David Ramsay and Martha Laurence Ramsay: Memoirs of the life of Martha Laurens Ramsay

On June 7th, 1811, when Martha Laurens Ramsay was ill in bed, she told her husband Dr. David Ramsay a secret that she kept her diary, letters and other private papers in a drawer secretly for a long time. Predicting she would leave the world soon, she requested her husband to find them and keep them “as a common book of the family or divide among its members” after her death. Then three days later, Martha was dead. When Ramsay found and carefully read them, he realized that “they exhibited an example which teaches more compendiously and forcibly than precept, the value of piety, and the comfort of submission to the will of God.” Shortly after her wife’s death, he sent them to their intimate friends Rev. Drs. Hollinshead and Keith and consulted them whether he should publish them or not. In replying to Ramsay, Dr. Hollinshead believed that “the publication of these devout exercises of her heart, with a sketch of her life, might contribute much to the establishment and comfort of many pious exercised Christians, who walk in fear and darkness.” After reading them, Dr. Keith told Dr. Ramsay that they irresistibly led him to “wish and earnestly to desire that they may be permitted to appear in print.” They both strongly recommended the publication that Ramsay finally made his decision to publish them. In the same year, after editing them, they were published in a book entitled Memoirs of the life of Martha Laurens Ramsay in Charles Town.

Although Ramsay agreed with Drs. Keith and Hollinshead, he read them rather differently from them. Ramsay suggested the rational piety rather than Christianity was a good lens for readers to enter into her wife’s inner mind. He pointed out, “God grant that their publication may be the means of exciting in others, and especially the connections and friends of their author, the same lively sentiments of fervent rational piety with which she was animated.” Unlike him, Hollinshead believed that “her example, while she abode with us, was a living lecture on the importance of the human character in every part it has to act upon the stage of life, and eminently recommended the maxims and habits of our holy religion, as worthy of all acception.” Dr. Keith shared the same view as Dr. Hollinshead and argued that “through the succeeding course of her life, she exhibited in the view of all attentive and judicious observers, a bright and attractive example of the temper and conduct of a real Christian.” In their opinions, Martha was a typical representative of pious Christians and her writings should be read from the perspective of Christianity. Ramsay was also a Christian, he didn’t deny the significance of Christianity played in her wife’s mind, but he read them in another way. Dr. Hollinshead and Keith were good friends to Martha and Ramsay, but why did they read them differently from Ramsay? The main reason was because both Ramsay and Martha were enlightened Christians, while Drs. Hollinshead and Keith were merely fetish Christians.