess Heaven is described as a Place of Rest, but it can never be such a Rest as lays all our active Powers asleep, or renders them useless in such a vital and active World. It would diminish the Happiness of the Saints in Glory to be unemployed there.”29 As we have seen, evangelicals were ambivalent about the liberal, enlightened emphasis on happiness, but whether emphasizing the goodness of suffering or the earthly delights of heaven, they also echoed it.
Most ministers were vague about how saints would be “employed,” but because of their belief that there would be degrees of glory in heaven, they imagined that the most exalted souls would work on behalf of those below them. Isaac Watts, for example, wondered whether the holiest might rule as “kings” over others. Later in the nineteenth century this medieval, hierarchical view of heaven would fade from view, an offense to the democratic sensibilities of the modern West, but it remained popular in the eighteenth century.30 Like both Thomas Aquinas and John Calvin, Jonathan Edwards expected some of the redeemed to enjoy a fuller vision of God than others, and in case anyone worried about feelings of competition or resentment, he insisted that “the exaltation of some in glory above others, will be so far from diminishing anything of the perfect happiness and joy of the rest that are inferior, that they will be the happier for it. Such will be the union of all of them, that they will be partaker of each other’s
glory and happiness.” Drawing on these ideas, Samuel Hopkins wondered whether some of the redeemed might serve as “public teachers” helping their inferiors attain greater degrees of glory.31 Even in heaven, Christians would continue to spread the gospel.
Both liberals and evangelicals believed that there would be a hierarchy in heaven, but they disagreed over the reasons why. According to liberal ministers, the most virtuous would be rewarded for their good works on earth. “Their works follow them,” explained the Reverend Samuel Webster. God would grant them greater glory “according to the degree of their virtue and goodness.”32 In contrast, evangelicals insisted that good works were worthless, and some would be more glorified than others only because of God’s sovereign will.
Sarah Osborn never speculated about the place she would occupy in heaven (though she always longed for “greater degrees of grace” on earth), but she expected to be “all activity and all reverence and Love in the realms above.” Because her illness sapped her energy, sometimes leaving her too exhausted to get out of bed, she dreamed of a time when she would be “forever active.” Besides longing to praise, adore, and gaze at God without ever growing weary, she also imagined flying to “execute his commands,” as if there might be specific tasks that he would ask her to perform.33 According to Isaac Watts, the saints would be engaged in labor beyond “mere Adoration and Praise,” including speaking to one another about their pilgrimages, traveling to other planets, and executing God’s commissions. While John Murray wondered whether God might send the saints on “beneficent errands” to Christians on earth, ministering to those whom they had left behind, Sarah Osborn expected to “work for eternity.”34
Sarah Osborn's World Page 42