Jacob shook with fear as he watched the children head toward the door, and his foreboding grew as his turn approached. As the child ahead of him headed downward to hell, crying and protesting, Jacob “determined that I would not go straight out at the door, as the others did”; instead, he bolted for the stairs on the right. A strong wind, however, blocked his way and, “like a whirlpool, sucked me down the stairs.” Jacob tried fighting the wind, but it was futile, and he wept bitterly “for I thought I certainly belonged to hell.”
He then learned that the room contained a second door, this one on the west side: “In anguish and dreadful distress, [I] went out of this door, and there, in that yard, sat God Almighty, on a kind of throne.” Jacob threw himself at God’s feet and begged Him to tell Jacob why he had been condemned to hell: “He told me it was for breaking my promise made in the woods, together with the sin I had committed against light and the checks of conscience at the time of it.” Jacob asked God why he could not forgive him for his sins: “‘O most merciful God! Didst thou never pardon so great a sin as this!’ No, said he, I never did.” Jacob continued to argue with God, citing the redemption of several sinners in the Old Testament and the saving “merit of Christ,” but God was adamant. Jacob awoke at dawn, trembling, when God repeated that he would not pardon Jacob for the sin he had committed.
The dream left Jacob devastated. He staggered from bed and headed to the barn, where he attempted unsuccessfully to pray: “It seemed as if [God] had turned his back upon me and heard me not.” Jacob was so upset that the family he was living with asked him what was the matter. Slowly, he regained his bearings and “began to have a little hope that I might not have committed the unpardonable sin.” He tried to rationalize that the dream was merely a dream, and that “dreams were not absolutely to be depended upon.” But the nightmare was so vivid and spoke so convincingly to his shortcomings that Jacob concluded it must be true, “and this [realization] would cut me like a knife. After this I never lost a sense of my guilt.”53
Jacob attempted to change nevertheless. He forced himself to pray; joined a religious society while at grammar school; attended church; and tried to lead a godly life, free of sin: “I had now some appearance of religion . . . and by degrees I obtained more and more a hope that I might obtain mercy, and that my sin was not unpardonable.” It was this hope that Gilbert Tennent unwittingly shattered when he addressed the Cambridge crowd in January 1741. Jacob believed that Tennent was speaking directly to him, because the itinerant’s words mocked his Arminian hopes of “working” his way to salvation.54
In one sense, Jacob’s tale, replete with his wandering in a wilderness, was a traditional evangelical one, containing a lesson that any Calvinist could grasp: only the Lord granted salvation. Yet in another, more important sense, it was revealing of his personality, demonstrating just how much of a New Englander he was. Jacob imbibed the Puritan ethos of discipline, righteous living—and frightening insecurities about whether he was of the elect or was a “reprobate.” He had been taught from an early age—by his mother, his minister, and his textbooks—that an all-powerful God saved only the chosen few, that even young children could not expect any mercy from the Lord if they were sinners in God’s all-knowing eyes. Jacob’s tale, right down to the parable of the wilderness, reflected these teachings. From his earliest days, he placed tremendous pressure on himself to behave and to be a virtuous Christian worthy of God’s love.
Yet no matter what he did, he felt it was not enough. In his autobiography, Jacob recalled with disgust the time the minister of his grammar school invited Jacob to become a church member. The offer should have been a moment of triumph, a reward for his changed ways: the minister was impressed by Jacob’s efforts at piety and believed that Jacob was worthy of church membership because of his outwardly Christian behavior. Jacob saw things differently; the offer left him “thunderstruck, for . . . I did not conceive myself to be at all qualified for it.” Jacob drew two conclusions from the incident. It was “a sad instance of the minister’s carelessness in admitting members to his church, and of my own presumption in consenting to his proposal.” Both minister and congregant came up short in Jacob’s demanding view.55
Jacob was extremely hard on himself in another way—he struggled to achieve a rebirth. He did not become reborn after the wilderness adventure or his terrifying dream. He did not immediately undergo a conversion even after seeing the Great Awakening up close at the hands of two of its greatest practitioners, who did so much to expose his perceived shortcomings. Instead, this momentous moment in his spiritual life finally came about two months after Jacob heard Tennent’s discourse on hope. And the conversion came in the most ironic way—through study. By reading “authors on the harmony of the divine attributes,” Jacob simply came to understand Jesus Christ’s role in the atonement of sin, “and that God could glorify himself in pardoning a sinner through Jesus Christ.” Such a simple revelation was powerful nonetheless: “When I came to see that God could be glorified and sinners saved . . . it astonished me, it filled me with raptures of admiration.”56
Jacob’s struggles, however, were not over. He spent the rest of his college years attempting to maintain the conversion he had achieved in the winter of 1741. As he put it lyrically in his autobiography, “Sometimes I would have light, joy, and comfort, for a week or two together, and then for as long a time, I would be in darkness, doubts, and fears.” He also struggled to maintain his Calvinistic faith as his knowledge of the Enlightenment improved. In May 1744, Jacob confessed in a letter to a classmate just how confused he was about predestination; the classmate, Nathaniel Tucker, had taken the Arminian stance that individuals can achieve salvation on their own by embracing the gospel. Jacob wrote that he was at a loss as to how to respond, that the topic was so complicated “I cannot come to any determination of [it] in my own mind.”57
Despite the supposed problems with backsliding and his doubts about Calvinism, Jacob’s piety and intelligence were obvious to others, and, as his time at Harvard drew to a close, friends and colleagues urged him to become a minister. Jacob resisted, however. Despite his rebirth, he remained doubtful about whether he truly was of the elect. He also doubted whether he possessed the personality to be a pastor—he was shy and disliked public speaking, especially on something as personal as religion. In private, he said, “I generally had great fervour and engagedness of soul . . . but when I come to be among people, I found myself bashful and reluctant to speak.” While at Harvard, Jacob admired those individuals who could “speak with freedom and earnestness to others.” He wished he were one of those people.58
Green graduated from Harvard in July 1744, unsure about what he would do for a living. He wanted to pursue advanced studies, but he had no money left to pay for it. Unlike many of his classmates, he “had no wealthy friends to help me.” Despite the entreaties of his friends and an unnamed congregation that sought to hire him, Jacob did not feel ready to for the pulpit, given his gauche ways and nagging doubt about his faith. Instead, as a stopgap, Jacob accepted a teaching position at Sutton, about fifty miles from Harvard, where Daniel Rogers was assisting the minister.59
When his teaching contract expired after a year, Jacob was still unsure about what to do next. It was now 1745, and a towering figure from Jacob’s past was then touring New England. Learning that Green was looking for work, George Whitefield offered him the opportunity to run his orphanage in Savannah, Georgia. Jacob was delighted, calling the offer “unexpected and surprising.” He accepted and agreed to meet Whitefield in New York after he settled his affairs in Massachusetts. Jacob caught up with Whitefield in Elizabeth Town, New Jersey, where he received some bad news: Whitefield had failed to raise enough money for the orphanage. Whitefield, however, volunteered to “fulfil his agreement with me for half a year, if I chose to go on with him; and that if I chose to stop, he would defray the expense I had incurred in coming thus far.”60
Jacob’s indecision now returned. He found himself in a