Book Review by Ruth

Title: Elizabeth Prentiss: ‘More Love to Thee’
Author: Sharon James
Publisher: The Banner of Truth Trust
Pages: 232 (including extensive end notes)
Purchased: CVBBS; $16.99
Begun: October 14, 2006
Finished: February 15, 2007
Rating: *****

Submitting my will to God’s purposes brings God’s peace even in the most anguishing of circumstances. That is the theme that clearly resonates throughout Sharon James’ biography of Christian author and minister’s wife Elizabeth Prentiss (1818-78). Prentiss is perhaps best known for her hymn “More Love to Thee” and for her 19th-century Christian novel Stepping Heavenward. James highlights the fact of how Prentiss’s own personal suffering gave her the tools and the desire to minister to others in a way that opened wide many doors of ministry.

Elizabeth Prentiss came from a long line of Congregational ministers. Her own father, Edward Payson, was widely known as a gifted pastor and preacher, and it was as his daughter that Prentiss received her first education in the school of suffering. Payson died just before Prentiss’s 9th birthday, and James describes his last year of life as “harrowing” for the whole family. No doubt, Payson’s demonstration of a will fully submitted to God’s plan for him and his family served as a defining influence over Prentiss’s own thinking, even though she only knew him as a young girl. “She often recalled [her father’s] transparent godliness,” James says. “She never forgot the time when, as a young child, she rushed into a room and found him flat on his face on the floor, totally absorbed in prayer.”

During her teen and young adult years, Prentiss was given to frequent mood swings that extended even into the spiritual realm. “She would throw herself furiously into whatever project was occupying her at the time. This would be followed by total exhaustion and corresponding depression.”

While some readers (like me!) may be more naturally bent towards criticizing such a personality, I think we can all--male or female--identify to some degree with such emotional pulls. And it may be that it was this same tendency to great passions that actually enabled Prentiss to experience a far greater affection for Christ than many will ever know. And to the extent that Prentiss was (and still has been) able to encourage others in their love for Christ, our Creator used even what we may consider a weakness of character to draw glory to Himself. James points out that though her actual conversion experience was somewhat clouded by these highs and lows of tension between her love for Christ and for the world, Prentiss finally felt the matter to be settled in 1840 (at age 22), and her salvation in Christ was duly proven many times over as God began to mature her and to use her as an agent of change in the lives of others as well. In a letter to her cousin dated September 17, 1840, Prentiss wrote: “I have felt that if, in the course of my life, I should be the means of leading one soul to the Saviour, it would be worth staying in this world for no matter how many years.”

Prentiss’s next degrees in the school of suffering were heaped one upon another over a relatively short period of time during her early years as a wife and mother. In 1848, shortly after the birth of her second child Eddy, Prentiss’s mother died following a short illness. Prentiss was grieved that the seriousness of her mother’s condition had been hidden from her and that she was never able to say goodbye. Her grief over her mother and the stress from her baby boy’s chronic colic sapped Prentiss of what little strength she had following her pregnancy and permanently altered her sleep patterns such that she suffered from insomnia for the rest of her life. On top of those circumstances she found herself frustrated in her pursuit of Christ, trying to find comfort in her husband’s assurance that God understood her struggles and didn’t expect her to have the same devotional life that she had experienced in her days of teaching before she was married. Baby Eddy’s health grew worse over the next few years, even as Elizabeth's husband George began his ministry as pastor of Mercer Street Presbyterian Church in New York City. In January of 1852, when she was 6 months pregnant with her third child, Eddy died at only 3 years of age.

Prentiss’s immense grief further complicated her physical weakness, and she found herself on the brink of death immediately following the delivery of a little girl, Bessie. Her illness caused her to be bedridden during these, her baby’s early days of life. The one time she was able to hold baby Bessie, Elizabeth became convinced that Bessie was seriously ill. Indeed, Bessie did die at only 1-month-old, with Elizabeth in the next room agonizing and yet unable to do anything for her infant daughter. She found herself utterly distraught: “Empty hands, empty hands, a worn-out exhausted body, and unutterable longings to flee from a world that has had for me so many sharp experiences. God help me, my baby, my baby!” A fuller account of these agonizing experiences can be found in Life and Letters (by George Prentiss), but James does an excellent job of framing Elizabeth’s faith-filled spirit even in these agonizing days.

It was on the background of these sorrows that Elizabeth began to discover her pen, often putting her prayers into verse.

One child and two green graves are mine
This is God’s gift to me;
A bleeding, fainting, broken heart --
This is my gift to Thee.

A continual theme in Prentiss's writings was how “God employs suffering to bring his people closer to Himself, [for] suffering breaks the idolatrous love of the creature” (James). Her writings are not without their literary flaws. James graciously, yet truthfully, points out some of the flaws in her works (some having to do with trite plots and others with doctrinal misunderstanding). But James also demonstrates how Prentiss's main motivations in writing were always either expression of her own devotion to Christ for personal use only (such as was originally the case with the hymn “More Love to Thee”) or a desire to minister to others who might be experiencing trials similar to those through which she had herself had been sanctified. Prentiss's fictional writings were always didactic in nature.

As a pastor’s wife, it was this immense desire to minister to others that drove Prentiss. She particularly reveled in her calling to minister through visits to the sick or bereaved (her husband typically preached at least one funeral sermon every week). She also sought to minister through the writing of letters (in addition to her books and short stories) to encourage others in their spiritual walks. Her own joy in and longing for the ministry of a pastor’s wife was a great encouragement to me personally. Indeed, one of Prentiss's greatest trials in the later years of her life was submitting to God’s calling of her husband away from the pulpit and to the seminary desk. Yet even in this, Prentiss was constantly seeking to submit her will to that of her Heavenly Father’s. She wrote to a friend:

"Where He is, I want to be; where He bids me go, I want to go, and to go in courage and faith. ... I feel a spasm of pain at my heart (I don't suppose we are expected to cease to be human beings or to lose our sensibilities), but if my Lord and Master will go with me, and keeps on making me more and more like Himself, I can be happy anywhere and under any conditions, or be made content not to be happy."

In this biography, Sharon James plainly and engagingly pictures Elizabeth Prentiss as a humble, flawed individual who yet enjoyed fuller and fuller experiences with her Lord as He placed her in the fire of affliction and then gave her the ability to joyfully submit to His plan for her life. I am confident that anyone who reads this book will be encouraged by the emphasis of sanctification through submission and suffering. Elizabeth Prentiss framed it well:

“God never places us in any position in which we can not grow. ... God delights to try our faith by the conditions in which He places us. A plant set in the shade shows where its heart is by turning towards the sun, even when unable to reach it.”