The following story aims to illustrate the display of God’s providence and grace, in his patient pursuit of an elect soul. It provides an account of the conversion of a young woman named Sarah Baker. The excerpted portion below are her own words as recorded in an interview. Born to parents of some wealth, Sarah spent her earliest years in a loving, pleasant home and was afforded a full array of comforts and care, including an education at a boarding school and instruction in general morals. When she was nine years old, however, an event occurred which completely changed her prospects and course of life—the untimely death of her beloved father. From that point forward, one disastrous circumstance after another caused her formerly comfortable life to unravel into poverty and hardship.
Next to the Bible, my father’s chief delight was in studying the works of the old divines, of which, in time-worn editions, he has succeeded in accumulating a goodly number. These, he was wont to say, contained more of the “sap and marrow of the gospel,” and had about them more of the “fragrance and flavour of Paradise, than aught more recently produced.”
My eldest son, Robert Stockton Green, died the very close of this year 1813. He died at Boston, on Tuesday the 28th of September, and the next day his corpse was deposited in Mr. Dexter’s cemetery;—the very day of our annual commencement, eight years after taking his degree in this College. He was born July 30th, 1787; and was, of course, twenty-six years and two months of age when he died, wanting two days.
Believing that God hath made with me, and with my seed after me, his everlasting covenant, to be a God to me and to my seed, I did, in your baptism, and often since, and now do, before God and his angels, make a solemn surrender of you all into the hands of my God, and my father’s God, and of the God of your mother, and her father’s God; and in the presence of that God, and as ye shall answer at his second coming, I charge you:
