In fact, the hardships she endured seem to have been incentives toward Methodism, because they fed her self-image as the lone, suffering saint. Roe wrote, “[S]he has been Sever with me—yet Glory be to god my Soul is at peace—I know these Crosses are for my good and the happiness I enjoy in God, more than repays my Soul.”70 Even as her widowed mother attempted to enforce her social conformity, Roe insisted that her true self was inaccessible to her mother. She wrote, “My Mother insisted on my going with her to dine and drink Tea with her at an uncles—and I was not Suffered to attend Preaching Morning or Night—but I had secret intercourse with my God which none could hinder.”71 Roe began to grow further and further apart from her mother by beginning new friendships outside of her family’s social circles and taking up a spiritual life that she did not share with her mother.
Eventually, Roe’s secret life won out, and her mother allowed her to become a member of the Methodist family, albeit grudgingly. Roe’s biography became a Methodist model for disobedience and refusal to participate in frivolous ungodly company at any cost. Her willingness to give up her class comforts, to become a servant rather than go against her spiritual calling, was a hallmark of the religious sacrifice necessary for converts. Roe marked her alienation from the norms of her family by upending them completely and becoming their servant. Persevering through suffering her mother’s persecution sealed Roe’s fate as a member of the Methodist family. She rejoiced, “I now am enrolled by Name among thy Dear People.”72
Catherine Livingston’s Narrative
Although Catherine Livingston was across the ocean and living in a remarkably different setting from Roe or Bosanquet, Livingston’s narrative demonstrates the striking similarities between the conversion narratives of American and English Methodists. Livingston (1752–1849) was born into a large, prominent family in New York. The Livingstons were well established with extensive landholdings in upstate New York, where their name is still as prominent as the houses they built on the banks of the Hudson. Catherine Livingston’s mother brought a considerable landholding of her own into the Livingston clan, and Catherine’s father was a judge.73 Catherine Livingston would become widely regarded as a leader of Methodism in New York State, a distinction her family could not have wished for her. Like Bosanquet and Roe, Livingston was well loved by her parents and reported a happy childhood. Her parents adhered to traditional churches; her mother was a Dutch Calvinist, her father an Anglican, and the children were raised in both traditions.74 In 1775, her father died suddenly when she was twenty-three, and the family went through considerable upheaval during the Revolutionary War, when the British set fire to her family home of Clermont. However, the Revolution did not merit mention in her spiritual autobiography, which she wrote in 1817.
As a young woman in elite circles, Livingston had a full social calendar, reporting invitations to no fewer than five balls one week. Like Hester Roe, she realized her difference from others in her family when she was a teenager. Livingston, though, always had a sense that she lacked fulfillment in the circuits of her class: “If the smiles of the world and the pleasures of it could have bestowed happiness, I should certainly have enjoyed it, but no, there was something wanting, and a dear friend, who was also an inmate in the same dwelling, and myself would sit up after returning from brilliant balls, and gay parties, and moralize on their emptiness, till it became burdensome to accept of invitations.”75 An awakening followed the death of her sister-in-law Margaret Livingston in 1785, when Catherine Livingston began to read the Bible more and socialize less. Livingston reported in her autobiography that she began to withdraw from her family as well, because she was not sure if they would understand her religious ardency. She was isolated, much like Bosanquet at times, because she had no Methodist circle to enter. As a result, she went back to the social realm of her family, attending balls, parties, theaters, and the Anglican church.76
Figure 5. Catherine Livingston Garrettson, engraving by John Chester Buttre, ca. 1863. Courtesy of the Drew University Methodist Collection.
In 1787, she felt a true conversion where “[a] song of praise and thanksgiving was put in my mouth—my sins were pardoned my state was changed; my soul was happy. In a transport of joy I sprang from my knees, and happening to see myself as I passed the glass I could not but look with surprise at the change in my countenance. All things were become new.” Livingston captured in her diary the sense of new birth, as she saw the world with different eyes and felt transformed. She shared her conversion with her mother who seemed happy for her.77 Like Roe, she avoided all social gatherings in earnest, discarded her frivolous clothes and trimmings, and opted for only serious clothes and serious pursuits.
Much like Mary Bosanquet, one of Livingston’s key entries into Methodism was through a servant. A housekeeper gave her a copy of Wesley’s writings, “so that I ever claimed him for my spiritual father. And I often thought of writing, to let him know how much I was obligated to love and honor him. These books had opened to me the way to get religion and the only way to keep it when attained.”78 Her true family, Livingston claimed, was not found in her family’s house, but in the books and narratives circulating through the transatlantic Methodist family. In 1787, Livingston sought increasing solitude, and she took to writing an account of her spiritual life. In the first pages she prays that she can “put on the whole ‘Armour of God,’ Having my loins girt about with Truth and having on the Breastplate of Righteousness.”79 The imagery of war was significant. Not only did Livingston feel combative toward the omnipresent sinfulness and temptations of living in this world, but she also felt like a warrior who stood alone in this fight, because she was at odds with those nearest and dearest to her, her unconverted family and friends. Because she lived at a great distance from the nearest Methodist society, Livingston had no alternate family around her. Yet she entered into a virtual spiritual family by imbibing their literature and following their practices by praying, isolating herself, reflecting, and writing in her spiritual diary.
Like many Methodists, Livingston worried that her newfound religiosity and its deep psychological effects appeared as insanity to outsiders. She reported mood swings, alternating doubt and joyfulness in her spiritual state. One day in December of 1787, Livingston wrote of waking in a good mood as usual, thinking happily of her relationship to God. Then, after she took a walk and began some self-examination, she found some longestablished faults, vanity and selfishness. “Instead of praying to that Great power, Whose Hand is ever near to help those who confide in Him, I prayed that He would lay me low, low in the Dust, before Him, that He would shew me myself, and encrease my dependence upon Him. Presumtuous Wretch!”80 Her happiness disintegrated over the course of the day until she felt herself at the very bottom, “deform’d with Sin, Naked, Helpless, Worthless, beyond the power of Language.” She wrote, “the terrors of the Law, and the Arm of a Just Judge; appeared to be lifted up to strike a Guilty Wretch…. Was it any wonder my poor Weak reason, was on the point of deserting its mansion forever!—My Actions, and language I knew were those of a Frantic Bedlamite.”81 In this passage, she wrote of feeling isolated, and she poignantly described the sensation of losing her reason. She wrote with surprising self-awareness of being on the edge of suicide.82