SOURCE: Dodds, Elisabeth D. “To the Breaking Point and Back” and “Rumblings.” In Marriage to a Difficult Man: The “Uncommon Union” of Jonathan and Sarah Edwards, pp. 95-106; 107-113. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1971.

[In the following essays, Dodds discusses the episode of spiritual and emotional crisis in 1742 that changed Edwards's life, and she comments on Edwards's relationship with her husband.]

To see in the “eternal feminine's” ideal of passivity and self-containment the seeds of self-paralysis and self-alienation is the great task of the modern era, resembling that task already recognized to establish, through love, the authentic self of the infant.

—Dan Sullivan

We wish we could erase the whole month of January, 1742. But because this episode in the life of Sarah Edwards was so peculiar, so unlike the character she showed in all the rest of her years, it is inescapable.

Here we don't like her at all. The serene mother becomes limply needful. The patient wife comes to the end of her patience. The attractive hostess becomes grotesque—jabbering, hallucinating, idiotically fainting. We are embarrassed for her. But isn't this what each of us does in our bad dreams? what sometimes we refrain from doing by the thinnest edge of self-control? what we finally do when we have a nervous breakdown?

Here Sarah stands exposed as a fully human woman. One with a breaking point as any woman has. Before, she had been too good to be true.

But, and here is mystery, this blackness was over soon and she never went through such an episode again. We would prefer to dodge this awkward spot, but it is the heart of her story. Such a period of anguish seems to be often the necessary step before a person fully feels the transforming power of God. This was Jacob's night of wrestling with the angel, Benedict's roll in the rosebush, the mythic struggle.

Neither is there any explanation for the peace that comes on the far side of such confusion. Jacob was blessed by the angel as dawn broke. Benedict went on to preserve the life of the intellect through the Dark Ages. Sarah went back to her routine, more efficient than before. But for one month in 1742, as snow sparkled on the Hampshire hills, Sarah Edwards went to pieces.

For the first fourteen years of the marriage of Sarah and Jonathan Edwards, she seemed to the outside world to be the sunny and stable member of the team. While Edwards pampered his headaches and his finicky colon, she would scarcely pause when she shucked off a baby. Hopkins reports of her:

She was unmindful of any pain or affliction. … As he was of a weakly, infirm constitution … she was a tender nurse to him, cheerfully attending upon him at all times, and in all things ministering to his comfort.

The wife expected to be Spartan in those days. One woman wrote in her diary: “Took Physic and consulted the physician, all to no purpose. Suspected the disorder to be nervous, faced about, put on great resolution and made mince pies and found myself no worse than before.”

The casual observer saw the difficult husband, the endlessly giving wife. Actually, more than anyone on the outside guessed, she leaned on him. Though she carried all the practical details of managing the house, Sarah depended on Edwards for her own spiritual replenishment. She would dart into his study during the day, confident that no matter how intent he was on his writing, he would put down his pen and turn to her with lighted face. She fed on his leadership of family prayers and on the quiet time she and Edwards spent together on devotions after the children were in bed, the time that put a benediction on all the bustle of the daylight hours. When Edwards was away, she had to carry all the complex administration of a large household without nourishment for her own inner self, without someone she could allow to share her fears and failings. She could take anything but his absences.

Edwards knew this and he worried about the mounting calls upon him to travel. He confided to Bellamy on January 21, 1742: “I desire your Prayers that God would quicken and Revive us again and particularly that he would greatly humble and pardon and quicken me.” He went on to turn down an invitation to speak in Connecticut, with this explanation: “I have lately been so much gone from my People and don't know but I must be obliged to leave 'em again next week for a fortnight, being called to Leicester, a town about halfway to Boston … and probably soon after that to another place, and having at this Time some Extraordinary affairs to attend to at Home.”

These were the “Extraordinary affairs” he mentioned: On January 19, as Sarah described herself,

I felt very uneasy and unhappy. … I thought I very much needed help from God. … I had for some time been earnestly wrestling with God. … I felt within myself great quietness of spirit, unusual … willingness to wait upon him, with respect to the time and manner in which he should help me, and wished that he should take his own time and his own way to do it.

In spite of this protestation about her patience with God, her nerves were actually stretched like an overtuned viola, so that she was crushed when, the next morning, Edwards mildly pointed out to her that she might have been tactless in a conversation she had had the previous day with “Mr. Williams of Hadley.” (This was probably the same relative who had been huffy since the first days of the Awakening, and had since snubbed every irenic gesture from the Edwardses. This deteriorated relationship had increasingly bothered Sarah.) When Edwards suggested that she might have handled Williams more adroitly, she crumbled.

I found that it seemed to bereave me of the quietness and calm of my mind, in any respect not to have the good opinion of my husband. This I much disliked in myself.

She goes on to explain:

The peace and calm of my mind … seemed sensibly above the reach of disturbance from anything but these two: 1st my own good name and fair reputation among men, and especially the esteem and just treatment of the people of this town; 2dly And, more especially, the esteem and love and kind treatment of my husband.

So Edwards, in his casual remark about her handling of the difficult Mr. Williams, punctured Sarah's two most vulnerable points—her anxiety about offending people and her need to be approved by her husband. Edwards had not been able to extricate himself from the date in Leicester, so he took off the next day, and her first anxiety swept over Sarah.

It is curious that a minister's wife feels she has to be popular in a parish. If a man does his work as well as he is able, his own conscience should provide a measure of his success. Yet almost all ministers' wives appear to need assurance that they, too, are accepted warmly by the people. This illogical human need was now nibbling at Sarah Edwards.

A young man named Buell had come to fill the pulpit while Edwards was absent. Sarah says of him:

I heard that Mr. Buell was coming to this town, and from what I had heard of him and of his success, I had strong hopes that there would be great effects from his labors here. At the same time … it greatly concerned me to watch my heart and see to it that I was perfectly resigned to God, with respect to the instruments he should make use of to revive religion in this town, and be entirely willing, if it was God's pleasure, that he should make use of Mr. Buell.

This, being translated, may have meant that she was afraid the people might like Mr. Buell better than they liked her husband, and that she disliked herself for feeling that way.

Often an older minister has plugged along and then had an attractive assistant whiz in, full of youthful energy and ambition. The older man may rejoice that his young associate can reach certain people who had not been touched before, but only a rare minister is not threatened. After the muted Edwards, the people of the congregation enjoyed the masculine vitality of young Buell. Edwards, on his part, had no competitiveness in his makeup. He was simply delighted by anyone of ability who could add to the work of the Kingdom. However, Edwards had always been impervious to social nuances. Sarah, whose genius was her ability to tune in on the feelings of other people, was on the other hand exceptionally vulnerable to hostility. The threat of Buell almost undid her before she was freed of jealousy forever.

President Clap at Yale had disapproved of Buell because he had appointed himself evangelist and gone riding around Connecticut in a revival team with Eleazar Wheelock, afterward founder of Dartmouth College. Buell later admitted that he had been guilty of “some imprudence and indecent heats.” He said this before the Fairfield Association of Clergy, when he was asking them to ordain him. The older clergy thought Buell needed some tempering before he could qualify for ordination, so they sent him to study under Edwards. He promptly captivated the congregation, and Sarah was confronted by the need to take into her household a guest who was more popular than her husband was.

A wife who is sensitive to social opinions feels them most sharply during a minister's absence from the parish. As a single tree on a hillside is likely to draw lightning, so the minister in a Puritan community was a lone oak, a large target for speculation, gossip, and misinterpretation. When Edwards was around, he absorbed these pressures, partly because of his God-centered serenity, and partly because he was so absentminded that he did not pick up the vibrations in the community. When he was away, Sarah picked them up alone. She saw a stout old lady, whom Edwards never coddled, purring as she told Mr. Buell about herself. And why had that knot of people lowered their voices as Sarah walked toward the church porch? Old Mrs. Hawley, teacup and knitting in her bag, was turning up a neighbor's path, for an afternoon chat. What would they talk about? With Edwards away, Sarah had no one to absorb her fears. When she could take them to her husband, he helped her see the smallness of the world of Northampton in perspective against the vast sweep of the starry skies; against the infinite mysteries of the atom; and against the other cities and countries where the Edwards name was becoming known with increasing respect. He cared about the little world of their parish, but he saw it in relation to the rest of God's world. Without Edwards near to steady her, Sarah cracked.

The beady eye of the modern psychiatrist might spot the phase she entered as a manic one. She thought she was passing through a period of religious ecstasy.

On Wednesday morning … I sat still in entire resignedness to God and willingness that God should bless his [Buell's] labors here as much as he pleased. … I rejoiced when I saw the honor which God put upon him, and the respect paid him by the people, and the greater success attending his preaching than had followed the preaching of Mr. Edwards.

She tried to persuade herself that she really believed this when she went in the afternoon at three o'clock to a lecture preached by Buell.

We remained in the meeting house about three hours, after the public exercises were over. During most of the time, my bodily strength was overcome, and the joy and thankfulness which were excited in my mind … led me to converse with those who were near me in a very earnest manner.

After this jag of compulsive talking, Sarah came home to find Buell there, talking with five guests, including her next-door neighbor Eleanor Dwight.¹ She relates that the “intenseness of my feelings again took away my bodily strength. … I could with difficulty refrain from rising from my seat and leaping for joy.”

The next day she went on managing the household—burped babies, planned food for the extra house guests, supervised snow-shoveling, but she “engaged in the duties of my family with a sweet consciousness that God was present with me.” About eleven o'clock that morning, she accidentally went into one room where Buell was talking with somebody, and she quietly fainted. Buell applied a peculiar first-aid procedure. He read aloud a hymn of Isaac Watts which “made so strong an impression on my mind and my soul was drawn so powerfully towards Christ and heaven that I leaped unconsciously from my chair.”

With that, Sarah fainted again and the concerned guests put her in bed, where she “lay for a considerable time, faint with joy.” By this time, the whole town was buzzing. Mrs. Samuel Phelps openly worried that Sarah would die before Edwards returned “and he should think the people had killed his wife.” What young Mr. Buell thought would be interesting to know. The neighbors took turns holding the household together, while Sarah

lay on the bed from 12 o'clock till four, being too exhausted by joy to rise and sit up; and during most of the time, my feelings prompted me to converse very earnestly with one and another of those who were present.

“Enthusiasm” is an eighteenth-century word, which was used in the sense that a person was ridiculous to the verge of insanity in his religious zeal. (Dr. Johnson defined it as “vain confidence of divine favor or communication.”) The mildest description of the day Sarah spent then would be “enthusiastic.” The subject of sainthood is still mysterious. Some modern observers think that all religious extremes are pathological. Back in 1902 the Harvard psychologist William James, asked to deliver the Gifford Lectures in Edinburgh, examined The Varieties of Religious Experience. James's method of separating true religious experience from insanity he called “pragmatism,” the objective scrutiny of (1) a phenomena and (2) its result. James analyzed the reports about many people who were considered saints and isolated three factors that were present in all the stories. First, the subject went through a term of restlessness, of anguished wrestling. Then came a crisis, a vision. The aftermath was joy, peace, freedom, “a transition from tenseness, self-responsibility and worry, to equanimity, receptivity and peace.” James's words precisely describe the steps through which Sarah was to pass, and her case is a large portion of James's chapter entitled “Saintliness.”

What happened to Sarah Edwards during that snowy week of January, 1742, her husband believed to be a theological crisis, part of the process of her conversion, the gate through which she had to stumble before she could share the full sweetness in the universe that God rules. An observer dyed in the views of Freud and his followers could come up with a psychological explanation for the week. William James confessed that he knew no “logical” explanation for such “shiftings of inner equilibrium.” He simply says: “The further limits of our being plunge, it seems to me, into an altogether other dimension of existence from the sensible and merely ‘understandable’ world.”

However one may choose to interpret this part of her story, there is no doubt whatever that afterward Sarah Edwards emerged a changed and liberated person, one whom even her husband, previously her only critic, was to consider a saint. It was a week of emotional crisis, but its aftermath was a new life, grounded on practical reality.

Meanwhile, God worked on Sarah in his mysterious way. On January 29 she woke up trembling with an anxiety about the fact that Mr. Williams of Hadley was scheduled to speak in Northampton that day. She made herself

examine my heart whether I was willing that he … should be made a greater instrument of good in the town than Mr. Edwards. … I never felt such an entire emptiness of self-love, or any regard to any private, selfish interest of my own. It seemed to me, that I had entirely done with “myself.” I felt that the opinions of the world concerning me were nothing.

So she pulled herself together and managed to attend the meeting. Afterward she talked feverishly with the people near her. She went home, tried to read a bit in the Bible, and fainted again. For the next two days she was in a transport which some would define as a hallucination. She imagined that she was experiencing a rhapsodic vision:

I thought if I were surrounded by enemies who were venting their malice and cruelty upon me … it would still be impossible that I should cherish any feelings toward them but those of love and pity.

Then her other anxiety surfaced, as she thought about her relationship with Edwards, but she concluded that

if the feelings and conduct of my husband were to be changed from tenderness and affection, to extreme hatred and cruelty … I could so rest in God that it would not touch my heart.

The bogey of the feud with Mr. Williams still pursued her.

Just then, Mr. W. came in and spoke with a somewhat light, smiling air of the flourishing state of religion in the town; which I could scarcely bear to see.

Her reply to him was to faint again.

The next day, she sat at the dinner table with her large household, and had one more spell of fainting (while Mr. Buell was holding forth to the group). But the following day a parishioner, Mr. Lyman, who had been on an errand in Boston, stopped by to say that he had come through Leicester on the way back. He brought cheerful news about the success Edwards was having there. This braced Sarah, though she had spent a sleepless night on a purely imaginary problem: “How should I feel if our house and all our property should be burnt up?” She was not the first, or last, woman to lose a night of rest on some such borrowed trouble!

Then Edwards returned. This may have been an electric confrontation. It is instructive to note the matters on which a very articulate man chooses to be silent. Edwards wrote torrentially, but he was reticent about his own role in relation to his wife here. Perhaps he felt a measure of responsibility for her slide into unreality, for the incident which had unglued her was the time that she imagined she had irritated Edwards. (“I found that it seemed to bereave me of the quietness and calm of my mind, in any respect not to have the good opinion of my husband.”) There may have been forgiveness to ask and give on both sides, and then there may have been, in a deep sense, reunion.

Next, Edwards did an amazing thing. His ability to forecast future developments was both his genius and his burden. Long before anyone had thought of psychotherapy, he anticipated it. He had Sarah sit down and tell him everything she could remember about the weeks just past. Using the shorthand system he had invented, he took down her words in full. By promptly reliving the strange weeks she had just spent, Sarah seems to have discharged the pressures of fourteen taut years. From then on, she sailed through strains that would have sent another woman into bitter seclusion or into whining invalidism with migraines or sinus.

So she went back to making jams and hemming linens, but after this time her work appears to have been done without resentment. The martyred Protestant wife is a familiar figure in the social history of the West. These ladies thought they were being self-effacing when actually they were boiling beneath the surface. A surprising example of this was the wife of Bronson Alcott. The woman who was the original of the seraphic Marmee of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women once burst out:

A woman … lives neglected and dies forgotten … but a man who never performs in his whole life one self-denying act, but who has accidental gifts of genius, is celebrated by his contemporaries while his name and his works live on from age to age.

Sarah Edwards stopped straining to please God and began to live in the assurance of a salvation she didn't have to try to deserve. She stopped pushing herself to be worthy of Edwards' love and from then on had his unreserved admiration. Before, onlookers had considered her a saint but her husband knew she wasn't. Afterward, Edwards marveled at her “constant sweet peace, calm and serenity of soul.”

William James, when he was puzzling about whether sainthood was a form of insanity, finally concluded:

By their fruits ye shall know them. The good disposition which a vision, a voice or other apparant heavenly favor leave behind them are the only marks by which we may be sure they are not possible deceptions.

For the rest of their life together, Edwards was to marvel at his wife's good disposition. As he put it, she lived with a

daily sensible doing and suffering everything for God … eating for God and working for God and sleeping for God, and bearing pain and trouble for God, and doing all as the service of love, and so doing it with a continual, uninterrupted cheerfulness, peace and joy.

He was also struck by her

continual rejoicing in all the works of God's hands, the works of nature, and God's daily works of providence. [And her] wonderful access to God by prayer.

Her husband makes plain that Sarah's new sanctified state did not make her neglect the everyday matters of actual living. As a matter of fact, it made her more efficient, for “worldly business has been attended with great alacrity, as part of the service of God … [she has] found to be as good as prayer.” Edwards added that not only has she resumed her “relative and social duties,” but showed “a noted eminence in them.” On March 27, 1742, at 6:45 a.m. an earthquake made a “very loud noise” in New England. Jouncing plates and scaring babies, the physical rocking of the world matched the shaking up of Sarah Edwards.

As William James was baffled in 1902, so we still cannot be sure whether she had a religious transport, or a nervous breakdown, or whether the two were mingled. But the evidence is clear that after whatever it was, Sarah picked up life again, and went on as before, but in a new dimension of joy. Her own words may explain it. She said it left her with “the riches of full assurance.” She recalled how, midway in that peculiar week, she woke and

was led to reflect on God's mercy to me in giving me, for many years, a willingness to die, and after that … in making me willing to live.

The neurotic martyr is ready to die. The greater valor is to be willing to live. Her husband explained:

Now if such things are enthusiasm and the offspring of a distempered brain; let my brain be possessed evermore of that happy distemper! If this be distraction, I pray God that the world of mankind may all be seized with this … glorious distraction.

And Sarah said to him, “I could sit and sing this life away.”

.....

Mr. Edwards replied He must not run away.

—Sarah Edwards

Sarah's disturbance in the year 1742 is reflected in her one hiatus in a cycle of producing a baby every two years. There was a conspicuous pause. Then on May 8, 1743, at midnight, a daughter named Eunice arrived. Because of the new baby, Sarah was unable to accompany Edwards to clergy meetings that year, so he took along their daughter Sarah, who was then ripening into a poised young teen-ager. In September when he went down to the Yale commencement, it was their daughter Mary's turn to ride along with her father.

In New Haven, the two Edwardses met a young man named David Brainerd who was to provide the family with a later complication. The subsequent three years were uneventful, punctuated by the arrival of Jonathan, Jr., on May 26, 1745 (a Sunday). The family life turned on a quiet rhythm of worship and domesticity, planting the garden, picking the apples, studying, preparing for Sunday. It was a time of ripening, of consolidating spiritual gains, and they were to need the armor of it later.

A peripheral cloud for Sarah was concern that her family back in New Haven had caught the hostility against the Awakening. After Whitefield had visited Northampton, he had gone down to New Haven. Though the Colonial Legislature adjourned to hear him, the university snubbed him, taking its clue from President Clap. Sarah's brother, James Pierrepont, chose to be allied with Whitefield. James had prospered as a druggist in Boston and then returned to live in the family house and be a leisured gentleman. His hobby was genealogy, and he kept happily occupied trying to prove he was heir to the British duke of Kingston. This would have related him to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, the duke's daughter and a diplomat's wife who was herself famous as a writer of scintillating letters. This relationship was still to be debated in the press in 1876 when Edwards Pierrepont, American ambassador to the Court of St. James's, claimed to have ducal ancestors. James never foresaw that ducal wealth would come into the family line through another source. One of his descendants was to be J. P. Morgan.

When Whitefield turned up again in New Haven in 1746, the local clergy association advised First Church not to allow him to preach. At that, James Pierrepont constructed at his own expense a platform on New Haven green, where a vast assembly heard Whitefield deliver one of his most celebrated speeches. It was a conversation with Father Abraham in which Whitefield would bellow to the sky: “Have you any Congregationalists up there? any Presbyterians? any Baptists?” After a pause to allow suspense to generate, Whitefield would report that Father Abraham had told him, “We know none of these names up here.” This was a pioneering ecumenical pronouncement, but it did not please denominationalists of the day. The speech caused a split in First Church and James Pierrepont contributed enthusiastically to a new Blue Meeting House (a name referring to its color) which was built in 1748 by the people who were adherents of Whitefield. James paid for the episode by diminished popularity in town, though he kept on as a selectman until 1773. These events also were the reason for a split in New Haven church life that lasted for centuries.

Back in Northampton as the children grew, the girls became conspicuously prettier and the numbers of young preachers trooping to visit the famous theologian increased, and the old nuisance about money also grew. Sarah almost every night had an extra plate or two to fill at her long dinner table, and small feet had a way of outgrowing shoes. There has turned up in a Scottish bookstore, where it had been slipped into an early Edwards memoir, a receipt in Edwards' own handwriting that indicates how pressed the family was for money as far back as 1742. In those days the town constables were supposed to pay the preacher's wages out of taxes. Sometimes a constable was lax about collecting taxes, and the minister had to wait to be paid. The receipt shows that Edwards had once bypassed the constable and simply taken from a lenient neighbor the portion of his taxes that would have been marked for Edwards' salary. The note says:

“To Preserved Bartlet Constable this note Returned by you to me, shall be accepted as one pound Six shillings of my salary received of Sam Phelps & me.”

It was dated Northampton, May 31, 1742.

In 1744 the family was still pinched, and it was Sarah's turn to try to extract their delayed salary from a constable. Preserved in Northampton still is a hasty scrawl with spelling so bad that it indicates her haste and agitation: “Sir: Mr. Sheldon jest now informs me that you cannot Send all the money at the time. Mr. Edwards is Rid out and therefore I write to Desire you to Send Some as much as you Possibbly can.”

They had another pressure on them in this period. Fellow clerics began openly to show their antagonism to Edwards. When he was taking his young daughter Sarah with him to Boston in 1743 they met at the switching station in Brookfield, Massachusetts, Edwards' old opponent, President Thomas Clap of Yale. Cooped up together in a coach all the way to Boston, the men “earnestly disputed.” Afterward, Clap reported that Edwards and Whitefield had a scheme to oust some New England clergy and replace them with men from Scotland. Edwards insisted that Clap had picked up “some strange and wonderful Misapprehension” and demanded that Clap publish a retraction. President Clap tartly retorted, “I hope for the future your Time will be better employ'd.”

Edwards' running controversy with Charles Chauncy of First Church in Boston was one he rather enjoyed, because he respected Chauncy's intelligence. Chauncy was revolted by the Awakening and said so in a massive, dignified book that Edwards had to admire even though he disagreed with it. When Chauncy prodded the faculty of Harvard to issue a statement deploring Whitefield's methods, Edwards wrote him of his regret that the issue divided “us into two armies, separated and drawn up in battle array, ready to fight with one another, which greatly hinders the work of God.”

By now Sarah had learned the costliness as well as the magnificence of being married to an unusual man. Because her husband was totally committed to what appeared to him to be the will of God, he was not cramped by the tiny fears that make another kind of man cautious. Such a man is likely to collide with others who hold differing views of the truth. Fortunately, Sarah had now worked past her earlier need to be approved by everyone. The consistent serenity she had achieved after her crisis made it possible for her to go on lovingly supporting Edwards and giving her children confidence that they were safe at home however chilly the community was toward them.

One afternoon Edwards and Sarah were riding horseback together, enjoying the chance to be alone with each other away from family noises. They had a favorite sandy road that skirted a low bluff on the riverbank. There they stopped and as they watched sheep munching the grass on cleared patches of pasture across the river, Edwards confided to Sarah his growing conviction that no one should join the church unless he made a “profession of godliness.” This was an explosive subject.

The Halfway Covenant was a compromise worked out by the Synod of New England from 1657 to 1662. This device allowed the “unawakened” to enjoy part membership so their children could take part in congregational and, even more important, political activities. In colonial society only church members had a vote in the town meetings that were held in April and September to choose the selectmen and tithing men, the sealers of leather, the overseers of weights and measures, the tax collectors, the men who put the town brand on all horses in case they strayed. Town meeting also chose the highway supervisors, who saw that each man put in two days a year helping work on the roads. In small communities where people had been closely bound together for common safety, they cared greatly about having power to influence such decisions. A man took his vote seriously, and when his church membership was questioned, it was a major threat to him.

In the turn of the century Solomon Stoddard had diluted this compromise even more by proposing that the “unregenerate” could take Communion, provided their reputations were not “scandalous.” Stoddard wanted to make room for those who weren't ready to claim that they'd had an experience of “regenerating grace.” Increase Mather, Harvard's president, had been horrified. The debate between Stoddard and Mather had made “a great noise in the country.” Many people would reminisce about that controversy if Edwards were to go ahead in his proposal to restore the sanctity of the Lord's Supper, a transaction that he regarded with utmost awe.

Sarah reported that Edwards “told me that He would not dare ever to admit another person without a profession of real saving religion … and spake much of the great difficulties that he expected would come upon Him by reason of his opinion.” Edwards then drew up four simple statements a person might make in order to share in the Lord's Supper. All the statements were innocuous. This is one sample: “I hope, I do truly find a heart to give up myself wholly to God, according to the tenor of that covenant of grace which was sealed in my baptism, and to walk in a way of that obedience to all the commandments of God, as long as I live.” The other three statements were equally temperate. But Sarah knew that the people would gag at saying even those mild words.

Sarah was most apprehensive about the reaction of their cousin, friend, and protector, Col. John Stoddard. “Sometimes we talked of the probability of Colonel Stoddard's disliking my opposing the opinion and Practice of his Father.” It is interesting that she said my, not his. Perhaps it was a slip of her pen. Or it may be that Sarah knew that Stoddard had a particular esteem for her, even more than for Edwards.

Though she quaked, Sarah realized that she had chosen to marry the sort of man who did not give in when he believed a matter of deep principle was at stake.

I asked him what course he intended to take. He said he knew not what. I asked Him if he would not publish something expressly handling the subject and vindicating his opinion.

He replied not unless he was forced to it for He did not at all love openly to oppose his grandfather in that manner. He said to preach against him would be looked upon as a great degree of arrogance … and much more to print against Him. He chose for the present to content Himself with giving some occasional Intimations of his opinion that People may be thinking of it.

They rode back to town together and like an armada stocking up with water and dried meat for a long campaign, they began to store up strength. They knew what might happen when people realized what Edwards thought. As Sarah said: “He often signified that when he should begin to have occasion to act on His principles … then the Tumult would begin.”

There is an amusing aspect to what happened next. They waited tensely for a hullabaloo when Edwards' book on Religious Affections came out. Nothing happened at all. Sarah reports that “he said to me that he wondered that he had heard nothing of the people's taking notice that he differed from Mr. Stoddard.” The truth was that the people had not read the book. Edwards, who was nourished by literature, overestimated the impact of print on other people. There was no commotion because his parishioners either didn't read the book, or if they tried to look at it, didn't understand it. Edwards had made an error many intellectuals make. They project onto others a capacity for reflectiveness that many people do not have. A situation that would leave a finely turned personality thrumming may leave a less imaginative person merely indifferent. George Whitefield once commented on this when he told of seeing some criminals riding in a cart on their way to the gallows. They were “tossing up who should sit on the right hand of the cart” with no more concern than children who are on their way to buy ice cream.

Sarah continued her “Narrative”: “I had [no] imagination that he desired it should be kept secret and therefore both I and my children often freely spoke of it when we had occasion.” She went on to tell how a friend had come up to visit them from New Jersey, bringing reports of the founding of a new college there. When Mr. Edwards told the visitors about the dilemma he faced, he predicted it “was likely [to be] a means of throwing him out of Business and bringing him and his Family to poverty.” The guests advised, “You had better run away from these difficulties and accept the place of the President of New Jersey College.” But, Sarah concluded, “Mr. Edwards replied He must not run away.”

Note

1. She was later to marry General Lyman, a Revolutionary War hero.

Sources

The lines by Dan Sullivan appeared in Commonweal, July 22, 1966, and are reprinted with the permission of Commonweal Publishing Company, Inc.

Background Sources

Genealogy of the Hon. Edwards Pierpont, folio in the New York Genealogical Society.

Grant, Leonard, “A Preface to Jonathan Edwards' Financial Difficulties,” Journal of Presbyterian History, March, 1967.

James, William, The Varieties of Religious Experience. It was printed first in 1902. I have used the Modern Library edition.

Schlesinger, Elizabeth B., “The Philosopher's Wife and the Wolf at the Door,” American Heritage, August, 1957.