The Family (9 page)

He wrote of “true religion” as not of outward forms but of inward emotion. He called this quality
affection
and rated it more highly than the thoughts and deeds of great men. He wrote about people with whom powerful men had never concerned themselves.

One such was a woman named Abigail Hutchinson, whose last days Edwards presented as a case study of conversion in the long essay that first brought him trans-Atlantic fame. Edwards had the good fortune to publish
A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God in the Conversion of Many Hundred Souls
in 1736, just as developments in the technology and economics of publishing were giving rise to that modern genre known as “current events.” Lengthy works might be made widely available so quickly that narratives that had once been “history” now became part of an ongoing conversation. He hoped that his careful case study of revival, played out in the microcosm of one sick young woman’s ravaged body, would forge out of religion a new natural science. He had experimented on himself toward this end for years, recording day by day, sometimes hour by hour, the most trivial workings of God and Satan within his own mind and body. He monitored what he ate and how it affected his prayers, noted how many hours he slept and whether fatigue served as a good tool with which to break his will. But his experiments, before 1735, remained unreplicated, unverified. The Awakening of Abigail Hutchinson afforded him a guinea pig on whom to test the efficacy of devotion, the science of mind, the subjugation of heart to power.

A
BIGAIL
H
UTCHINSON WAS
a sickly, unmarried young woman who worked in a shop. She lived with her parents, people known for intelligence and sobriety, who were neither wealthy nor very poor. Their house was smoky, dark, and cold. They measured time by the sun and the sound of churchbells.

Before her conversion, Abigail was “still, quiet, reserved.” She was gentle. There was, Edwards observed—with approval—nothing fanciful about her. She was very thin.

The spark that lit the spiritual fire which was to consume her came not from scripture nor from Edwards’s pulpit but from the news of another woman’s conversion, a young and popular and no doubt pretty girl, “one of the greatest company-keepers in the whole town,” Edwards described her, granted a “new heart” by God, “truly broken and sanctified.” The formerly loose woman’s popularity grew as the men who once had courted her gathered round to hear the sweet young thing testify. One Monday in the spring of 1735, as the ice on the Connecticut River crackled and boomed and melted back into cold black water, Abigail’s brother, a converted man, decided to speak with Abigail about “the necessity of being in good earnest in seeking regenerating grace.” Abigail fumed. Why did she need to be told the necessity of being in “good earnest,” a quality now attributed to a woman who went walking with men in the dark? Abigail was in good earnest. Why did she not experience the grace—the joy—now said to be visited upon a harlot?

Abigail decided to search for the answer in scripture, starting from page one. She read about Eve, who took the devil’s fruit in her mouth; Ham, who looked at his naked father and laughed; Lot’s daughters, who raped their father. God ran javelins through those whose love was wrong, incinerated those whose gifts were not worthy, broke infants beneath the hooves of horses ridden by infidels. No one was spared. After three days of reading, Abigail was too terrified to continue. Before, she had listened to the Reverend Edwards’s sermons—nearly all variations on a theme,
damnation
, delivered in tones, Harriet Beecher Stowe would later imagine, “calm and tender”—but she had not heard. Now she
saw
: she was wicked, born wicked right from the start, cursed as Eve. She had murmured against God. “Her very flesh,” Edwards recorded, “trembled for fear.”

She shuddered when she recalled the doctors she’d consulted. Why had she believed her body deserved anything more than what God had given?

What had God given?

Hunger. A craving for food. At the same time an inability to consume. A slow strangling. The war of flesh, of belly, of the throat that closes, of the tongue that feels food’s texture, sweet and savory. Suffering was the gift of the divine.

The next day she skipped ahead to Jesus, the New Testament, “to see if she could not find some relief there for her distressed soul.” By Saturday, she could no longer read. “Her eyes were so dim,” observed Edwards, “that she could not know the letters.” She had been pious all her life, but now she knew that her devotions had availed her of nothing in Christ’s eyes. She went to her good older brother. The Bible had become like a weapon turned against her, a knife held to her throat. It had revealed her to herself as filthy, defiled by sin; she was nothing, deserved nothing.

The next morning, Sabbath-day, she was too sick to get out of bed. But she needed to hear the Reverend Edwards. No, her family said, and restrained her; so he came to her. Around thirteen hundred people lived in Northampton then, and no man was better known. His grandfather, Solomon Stoddard, had built the congregation to which he ministered, and, in many ways, had built the town. Its residents called him “the pope of the Connecticut Valley.” Edwards inherited the mantle, if not the full authority. Whereas Stoddard had memorized his sermons the better to perform them, Edwards gripped the pulpit and read softly, his pale face proof to his congregation of his sincerity. At times, they felt they could almost see through him.

Before the Awakening, he had wasted no time on chatter and had not often visited his flock in their homes. But in 1735, as revival burned through the town, he began making rounds, taking notes, asking questions, and shy Abigail became an object of great fascination to him. He visited her in her home, she visited him in his. Something great was happening in the valley; the fear of God had never been more palpable. Travelers spent a night and left transformed, carrying with them the spores of revival; stories would return to Northampton of spiritual fires lit across New England. In Boston, they called it hysteria; Edwards believed that Northampton’s far remove secured it from dangerous ideas. To the west of the mountain lay wilderness. To the east, church steeples scraped the underbelly of clouds like thorns. Before Edwards’s ascension to the pulpit, Northampton had reveled in its frontier freedom. It was a tobacco town, the giant green leaves aged until brown and hung like bodies in barns the sides of which opened like gills. Ale was more commonly drunk than water.

And then, revival—compared to its fervor, drunkenness must have seemed dull. God was wilder and more terrifying than the woodlands to the west, and also gentler, like late day winter sun turning the snow fields golden.

Edwards exalted. In revival, the ecstasy of the thunderstorm was wed at last to the theology he had crafted in his years of studying scripture, science, and the work of spiders. Come in, come in, he’d say to the young men and women who knocked on his door. Men would scream and weep on his knee; women’s faces would flush, and they’d lay down before him. Such enthusiasm thrilled him, but it also frightened him. He knew about the tricks of the mind and the lies of the heart. Few said as much, but everyone knew: this could be Satan.

Cotton Mather, a rival of Edwards’s grandfather, would have frowned and barred his door to the young revivalists. Edwards the pastor surely considered doing the same. But Edwards the scientist consoled, encouraged, and most of all, recorded. Page after page of data: “Some have had such a sense of the displeasure of God, and the great danger they were in of damnation, that they could not sleep at nights,” he wrote, “and many have said that when they have laid down, the thoughts of sleeping in such a condition have been frightful to them; they have scarcely been free from terror while asleep, and they have awakened with fear….”

Such was Abigail. A sweet soul who had never before given offense to anyone, she had grown violent of spirit in her despair. Edwards sympathized with her anguish. As a younger man he, too, had often wondered if he could anticipate heaven, his fear greatest when he felt closest, could almost smell the milk and honey. He likened souls such as his and Abigail’s, those that paused on the cusp of salvation, to “trees in winter, like seed in the spring suppressed under a hard clod of earth.”

This was how she blossomed: After three days of scripture reading and three days of terror, she awoke on a Monday morning before dawn. Her mind felt like a windless pond, clear and flat and still, reflecting the heavens. And then words filled her, language flowing in like water. “The words of the Lord are pure words, health to the soul, and marrow to the bones.” And: “It is a pleasant thing for the eyes to behold the sun.” A light so bright…

Abigail exclaimed to her good older brother, I have seen! As she had suffered in terror for three days, so “she had a repetition of the same discoveries of Christ three mornings together.” Each time before dawn. Each dark morning, her frail body cold beneath layers of quilts, the sky blue-black in the window, her skin sallow and wed too closely to the bone, the light came—“brighter and brighter.”

Her cheeks, no doubt pale like Edwards’s, would have reddened, her eyes, huge in her emaciated skull, opened wide and shone like dark lanterns. She bloomed. She became a visible saint of the Lord. She asked her brother to help her to the homes of unconverted neighbors, that they might, she said, “see and know more of God.” He was shining in her glassy eyes. She wanted to go right away! House by house! Now! Now! She wanted to be a warning.

Death became her obsession; Edwards did not discourage her. Together they spoke of her body, its submission to the divine. Her sister tried to feed her. She could swallow nothing. I have been “swallowed by God,” she told her minister. He must have shivered; he had often thought of salvation in those very words.

Did Edwards lust for Abigail? He was not an unsensual man. He was a writer of love poems for his wife, Sarah, said to be the most beautiful woman along the Connecticut River, and father of ten children. He’d confessed to running elaborate mathematical problems through his mind to resist temptation. And yet despite the devices with which he meant to defend his purity, the thought of Abigail penetrated his mind. “Once, when she came to me,” he wrote, “she was like a little child, and expressed a great desire to be instructed, telling me that she longed very often to come to me for instruction, and wanted to live at my house, that I might tell her what was her duty.”

Did Abigail long for more than the pastoral care? She was not so ambitionless as she had once seemed. She wanted, most of all, to be seen, and the more she spoke of dying, rapturously, the more he saw her; indeed, seemed to stare at her, even wrote about her. “I am willing to live, and quite willing to die,” she told him, “quite willing to be sick, and quite willing to be well.” Anything for God.

She stopped drinking water. Her sister cried; Abigail smiled. “O sister, this is for my good!” Her sister could not understand. “It is best,” explained Abigail, “that things should be as God would have them.”

Her brother read to her from the Book of Job, pausing as he came upon a passage about worms feeding on a dead body.
No, go on.
“It was sweet to her,” Edwards mused, “to think of
her
being in such circumstances.”

Her eyes sank into her skull, her nostrils collapsed. Her hair became brittle. For three days she lay dying. Young men and women came to her bed and leaned in close to her dry lips to hear her. “God is my friend!” she’d whisper. Over and over.
God is my friend!

He had finally made her a woman. “Her flesh,” wrote Edwards near the end, “seemed to be dried upon her bones.” On Friday noon, June 27, 1735, her “weak clog” of a body submitted to Christ’s desire. She was, at last, beautiful in the eyes of God, and of Jonathan Edwards.

Y
EARS AFTER THE
revival, not long before his church purged him in 1750, Edwards wrote a reevaluation of what he had wrought—in essence, an appeal to reason, one that laid the foundation for the hybrid of science and faith that would become the cornerstone of fundamentalism: “As that is called experimental philosophy, which brings opinions and notions to the test of fact,” Edwards formulated, “so is that properly called experimental religion”—not in the sense of innovation, but of the science of sainthood—“which brings religious affections and intentions, to the like test.”

Such tests were for the most part exercises of the mind. For example, Edwards was fascinated by atomic power. Not nuclear, of course, but what he perceived as the indivisibility of atoms, about which he had learned from Newton. The smallest of particles, he concluded, was also the most powerful, for it alone was possessed of the power of resistance; one could not break it down any further, surely proof of an animating force, a creator.

And then, Edwards surpassed Newton. In 1723, thinking of light and color, perhaps the green leaves of summer—which, Edwards had come to understand, were not really green, had no color at all—he leaped centuries ahead to imagine an indivisible atom divided, the power that binds it broken, an almost incomprehensible reversal of creation. That is, imagined the mind of God as he knew it removed from the green of the leaves, the blue of the sky, our bodies that are not our own. “Deprive the world of light and motion,” he wrote, “and the case would stand thus with the world: There would be neither white nor black, neither blue nor brown, bright nor shaded, pellucid nor opaque, no noise or sound, neither heat nor cold, neither fluid nor wet nor dry, hard nor soft, nor solidity, nor extension, nor figure, nor magnitude, nor proportion; nor body, nor spirit. What then is become of the universe? Certainly, it exists nowhere but in the divine mind.”

In Boston and London he was judged a genius or a fanatic. In the little towns around Northampton, people thought of him as either a new Moses, leading them to the Promised Land they had long believed the colonies to be, or vulgar Ahab—angry, obsessed, ignorant of the compromises one must make to get along. His own relations among the so-called River Gods of the valley—powerful merchants and more conventional preachers—rebuked him. He would not have survived in his pulpit as long as he did had he not been protected by a cousin, John Stoddard, another grandson of Solomon Stoddard. But whereas Edwards followed his grandfather to the pulpit, Stoddard followed his grandfather’s example to power. The wealthiest landowner for miles, he made himself magistrate, representative to the assembly, and colonel of the militia. He was a feudal lord, and Edwards was the high priest of his benefactor’s authority.