They Found a Book in a Wall, You Won’t Believe What Happens Next
The secret behind the history of quiet times will make your quiet times more effective than ever.
One of the enduring mysteries of American Evangelicalism is the question of the source of Quiet Times: A Handbook, by James Hoeg. Where did Hoeg get the material for his momentous book? Almost since its introduction in 1867, people have questioned Hoeg’s exclusive authorship and have speculated about the true origin of Quiet Times. Thanks to a 20-year-old television show, it is a mystery no more.
As any Quiet Times scholar would tell you, James Hoeg was a barely educated Union Army chaplain, had never published anything until Quiet Times: A Handbook, and never published again (he died only 2 years after Quiet Times was first published). Most deny that Hoeg could have written Quiet Times, or any book. Then there is Hoeg’s own testimony. The book, and the cultural movement it spawned, had already gained a significant degree of momentum during his brief life as its author. And due to its growing fame, Hoeg had been interviewed by several religious monthlies on the subject. In none of these extant interviews does Hoeg claim exclusive authorship. Rather, he is on record saying, “it came to me,” and “this important word was delivered to me in an extraordinary time.” But apart from once naming the “extraordinary time” as the battle of Shiloh, he revealed nothing more about how or where it may have come from. All signs point to Quiet Times having a different author, yet for 150 years it is Hoeg’s name alone upon one of the most significant books in American Church history. How could this be? This mystery seemed destined to remain unsolved until a fascinating discovery was made during a 1999 taping of HGTV’s If These Walls Could Talk.
This history-tinged house design program showcased discoveries made during remodeling projects of old homes. When a demolished wall or attic space revealed treasures like old newspapers, antique tobacco tins, or empty whiskey bottles, the production team would track down enough history on the items to fill out an episode. It was a dismantled wall in a 180 year-old New England home that blew the Quiet Times mystery wide open. Used as a shim, a book from 1788 called Guilt Times: A Handbook by Ebenezer Cartwright, was found wedged between two rough-hewn beams. The episode followed the discovered book’s trail to the rarely visited Trembling Saints of Zion Museum and Gift Shop in nearby Barnstead, New Hampshire. There, in a place of prominence, they found a portrait of a severe Ebenezer Cartwright and, ironically, another copy of Guilt Times: A Handbook on display for anyone to see. No one made a connection to Hoeg’s Quiet Times at the time, but after a recent syndicated rerun of the episode, an astute viewer and Princeton University graduate student visited the museum of the long-defunct and always obscure sect of the Trembling Saints of Mount Zion on the hunch that Guilt Times and Quiet Times might be related. Was Guilt Times, in fact, the long-lost source for James Hoeg’s book? Had the mystery had finally been solved?
In short, yes.
Just how obvious was it that Guilt Times: A Handbook was the source material used for Quiet Times? Except for exchanging “quiet” for “guilt” and a few updates to already archaic words, Quiet Times: A Handbook is otherwise is an exact match to Cartwright’s book.
Who were these Trembling Saints of Zion now happily understood to be the fountainhead of one of our best traditions? The Saints were a small, late 18th century, New England religious sect founded and led by the aforementioned circuit preacher, Ebenezer Cartwright. According to the scant records of the time, mostly found in the very museum and gift shop featured in the show, the Trembling Saints were an off-shoot of an off-shoot of the Shakers. They share many characteristics to the Shakers and other shaking sects in both the new and old world and are sometimes closely linked in theology and practice to the Quivering Brethren of rural England. The Trembling Saints congregations received all their preaching and instruction from Cartwright, their founder, and as such, unlike their enduring museum and gift shop, their congregations did not survive much past his death.
Cartwright was a dynamic preacher according to surviving letters of church members. But a local newspaper sheds additional light on his dynamism in a report from one to the Trembling Saints’ public meetings. It reads, “Brother Cartwright shook with a frightening rage, much of his sermon was composed of unintelligible growls. All but the faithful fled in fear. It is no wonder Cartwright’s meetings do not attract and keep the crowds many of his contemporaries. Who can stand before a force as he?” In addition to his preaching, Cartwright was a prolific writer. In fact, the handful of burgeoning Trembling Saints scholars that have studied Cartwright in depth have each commented how Cartwright wrote so much and so recklessly that he often wrote tracts he had already essentially published under different titles (and sometimes with conflicting conclusions).
Most of his work was self-published on a large common press he kept in his drawing room. His publishings saw minor success within the greater family of epileptic churches. Extant copies of his works include, Dig Thee a Hole, and Another Hole within, ‘Tis a Worthy Home for Thee, and A Smile Beckons the Prideful Devil as a Brother’s Greeting, and Consider This Filth, This Bug, This Dung, If Only Ye Could Attain Such Cleanliness as These. And though publishers are now racing to cobble these gems into a Quiet Times II for an eager public, none of them had a fraction of the audience nor the influence that Guilt Times, A Handbook eventually attained. This beloved masterpiece alone found its way out of rural New England an into the wide world. Whether is was from the regional popularity of his home-printed copies, funding from a wealthy congregant, or some unimagined reason, Guilt Times somehow grabbed the attention of a small New York publishing house who printed a short run of gift editions in 1788. This edition was undoubtedly well-received within the proverbial choir of the quickly diminishing Trembling Saints, as much for its practical guidance in fostering a godly spirit as for its lovely gold-scripted cover. One can imagine it being an oft-passed-on heirloom.
The main thesis of Guilt Times, as anyone familiar with Quiet Times knows, is Cartwright’s contention that we sinners ought to make a special time each day for working up the guilt and self-loathing proper for feeling righteous. Each day is to be wholly spent with this guilt-ridden perspective influencing the things we say and do and feel about ourselves and others. This, as the guide book explains, is referred to as “conducting a daily guilt time.”
The particular brilliance of Guilt Times/Quiet Times, for which we can now properly credit Cartwright, is the two-step strategy for achieving a guilt-rich orientation. First, there are the guilt time lessons for interpreting the Scriptures in such a way as to feel the “well-portioned draught of guilt elixir for our wretchedness and filthiness, that we may know it deeply, and thus knowing it, attain righteousness, and by deeply knowing it, be deeply righteous.” Every passage, when read properly, can be seen as demonstrating the utter destitution of man in every way, which thereby elicits the true joy found only through feeling that destitution to its fullest. Then Cartwright masterfully doubles-down by presenting the guilt time practice itself as an additional measure in the standard for righteousness. And not only is the neglect of such activity to be “felt with deplorable gravity,” but even the dutiful performance of the guilt time is “in all ways marred and yet another log to add to the purifying fire of guilt.” In Appendix B, Cartwright includes a prayer of repentance and deep self-abasement for the neglect of the daily guilt time. He goes as far as to recommend that even “those who believe themselves true and faithful in their duty of fostering righteous guilt in devoted guilt time meditations ought, also, nay especially, to daily pray the Prayer of Repentance for Neglect.” Adding, “that we should never believe ourselves to feel guilty enough and ought to repent without ceasing for our failures to feel guilty even of our guilt. This double portion will bring us to true faithfulness.” Amen.
The experts largely agree that this theological gem made its way to the lines of the Civil War and into the hands of James Hoeg via a New England enlisted man. Perhaps a young New Hampshire man, almost 80 years after Guilt Times‘ publication, took a long-passed-down copy of Guilt Times, A Handbook with him as he went off to join the Union Army at the onset of the Civil War. One can imagine the teenager taking the book from his father’s desk in a moment of fear-driven spiritual dread. We can picture him crouched at the front, rattled by what the day would bring, reading by the light of a stump of candle such passages as, “How bright the sky is to the near-blind worm. May I be thus. Yet my eyes deserve not even such a glimpse. Worm deeper, dear soul.” Alas, we also see the poor young man being shot and killed in the Battle of Shiloh and the book then passing into the hands of James Hoeg, the Baptist chaplain long listed as the author. And in God’s providence, the destiny of the book and the very landscape of religion in America was changed forever.
It is clear from the wording in the chaplain’s introduction to Quiet Times: A Handbook that Hoeg believed the content was divinely brought to him for the reason of introducing (or re-introducing) it to the world. What is not entirely clear is how the book got its new title. But Princeton University’s report on the discovery speculates, based on the original covers discovered through the HGTV program, that Chaplain James Hoeg could have easily misread the gold colonial script. Photos shared of the covers confirm how one could readily mistake the stylized “G” for a “Q” and the short loop of the “l” for an “e”. What is much harder to explain is how Hoeg mistook the print of “guilt times” for “quiet times” on the inside pages. While the interior page type-setting is difficult for modern readers to navigate, it is not overly-difficult. One prominent theory places the blame fully upon Hoeg’s nigh illiteracy. But this does not explain how he then did not also shift the many many times “guilt” was not used in conjunction with “times.” A stronger theory is that Hoeg purposely made those particular changes. He rightly saw little if any substantive difference between the guilt times and quiet times and made the change to add a nuance more suitable to his post-war audience.
Accident or not, Hoeg’s efforts to bring Cartwright’s Guilt Times into the mainstream paid off in big ways. The re-named Quiet Times became a huge success. Soon people all over the land, eager to find spiritual order and peace after the bloodiest time in the nation’s history, began to gravitate to Hoeg’s (now known to be Cartwright’s) ideal of a daily ritual of guilt-finding and self-loathing as the god-ordained path to righteousness.
It has been pointed out that this discovery does not change or add to what we already have in Quiet Times: A Handbook – the implied question being, “what difference does it make for us to now know the original source?” The excitement about the new Cartwright material soon to be available can’t be denied, but as for Quiet Times itself, surely some guilt can be gained from contemplating our neglect of the original author and the tradition he belonged to, inadvertent as that neglect may have been. And surely knowing this hero of the faith inspires us, and perhaps even fosters a pride in our spiritual ancestry, of which we can also feel properly guilty. And then there is also the testimony in this discovery to the providence of God. Some point to the great Martin Luther and the key moments of his life as the most providential moment in history. There and then, they say, is when the entirety of Christianity hung in the balance. Some will point to the Pilgrims’ journey in the Mayflower seeking religious freedom as the moment that made the biggest difference in the advancement of the Kingdom of God. Those truly are important times when the hand of God can be clearly seen. But surely the moment when the particular labors of Ebenezer Cartwright and his Guilt Times, lost to history then found by James Hoeg in a dead soldier’s coat, must also be celebrated as among the most providential.
A century later, and it is hard to find a corner of the American church that does not owe a great debt to Quiet Times, and thereby a debt to Ebenezer Cartwright. In fact, one cannot help but wonder how Christians were truly Christian before this time? What would our world be like without Christians working up their guilt doing their daily quiet times (or not doing them and feeling guilty about it)? It is hard to imagine that world. Did anyone before Quiet Times even know how to properly feel bad at all?.. or feel good about feeling bad?.. or bad about feeling good? Or most importantly, did anyone know how to feel good about feeling bad about feeling good?
George Edema, M.Div, is a minister in the Presbyterian Church in America. His short story, “Sir Galahad and the Golden Meadow,” can be found in the collection The Lost Tales of Sir Galahad from Rabbit Room Press (2022).