How to console someone whose daughter marries a rake

In the eighteenth century, daughters sometimes have an embarrassing habit of marrying someone of whom their family disapproves. They may even go so far as to marry a rake. By "rake," I do not mean that they tried to marry a field implement. Admittedly, the emperor Caligula may have married his horse Incitatus, and a woman may have married a beloved dolphin in 2005, but eighteenth century daughters tended to stick to their own species and to things living. A "rake" is the term for an immoral, dissipated man.

So anyway, how do you console someone whose daughter marries a rake? Well, I was reading Samuel Richardson's Familiar Letters. Samuel Richardson was also the writer of Pamela and Clarissa, not that that probably carries a lot of cultural significance to you, but there you are. Anyway, Familiar Letters has a rather long title that gives you an idea what it is supposed to be: Letters Written TO and FOR PARTICULAR FRIENDS, On the most IMPORTANT OCCASIONS, Directing not only the Requisite STYLE and FORMS to be Observed in WRITING Familiar Letters; but How to Think and Act Justly and Prudently, in the COMMON CONCERNS of HUMAN LIFE. As you might guess from the caps, there is some serious instruction going on. The letters are going to teach you both how to deal with certain situations and how to write or counsel people going through those situations.

So what do you do if your favorite daughter married a rake? Well, the first thing you should do is chastise him if he has ever prayed for his daughter's health. The dad's brother writes to him, "I would not afflict you [over the marriage], my dear brother, instead of pouring balm on the wounds of your mind. But you will remember [here is the part where I'm going to do just what I said I wouldn't do], that it is scarce two years ago, when you were no less anxiously disturbed on occasion of the violent fever which then endangered [your daughter's] life. What vows did you not put up for her recovery!...And how do you know, that then she was only restored at your incessant and importunate prayers; but that otherwise, God Almighty, knowing what was best for you both, would have taken her away from this heavy evil? This should teach us resignation to the divine will ..." So, now that the daughter's marrying, the uncle reminds his brother that it's really partially his own fault for praying that she wouldn't die when she had a fever two years earlier. Lest we should think that this uncle was an unconscionable jerk, Familiar Letters includes the father's response, "very affecting [are] your just reproofs of my misplac'd fondness for a creature so unworthy. Resignation to the divine will, a noble, a needful lesson!"

Lest we miss the point, the next "familiar letter" is "to a father, on the loss of his son." Even though the son who died was young, he was pretty godly, so far as wee tykes go. The father's friend writes, "I will not, to alleviate your grief, remind you of a topic, which is, however, [what I am about to do anyway, even though I told you I wouldn't,] no less important, than too frequently the case, that he might not always have been so hopeful; but might, as he grew up, many ways have administered bitterness to you. But I think it surpasses all other comforts, even those you hoped for from him, that he is taken away at an age, in which God's mercy renders his eternal happiness unquestionably certain ..." So, if someone's child dies, you tell him/her that the kid would probably have turned out really bad anyway and administered some heavy-duty bitterness, so thank God for killing him early before he could be sent to hell!

I'm oversimplifying things, of course. And I don't doubt that this may have been very comforting to some Christian parents whose children have died. There may also be a place for comforting people by hypothesizing what "could" have happened, that God has a purpose, that you don't have to be concerned about their future salvation. But call me cynical, call me Calvinist, I don't see how it is comforting to envision a deity whose only manner of bringing some potential reprobates into heaven is by killing them off when they are young. If forced to choose, I'd prefer thinking, "My kid was such an Enoch-in-training that God wanted him for His heavenly courts right now," rather than thinking, "My kid was about to begin his reprobate-in-training status, so God struck him dead now. Yay God!" There is much about Arminianism or Molinism that is attractive--it's easier (albeit in my mind, incorrect) to explain the problem of evil by saying that it results from God's granting humanity the "free will" to choose evil. But I find the theodicy that results in these "familiar letters" to be rather disturbing: we justify God in His decree/allowance of a child's death by hinting that the child's exercise of free will would eventually have led to naughty actions of hellfire proportions. God conducted a sort of divine "preemptive strike," if you will. (While Calvinists believe that God conducts a "preemptive strike," it is God putting to death the "old man" ... not the "new kid!" God wouldn't need to send a fever and kill a daughter to prevent her from running off with a rake; He could just change the heart.)

It is interesting to compare Calvinism with the type of Arminian theodicy I am describing here, which I shall call "Insane eighteenth century Arminianism," to distinguish it from modern Arminianism, which tends not to encourage you to rebuke people who have prayed for God to heal their children's illnesses. Calvinists are often represented as being rather suspicious of the human heart--we have copyrighted the phrase "total depravity," after all. And since Calvinism denies that you can "lose" your salvation, it follows that someone who dies in rebellion against God never had a "real" (or at least effectual) salvific experience, even if earlier in his/her life the person seemed to have a sincere conversion, praised God, etc. However, the Arminian theodicy I am describing here might lend itself toward a greater suspicion of an individual's heart, since it construes death as a possible sign that the person's heart was about to go south (perhaps through internal corruption or external temptations), even where there is no evidence of a potential lapse. While Calvinists might be suspicious of a past religious experience on the basis of future reprobate living (the person was never saved), Familiar Letters suggests we suspect future reprobate living on the basis that the person has died, despite a promising life (the child might not have stayed "saved"). While Familar Letters never insists that this hypothesized future depravity is the cause of death, the text does insist we need to keep it in mind as a strong possibility.