A Sermon by Kenneth W. Phifer Delivered at First UU Church of Ann Arbor 09 May 2004 JUDITH SARGENT MURRAY Women have played a vital role in the unfolding of American history. That their role has been played down, ignored, or distorted is the fault of historians with myopic male vision. Blessedly what women have done has been coming to light more and more across the past several decades. We now know that the burdens of immigrating to this continent were shared equally by men and women. We now know that female slaves were worked as hard and at the same jobs as male slaves. We now know that the women who crossed the prairie looking for land or gold or hope of any kind were as tireless, as strong, and as clever as any man on those same journeys. Men went off to war, or in search of fortune, or to evade responsibility. Women raised the crops, took care of the animals, repaired the hut or hovel or house the family lived in, and nursed the children. Many of these stories can be found in a splendid new book by Gail Collins, AMERICA’S WOMEN: 400 YEARS OF DOLLS, DRUDGES, HELPMATES, AND HEROINES. It is a book worth reading as a reminder of how hard it has been for women to make their way in this land of the free, but how ably they have done so. Regrettably men usually gave little heed to the kind of advice offered by Abigail Adams to her husband John while he was attending the Continental Congress that would draft the Declaration of Independence. “In the new Code of Laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make I desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands…That your Sex are Naturally Tyrannical is a Truth so thoroughly established as to admit of no dispute, but such of you as wish to be happy willingly give up the harsh title of Master for the more tender and endearing one of Friend. Why then not put it out of the power of the vicious and the Lawless to use us with cruelty and indignity and impunity. Men of Sense in all Ages abhor those customs which treat us only as the vassals of your Sex.” John’s response: “As to your extraordinary code of laws, I cannot but laugh.” Despite meeting with disdain from her husband, Abigail persisted, as did thousands of her female compatriots, until the day came when the ideal of equality promised in the Declaration of Independence was made real. Women today can own property, marry whom they choose, vote, and work in most occupations. It is not insignificant that a conservative president has two women among his closest advisers, Condaleeza Rice and Karen Hughes. Paradise it is not, but I am confident that Abigail Adams and her many companions through the past several hundred years would nonetheless smile with pleasure at what has been achieved. One of those companions, indeed a friend of Abigail and John Adams, is the subject of my sermon this morning, Judith Sargent Murray. I would be surprised if more than a few of you had ever heard of her. Her work was mostly done in the shadow of the man she loved and married and did all she could to support and care for, John Murray. John Murray is generally regarded as the Father of American Universalism. He was born in England in 1741 and raised partly in Ireland. His early religious convictions centered on a Calvinistic notion of Election: God predestined a small number of people for eternal bliss and the greater part of humanity for eternal damnation. He married late in his teenage years and he and his wife began to question the doctrine of Election. Hearing James Relly preach about universal salvation, the idea that all will be saved by a loving God, they were persuaded. Murray determined to become a preacher. A series of tragedies then caused him to change his mind. He was arrested for debt. His one year old son died. Four of his siblings died in Ireland. Then his wife died as well. He decided to come to America where, in his words, he could “pass through life, unheard, unseen, unknown to all, as though I ne’er had been.” Just the opposite of this oblivion was to be his fate. His ship was stranded on a sandbar off the coast of New Jersey. When he went ashore, he was approached by a man named Thomas Potter, who invited him to preach in the chapel which he, Potter, had built, waiting for someone to come and preach the message of universal salvation. Murray, reluctant at first, agreed to preach only if the ship did not get off the sandbar by Sunday. On September 30, 1770, Murray did preach—and only after that sermon did the wind change and blow the ship off the sandbar—and he did not stop for the next 39 years. When Murray came to the colonies, there were universalists here, but no churches, no larger organization to help bind the churches together, no movement proclaiming this message of grace and hope. When he died in 1815, the movement was secure and strong, the notion of God’s love embracing all of the divine creation having worked its way into a permanent, and by the end of the 19th century a predominant, place in Christian theology. Murray was an itinerant preacher for several years before settling in Gloucester, Massachusetts. He was for a time a chaplain in the Continental Army until illness forced him to give up this position. In 1780, the first Universalist church in America was established in Gloucester. Ten years later the Universalist Church of America was formed so that the several tens of Universalist churches in the new country could associate with and strengthen each other. While in Gloucester, Murray led a legal challenge to the existing rule of taxes being paid to the town church, in most cases the Congregationalist Church with its Puritan roots. Murray worked for six years to gain people the right to pay their taxes to whichever church they attended. In 1833, Massachusetts abolished the religious tax. Among the leaders of that reform was another outstanding Universalist preacher, Hosea Ballou. In 1793, Murray was called to serve a Universalist congregation in Boston, even while he was still serving the people of Gloucester. In this dual role he continued until a stroke silenced him in 1809. It was in Gloucester that John met Judith Sargent Stevens, whom he was to marry in 1788. Judith was to be the strong support for Murray’s preaching and personal life, the antidote to the despair he sometimes felt when he remembered the terrible loss of life in his family and when he contemplated the hardships of preaching a message that appeared to threaten people when it was intended to give comfort and hope. Once when preaching in Boston, a stone was hurled through a window and narrowly missed his head. He picked up the stone and said, “This argument is solid and weighty, but it is neither rational nor convincing.” Setting the stone down, he then said, “Not all the stones in Boston, except they stop my breath, shall shut my mouth.” No small part of the courage that enabled him to speak those words came from the love of his wife and her hard work on his behalf. Judith Sargent was born in 1751, the daughter of a Gloucester merchant. In 1769 she married John Stevens, also a merchant but a less successful one than her father. In 1786, he fled to the West Indies to escape his creditors, and there he died in 1787. Judith first met John Murray in 1774 when he came to preach in Gloucester. Her father became one of Murray’s closest friends and strongest supporters in founding a Universalist church in the town. Judith also became a good friend of Murray’s, as letters she wrote to him make clear. Two days after he had left Gloucester on that first preaching mission, Judtih wrote: “If I am not mistaken in the character of the person I have the pleasure to address, it will be most agreeable to him that I should lay aside all that awe and reverence which his unquestionable superiority demands, and approach him with the freedom of a sister conversing with a brother whom she entirely esteems. I am not much accustomed to writing letters, especially to your sex, but if there be neither male nor female in the Emmanuel you promulgate, we may surely, and with the strictest propriety, mingle souls upon paper.” By a mingling of souls, Judith meant a deep and rich friendship that fourteen years later would eventuate in marriage when she was a widow and thus free to pursue a more intimate relationship with Murray. At that time he approached her and revealed to her that he had loved her from the first days of his meeting her. He had refrained from saying anything out of a sense of respect for her as a married woman. Now that her husband had died, he wished to know if she would consider him as a husband. She very gladly accepted this offer, writing to a friend at the time that “my bosom glowed with an attachment for Mr. Murray.” In that same letter, she also reveals her strong independence by protesting the fact that “The World, it seems, will not allow to a single woman an intellectual connexion with an individual of the other sex.” Their marriage was from all accounts a most happy one. They had two children, one of whom died young, the other of whom grew to adulthood. The last six years of John’s life, she nursed him after the stroke that stripped him of his powers. She then moved to Mississippi to live with her daughter and near her brother for the five years that remained to her. She died in 1820. Judith Sargent Murray was an important figure in several ways. First of all, she was a strong supporter of her husband in a time when his voice was more than any other the voice of a significant new theological understanding, universalism, the salvation of all people. Murray and other Universalist preachers operated at some considerable risk in preaching the message they did. Murray was not alone in having stones hurled at him. Tarring and feathering was another threat. Towns voted sometimes to expel Universalists, and more orthodox believers pursued various legal means to hound these preachers of the new heresy. Murray always maintained a very stout public front, but privately he was often a man in torment. Judith was a stalwart supporter even before she married John, one who could help him to carry on when life seemed bleak and his soul empty. Among the earliest letters she sent to Murray is one in which she writes that “you bid me show you what the God Man hath revealed to my soul.” This appears to be a response to some kind of request for shoring up his faith. The conclusion to the letter offers that consolation when she writes “May the peace you so abundantly communicate revert back into your own bosom. May you experience the divine influence of that serenity which results from goodness, and may you never want the consolation you are so wonderfully calculated to bestow.” She had just met the man, was ten years his junior, and yet already was offering balm to his wounds, a practice she would continue with propriety throughout her marriage to Mr. Stevens and with intimacy in the 27 years of their married life. On more than one occasion, Judith held John Murray to his call when he was despondent and thinking of leaving the ministry. Indeed, one of the factors leading her into marriage with Murray was his temporary exile from America to escape legal problems. Religious opponents had challenged the legality of his marriage ceremonies, saying he had not properly been ordained to the ministry. He left Gloucester in 1787 in hopes of his absence allowing matters to calm down. She wrote a friend that “the event which banished Mr. Murray from America effectively removed the vale. I was solicitous to yield in person that relief which the balm of sacred friendship might supply, and that I was denied the privilege of sympathizing with a Man, whom I so much esteemed and revered was to me an agonizing consideration.” If marriage was the only way of supporting Mr. Murray, then marriage it would be, and happily, for he was a splendid man. It seems clear that no psychiatrist, no pill, no colleague, no religious ritual could have done more than Judith Sargent Murray did to support her husband in his courageous proclamation of the good news of universal salvation. One biographer even claimed that “clearly, John’s success in the ministry was largely due to Judith’s unwavering emotional support.” Once, when Hosea Ballou was preaching in the Boston church while John was elsewhere, he made a doctrinal point at variance with what Murray believed. She quickly summoned a member of the choir and instructed him to announce to the congregation following the prayer that the doctrine heard this morning was not the one usually heard from this pulpit, a clear rebuke of Mr. Ballou. Having once experienced a similar rebuke after a sermon in a Presbyterian church, I am in admiration of Mr. Ballou’s response, “You have heard what the brother has said. I beg you to take note of the same.” Judith had defended her husband and his understanding of universalism, and she was to do so till the end of her days. She was the first to encourage him to write down his ideas, thereby reaching a wider audience. She was the best editor he ever had. Later she edited the three volumes of his LETTERS AND SKETCHES OF SERMONS and finished his AUTOBIOGRAPHY when ill health prevented him from doing so. Judith Sargent Murray was a major influence in the early development of Universalism through her support of her husband’s work. The impact of his message would have been far less had she not been there to encourage, to edit, to inspire, and to defend. In one instance she even delved into the writing of theology to bolster her husband’s position. Accused throughout his life of failing to make a clear distinction between the universal salvation of every individual and universal redemption of the whole creation, which might leave some wicked individuals outside of heaven, Murray’s reputation as a true Universalist was preserved by Judith in completing his autobiography where she made the distinction clear. (see RECORDS OF THE LIFE OF THE REV. JOHN MURRAY…WRITTEN BY HIMSELF, TO WHICH IS ADDED, A BRIEF CONTINUATION TO THE CLOSING SCENE, BY A FRIEND). But Judith Sargent Murray was also a force in her own right, a woman of independence and achievement in an era when women were mostly ignored if they attempted to have a role in public affairs of any kind. Throughout the period of her 18 year marriage to John Stevens, she was writing and publishing poems in various journals in and around Boston. In 1798, with the strong encouragement of her husband, the poems were collected in three volumes under the title of GLEANER. Included among the names on the subscription list were those of the Governor of Massachusetts, George and Martha Washington, and the man to whom the work was dedicated, John Adams, at that time the president of the United States. Earlier, in 1782, she had published anonymously SOME DEDUCTIONS FROM THE SYSTEM PROMULGATED IN THE PAGE OF DIVINE REVELATION: RANGED IN THE ORDER AND FORM OF A CATECHISM: INTENDED AS AN ASSISTANT TO THE CHRISTIAN PARENT OR TEACHER. According to Gordon Gibson, a UU minister in Elkhart, Indiana who has done extensive research into the life and work of Judith Sargent Murray, the significance of this work lies in its “delineation of early Universalist belief.” Prepared to help herself and her husband with the raising and moral instruction of two orphan girls they had taken on, she happily proclaimed her universalism: “There are many…persons who proclaim eternal damnation to the greater part of mankind…the veil is yet upon the hearts of the multitude…they cannot see the things which belong to their peace…when every thing that is hid, shall be made manifest…they shall all know…God is life eternal.” In addition to relying heavily upon Scriptural justification for their Universalist beliefs, Judith Murray and the early Universalists were also Trinitarians, as later Universalists would tend not to be. As part of this catechism, Mrs. Murray would write, “…so the Father is God, the Son is God, the Spirit is God, yet they are all one God.” In the preface to this work, she makes clear her feminist sensibilities by speaking of a time when male and female distinctions would be no more. She takes gentle exception to the supposed natural inferiority of the female sex in any effort of genius, and by the very writing of the catechism for two young girls—and publishing it with the hope that it would have a wider readership among girls and boys—she made clear her belief that sex was not a barrier to thought, to education, or to accomplishment in the world. Recall that she was writing a full decade before the first classic of feminist writing in the modern world, Mary Wollstonecraft’s VINDICATION OF THE RIGHTS OF WOMAN. Much of what we know of her thoughts we have learned from the copies of letters she sent to others. There are twenty volumes of them, even after she herself destroyed all the copies of her letters prior to 1774. That she was a feminist is clear. In a series of letters sent to her brother Winthrop, she argues that women should study Latin and Greek just as men were doing. She later presents a case for women studying science because of all the forced leisure time they had. In a series of letters to her younger brother Fitz William, each is devoted to a discussion on one topic of study. Among the subjects on which she discourses are geography, astronomy, language, music, fencing, reading, Old Testament history, Persia, dance, and proper and improper types of humor. In a letter to a friend in 1777, when she was 26 years of age, she writes “That Eve was the weaker Vessel, I boldly take upon me to deny. Nay, it should seem she was abundantly the stronger vessel since all the deep laid Art of the most subtle fiend that inhabited the infernal regions was requisite to draw her from her allegiances, while Adam was overcome by the influence of the softer passions, merely by his attachment to a female…” In another letter to a friend, writing of matrimony, she was outraged at the prevalent notions of the time about the role of woman in marriage. “For those sentiments, so humiliating to our sex, avowed by Rousseau, I will never forgive him. Is it not abominable to be denied the liberty of judgment, even upon the most important points? How are you affected by the objection that a female, educated in whatever principles, however zealous, should the persuasion of her matrimonial companion chance to be diametrically opposite, must immediately relinquish her ideas, not presuming to have an opinion which shall vary from the Dogmas of her Father, while under his care, nor clash with those of her Lord and Master, when consigned over as his property!! Is not this intolerable?” Held back by her society from a full expression of her views and “the fame for which I confess an insatiable thirst,” she worked through personal contacts, the influence she had with her husband, and through her letters to touch and influence the world. In the early years of Universalism, she was an important communications link between Universalists up and down the eastern seaboard at a time when such views were still regarded as heretical by the overwhelming majority of people. Judith also had a touch of the adventurer in her, writing to a friend, Mrs. Pilgrim, just a few years after the first human flight in a balloon. “Balloons would in truth become very valuable could they safely transport us over the broad Atlantic. With what inexpressible pleasure might I thus set my table and allow my heart to flutter with the expectation of seeing my little Circle graced by the presence of a friend so condescending as Mrs. Pilgrim, and after we had sipped the cheering beverage together, taking my place beside you in the aerial machine, I would hie me to the Metropolis of the World, and not contented with an afternoon, I would gratify my admiration of whatever is excellent among men by days, weeks, months and years of wonder.” Judith Sargent Murray was a remarkable woman. She was an early feminist in this country who made clear her convictions about the equality of women and men and the injustice of the restraints placed upon women in the 18th and 19th centuries. She was a literary force in an era when women were virtually non-existent in published writing. She furthered the cause of Universalism through her own publications and her letters to others of her theological persuasion, as well as the staunch support she gave to her husband both before and during their marriage. It is not an unfair assessment to make to say that if John Murray was the Founding Father of American Universalism, its Founding Mother was Judith Sargent Stevens Murray. On this Mother’s Day in the year 2004, we salute her for what she did to bring equity into the social world and kindness and common sense into the theological world. BIBLIOGRAPHY 1. Gail Collins, AMERICA’S WOMEN: 400 YEARS OF DOLLS, DRUDGES, HELPMATES, AND HEROINES, HarperCollins, 2003. 2. Gordon Gibson, “The Rediscovery of Judith Sargent Murray,” The 1991 John Murray Distinguished Lecture, available for $3.50 from Gordon Gibson, P.O. Box 584, Elkhart, IN 46515. 3. Sharon M. Harris (Ed.), SELECTED WRITINGS OF JUDITH SARGENT MURRAY, Oxford University Press, 1995. 4. Sheila L. SKEMP, JUDITH SARGENT MURRAY: A BRIEF BIOGRAPHY WITH DOCUMENTS, Bedford Books, 1998 5. Bonnie Hurd Smith, FROM GLOUCESTER TO PHILADELPHIA IN 1790: OBSERVATIONS, THOUGHTS, AND ANECDOTES FROM THE LETTERS OF JUDITH SARGENT MURRAY, The Judith Sargent Murray Society. 6. THE JUDITH SARGENT MURRAY PAPERS (Z/1827), Manuscript Collection, Mississippi Department of Archives and History. Copyright 2004, Kenneth W. Phifer, All Rights Reserved