SOURCE: Ellison, Julie. “The Sociology of ‘Holy Indifference’: Sarah Edwards' Narrative.” American Literature 56, no. 4 (December 1984): 479-95.

In the following essay, Ellison examines Edwards's narrative and her husband's revision of it, which, she states, provides insight into the complex connections between social conflict and religious experience.

Dr. Hopkins, the Edwardsean theologian of Harriet Beecher Stowe's The Minister's Wooing (1859), describes his youthful beloved through an extended reference to Sarah Edwards. “It was my privilege,” he recalls,

to be in the family of President Edwards at a time when Northampton was specially visited and his wife seemed and spoke more like a glorified spirit than a mortal woman,—multitudes flocked to the house to hear her wonderful words. She seemed to have such a sense of the Divine love as was almost beyond the powers of nature to endure. Just to speak the words, “Our Father who art in heaven,” would...