The Journals of Martha E. McMillan

Observance of the Sabbath 1888 Tabitha DeHart (2105) It is clear from Martha’s journals that her faith was a large part of her life. This is perhaps most clear in how she documents the Sabbath each week in her journal. Starting in or before 1868, Martha recorded the text of the sermon each week, often with a few of her own brief reflections on the text. Martha also documents the weekly routines that she and her children kept on the Sabbath—sermon, Sabbath school, Young folks prayer meeting, and catechism reciting. Martha seems to have been a (though not necessarily the ) spiritual leader in her home, and the way that Martha led her family in observing the Sabbath highlights how much Martha prized her own faith and how committed she was to cultivating that same faith in her family. During Martha’s lifetime, a mother was expected to play a large role in cultivating her children’s moral natures: “The greatest responsibility that the middle-class matron had was to her home life—to be, in fact, ‘the angel of the house’” (Graham 156). According to another source, “interest in domestic piety increased between 1830 and 1870 [as] the traditional Calvinist notion of sin and salvation [was overturned] by advancing the spiritual dimensions of the home’ (qtd in Graham 156). Of course, the Sabbath was an important part of cultivating home religion. In her House and Home Papers, Harriet Beecher Stowe, speaking through the voice of her pseudonym “ Christopher Crowfield,” states, “I should define the Sabbath as a divine and fatherly gift to man,—a day expressly set apart for the cultivation of his moral nature” (14). Stowe goes on to say that “accordingly, whatever ways and practices interfere with the purpose of the Sabbath as a 88