David Brainerd

A Flame for God

Vance Christie

• Publisher: Christian Focus Publication
• Year: 2009
• eBook ISBN: 9781845506681

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BOYHOOD AND CONVERSION

In 1649 an eight-year-old orphan named Daniel Brainerd was brought from Essex, England, to Hartford, Connecticut. It is not known what had happened to his family in the homeland or which vessel carried him to the New World.¹ Perhaps those unknown individuals who looked after the vulnerable young boy hoped his fortunes would improve and he would be able to make something of himself in America. If that was the case, their hopes for the lad were amply realized in the end.

Daniel lived in Hartford with a family named Wadsworth until he was twenty-one. He then joined twenty-seven other land seekers in traveling a score of miles down the scenic Connecticut River to establish the community of Haddam. The tract those early pioneers settled was twelve miles square and was divided nearly equally on the east and west sides of the river. Daniel prospered there, eventually becoming not only Haddam's chief landholder, but also its constable, surveyor, assessor and collector, as well as a Commissioner for the General Court and a justice of the peace.

Two years after the settling of Haddam, which soon grew to be a community of some sixty families, Daniel married Hannah Spencer. She bore him seven sons and a daughter. The youngest of their sons, Hezekiah, was born in 1681. He inherited the largest portion of his father's estate, including the family homestead with its house in the country located two miles upriver from Haddam. The house stood just one hundred feet above the Connecticut's west bank.

Hezekiah went on to become quite prominent. In addition to being a country squire, a regiment commander and, like his father, a justice of the peace at Haddam, he served in the Connecticut government. He was a Representative to the General Assembly, Speaker of the House for two years, and a member of the Senate from 1723 till his untimely death four years later.

Thomas Brainerd, a descendant of Hezekiah's brother, James, described Hezekiah as a man ‘of great personal dignity and self-restraint, of rigid notions of parental prerogative and authority, of the strictest puritanical views as to religious ordinances, of unbending integrity as a man and a public officer, and of extreme scrupulousness in his Christian life.’²

On October 1, 1707, Hezekiah married Dorothy Hobart Mason, the young widow of Daniel Mason. Dorothy came from a family that had produced a number of ministers. Her paternal grandfather, Peter Hobart, after suffering persecution as a Puritan preacher in England, moved his family to Hingham, Massachusetts, where he continued his ministry. Four of his five sons followed in their father's ministerial footsteps, serving churches in New England.

Hobart's second son, Jeremiah, was Dorothy's father. After serving at Hempstead on Long Island, a pastorate made difficult, in the words of Edwards, ‘by reason of numbers turning Quakers, and many others being so irreligious that they would do nothing towards the support of the gospel,’ Jeremiah became Haddam's first minister. He pastored there till his death at age eighty-five in 1715.

Dorothy's maternal grandfather was the cultured Puritan minister Samuel Whiting who served congregations in Boston of Lincolnshire, England, and Lynn, Massachusetts. In addition to his daughter, Dorothy's mother, Whiting had three sons, all of whom devoted their lives to the ministry. An uncle of Dorothy's mother, Oliver St John, served as Chief Justice of England under the eminent Puritan political leader, Oliver Cromwell.

When Dorothy married Hezekiah Brainerd she already had a two-year-old son, Jeremiah Mason, by her first husband. Heze-kiah and Dorothy's union was blessed with nine children of their own: Hezekiah (born 1708), Dorothy (1710), Nehemiah (1712), Jerusha (1714), Martha (1716), David (1718), John (1720), Elizabeth (1722) and Israel (1725). David, the sixth child and third son of his parents, was born one week after Easter, on Sunday, April 20, 1718.

Details are sketchy about David Brainerd's upbringing. He and his siblings were doubtless expected to share fully in the numerous chores to be carried out around the farm and home. They also needed to attend carefully to their schooling and religious duties. But life was not all work for them. They likely hiked and hunted in the forested hills that made up their portion of the Connecticut River valley. Nearby streams and the river would have afforded opportunities for summertime fishing and swimming as well as wintertime skating.

The Brainerd children likely received much of their education at home. Subjects commonly emphasized during that era included reading, writing, arithmetic and the catechism. The town records of Haddam reveal that money was provided for a community schoolhouse in 1728, so it is possible, though far from certain, that David Brainerd was one of its early pupils. Whether educated at home or in a local schoolhouse, the fact that he was later admitted to Yale College and there rose to the top of his class makes clear that he received a sound basic education as a boy.

Certainly daily religious instruction and weekly church attendance figured prominently in the life and routine of the Brainerd family. Puritan families commonly had both morning and evening family devotions. Brainerd's paternal grandfather, Daniel, served as one of the original deacons when the Congregational Church was formed in Haddam in 1700. As has already been mentioned, his other grandfather, Jeremiah Hobart, was the first pastor of that congregation. David Brainerd's strict, dutiful father doubtless saw to it that all his family members were punctilious in their church attendance.

The building where the Brainerds attended church was erected in 1721. Congregants enjoyed singing psalms, but did so without the aid of an organ, as organs had not yet come into use by Congregational churches of that period. The meetinghouse had neither lights nor a fire for heat. Worship services were held Sunday morning and afternoon, and it was not at all uncommon for the pastor's sermons to run up to two hours in length.

Neighboring Indians had the right to hunt and fish in the countryside, so the sight of natives would have been one to which the Brainerd children were accustomed. For years a large tribe of superstitious, devil-worshiping Indians had resided a short distance downriver, near East Haddam. The natives called that location Machemoodus, meaning ‘the place of noises,’ so named for the rumblings and strange sounds that emanated from deep within the base of nearby Mount Tom. The aborigines believed the mountain to be the residence of Hobbamock, the spirit of evil and the author of all human plagues and calamities.

Looking back near the end of his life, David Brainerd would write that he did not remember having any significant conviction of sin before he was seven or eight years old. Then he became deeply convicted of his sin, concerned about the condition of his soul and terrified at the thought of dying. By that sudden spiritual agitation he was ‘driven to the performance of duties,’ presumably including more conscientious endeavors at personal prayer and Bible reading. Those legalistic efforts, however, proved to be ‘a melancholy business that destroyed my eagerness for play.’ As it turned out, that early period of spiritual concern was shortlived.

He further revealed that from his youth he was ‘somewhat sober, and inclined rather to melancholy than the contrary extreme.’ His propensity toward dejection was doubtless deepened by a stunning loss he suffered when he was but nine years of age. At that time his half-brother, Jeremiah Mason, was twenty-two and engaged to be married to Mary Clark. Their wedding day was set for May 24, 1727, and Phineas Fiske, Haddam's second pastor, performed the ceremony. The happiness of the occasion was shattered, however, when news arrived that Hezekiah Brainerd, while attending to senatorial duties in Hartford, had suddenly passed away earlier in the day. That same day was Hezekiah's birthday; he was only forty-six.

Throughout the next few years David Brainerd was relatively unconcerned about and satisfied with his spiritual condition. That abruptly ended during the opening months of 1732, however, when he became greatly excited over ‘a mortal sickness’ which visited Haddam. Once again he became frequent and fervent in his perceived spiritual duties. He also found delight in reading Christian books, especially James Janeway's Token for Children. Janeway was a Nonconformist minister who served in London, before dying of consumption in 1674 at age thirty-seven.³ His Token for Children, subtitled Being an Exact Account of the Conversion, Holy and Exemplary Lives, and Joyful Deaths of Several Young Children, urged young people to live in a serious, devout fashion so that they might be prepared to enter heaven should they die.

That March, a month before his fourteenth birthday, another dark season came into his young life. His mother's death at age fifty-two left him ‘exceedingly distressed and melancholy.’ After her passing his religious concern began to decline and gradually he slipped back into a state of relative complacency.

The year that followed brought many changes for the Brainerd family. Brainerd's oldest brother, Hezekiah, had married Phineas Fiske's daughter, Mary, in January of 1731. Their first child was born in July of 1732 in the homestead which Hezekiah, Jr., had inherited. Nehemiah graduated from Yale that fall, and in December David Brainerd's favorite sister, Jerusha, married Samuel Spencer of East Haddam. Just days before his fifteenth birthday the following April, he moved into Samuel and Jerusha's home in the village of East Haddam.

During the four years that he lived there he cultivated a degree of religious devotion by maintaining his private spiritual duties. He also tried to avoid spending too much time with other young people because of the detrimental effect he perceived it had on his spiritual life:

I was not exceedingly addicted to young company, or frolicking, as it is called. But this I know, that when I did go into such company, I never returned from a frolick in my life with so good a conscience as when I went. It always added new guilt to me, and made me afraid to come to the throne of grace, and spoiled those good frames I was wont sometimes to please myself with.

In April of 1737 he turned nineteen and received his portion of the family inheritance, a farm near Durham, about ten miles west of Haddam. He tried his hand at farming for a few months, but found it did not appeal to him. Instead, more in keeping with his ‘natural inclination’ toward studies, he frequently longed to attend college and pursue a liberal arts education.

Hezekiah, Jr., who would shortly become Haddam's Clerk and a justice of the peace, had three years earlier taken his father's place as Representative to the General Assembly, a post he would occupy almost continually for forty years. Nehemiah had entered the ministry, following in the footsteps of several of his relatives. As Brainerd approached his twentieth birthday, he decided that he, too, would pursue a ministerial career.

He returned to Haddam in April, 1738, in order to live and study with Phineas Fiske, who was then in his twenty-third year of ministry there. About that same time one of Fiske's six daughters, Elizabeth, was married to Brainerd's brother, Nehemiah. The somber older pastor gave the aspiring ministerial student an interesting bit of advice that it would appear he hardly needed, but was careful to heed: ‘he advised me wholly to abandon young company and associate myself with grave elderly people, which counsel I followed.’

In less than a year Brainerd read twice completely through the Bible. In addition, he devoted considerable time each day to prayer and other secret duties, and gave careful attention to the Bible messages he heard at church, endeavoring to retain as much of them as possible. He also met with a group of young people (presumably with Fiske's approval) on Sunday evenings for a time of religious devotions. After those meetings and sometimes again on Monday mornings, he would rehearse to himself the sermons he had heard that Sabbath. ‘In short,’ he later said of himself, ‘I was a very good Pharisee, i.e., had a very good outside, but rested entirely on my duties, though I was not sensible of it.’

Fiske passed away in the fall of that year, after which Brainerd continued his studies under the tutelage of his brother, Nehemiah. He remained constant in his religious duties and was often amazed at and troubled over the carelessness of others with regard to spiritual matters. ‘Thus I proceeded a considerable length on a self-righteous foundation, and should have been entirely lost and undone, had not the mere mercy of God prevented.’

God graciously began to dismantle his self-righteousness one Sunday morning late that year as he went out walking to spend some time in private prayer. Suddenly, unexpectedly he was overwhelmed with a view of his own sin and vileness, as well as with a sense of his being in imminent danger of the wrath of God. This left him greatly distressed and dejected for days and caused him to spend much time alone.

In February of 1739 he set apart a day for secret fasting and prayer. He spent the entire day crying to God for mercy and asking Him to open his eyes to see the evil of sin and the way of life by Jesus Christ. God used the day to help him see the sinful condition of his own heart and, to some degree, his spiritual helplessness. ‘But still I trusted in all the duties I performed.’

Sometimes he became spiritually apathetic, not having any significant convictions of sin for days at a time. Afterwards, however, conviction would return to seize him even more strongly. He later described one such occasion that was especially distressing:

One night I remember in particular, when I was walking solitarily abroad, I had opened to me such a view of my sin that I feared the ground would cleave asunder under my feet and become my grave, and send my soul quick (alive) into hell, before I could get home. And though I was forced to go to bed, lest my distress should be discovered by others, which I much feared; yet I scarce durst sleep at all, for I thought it would be a great wonder if I should be out of hell in the morning.

His considerable spiritual perplexity and distress led him to start virulently finding fault with God's ways of dealing with mankind. He thought it unfair that Adam's sin had been imputed to all human beings and wished for some other way of salvation than by Christ. He pondered various schemes (‘strange projections, full of atheism’) by which he might escape God's notice, thwart God's decrees concerning him and escape the divine wrath his sins deserved. Often he wished there was no God. He even wished there were some other Divine Being with whom he might ‘join and fight against the living God!’

He considered four aspects of Christian doctrine related to salvation especially irksome. First, he took issue with God's law as being unreasonably rigid. If it regulated only his outward conduct he thought he could bear with it and possibly fulfill it. But he realized it condemned also the evil thoughts and other sins of his heart that he could not possibly prevent. Secondly, he resisted Scripture's teaching that faith alone was the condition of salvation. Having been ‘very conscientious in duty’ and ‘exceeding religious’ for such a long time, he could not abide the thought that all he had done should count for nothing toward his own salvation.

In the third place, he was frustrated by his inability to ascertain precisely what was involved in believing and coming to Christ. Having pondered Christ's call to the weary and heavy laden to come to Him, Brainerd could discover no way that the Savior directed them to do that. He read Solomon Stoddard's Guide to Christ but ended up frustrated with it. Though the volume did an excellent job of describing the exact condition of his own heart while under conviction, it failed to tell him anything he could ‘do’ that would bring him to Christ. As he would later state of himself, he had not yet learned ‘that there could be no way prescribed whereby a natural man could, of his own strength, obtain that which is supernatural.’

Solomon Stoddard (1643–1729) was Jonathan Edwards’ father-in-law and his predecessor as the pastor at Northampton, Massachusetts. A Guide to Christ, Or the way of directing souls that are under the work of conversion was originally published in Boston in 1714.⁴ In the end, that work played a central role in Brainerd's being brought to salvation. He testified that the book was the instrument ‘which, I trust, in the hand of God was the happy means of my conversion.’

Fourthly, he had great inward opposition toward the doctrine of God's sovereignty over salvation. He refused to accept that teaching bec...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword by John MacArthur
• Introduction
• 1. Boyhood and Conversion
• 2. Spiritual Awakening at Yale
• 3. College Conflict
• 4. Awaiting God’s Direction
• 5. Licensed to Preach
• 6. Appointed as a Missionary
• 7. A Start among the Indians
• 8. Timely Encouragement and Fresh Challenges
• 9. Wintertime Studies and Reflections
• 10. ‘Resolved to Go on Still with the Indian Affair’
• 11. Summer at the Forks
• 12. First Susquehanna Journey
• 13. Hope and Despair
• 14. Seeking a Missionary Colleague
• 15. A Difficult and Disappointing Itineration
• 16. The Spirit’s Stirring
• 17. Days of God’s Power
• 18. Ministering Where Satan Reigns
• 19. Progress of a Remarkable Work of Grace
• 20. The Continued Stirring
• 21. Conviction, Conversions and Opposition
• 22. Ministering to Exhaustion
• 23. Preparing a New Settlement
• 24. ‘One Continued Flame for God’
• 25. Invaluable Insights concerning Indian Ministry
• 26. Final Susquehanna Journey
• 27. Final Ministry among the Indians
• 28. Illness at Elizabethtown
• 29. Near Death at Boston
• 30. Temporary Recovery
• 31. Finishing the Course
• 32. Ongoing Influence
• Appendix: Brainerd’s Depression
• Further Reading
• John And Betty Stam
• Christian Focus Publications