left Whitefield to visit her. As it turned out, this was the last time he saw her.48
As momentous as Whitefield’s tour was, the arrival of Gilbert Tennent only a few months later made an even deeper impression on Jacob. Tennent came to Cambridge in late January 1741. Uncouth, haughty, and loud, Tennent was not Whitefield’s equal in speaking ability or intellect, but he stirred Jacob in ways that Whitefield did not. Part of Tennent’s influence on Jacob had to do with the timing of his visit on that cold January day, and part of it with the message he delivered. Jacob had never heard of Gilbert Tennent when this controversial Presbyterian itinerant came to Harvard, and he went to hear him only out of curiosity. Tennent’s sermon was on false hope. “Some of you may try to maintain your old hope, though it shakes and has no foundation, and you will flatter and deceive yourselves,” Jacob recalled him saying. “But your hope must come down. I know it will be like rending soul and body asunder, but down it must come, or you must go to hell with it.”49
These words struck Green with tremendous force. Every doubt he had long harbored about his spirituality, every fear he had long felt about his eternal fate under the Calvinistic doctrine of predestination, came washing over him as Tennent shouted his warnings from the pulpit. The sermon left Jacob deeply upset and troubled: “I saw myself fit for hell. The sinfulness of my heart and nature appeared infinitely more dreadful than ever it had done before. I had a new and dreadful sense of my wickedness.” To his friends and acquaintances, Jacob was serious and hardworking, but Jacob still viewed himself as a wretched sinner. His childhood feelings of inadequacy tormented him. As a young boy raised in the Calvinistic gloom of Puritanism and the dire warnings of Michael Wigglesworth’s Day of Doom, Jacob was convinced that he was unsaved and a sinner in the eyes of God. These doubts grew and became more specific as he got older.50
Before he entered Harvard, two incidents had crystallized his sense of crisis and persuaded him that he was going to hell. The first occurred at about age sixteen, when he left Leicester for the fifteen-mile ride to Killingly to see his mother. The trip entailed passing through a “gloomy wilderness” containing few houses. Jacob was unfamiliar with the trail, and he attempted to navigate it as night and rain arrived. When the path forked, Jacob took the wrong turn. Engulfed in blackness, Jacob was unable to find his way back. “What to do I knew not,” he recalled. “Sometimes I moved onward, sometimes [I] stopped and considered; but generally kept moving on.” Pelted by rain, tired and hungry, Jacob became scared and “my conscience fell upon me.” His feelings of sinfulness resurfaced, and he prayed to God for forgiveness. “I confessed my sins and omissions,” and he vowed to change if God “would deliver me out of that wilderness.” Jacob also made his promise as specific as possible: “I would, within one week after I got home from that journey, begin to pray in secret evening and morning, and continue to do so for a fortnight.”51
Appropriately bucked up, Jacob gave his horse a kick and pressed on in the rain. Almost immediately, he spied a light ahead and moved toward it. It was a house occupied by a family, who provided him with directions. They also agreed to allow a boy to help guide Jacob out of the woods. Thanks to the boy’s help and the moon’s emergence from behind storm clouds, Jacob finally made it to his mother’s house shortly after midnight.
Jacob felt great relief at his deliverance, but he reneged on his promise to begin praying. With each passing day “I was less and less affected with a sense of my being lost in the woods, and the promise I had made.” He returned to Malden feeling “careless, stupid, and insensible of my guilt.” Jacob, of course, felt great guilt at his failure to keep his word to God. His guilt was so intense, it led to the second incident: on the night before he was supposed to begin praying regularly, he suffered a violent nightmare that left him even more afraid for his soul.52
It was the most Calvinistic of dreams. Jacob was in a large room at twilight with a group of elderly men and young boys about six years old. The room contained an open door with two pairs of stairs—the one on the right led upward, presumably to heaven; the one on the left downward, to hell. One by one the children were led to the door, where they learned their fates. In the morning, they returned unharmed, but by taking that fateful step through the door they discovered where they would spend eternity.
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
