Isabel’s Testimony: The Power of Faith

In my March 25, 2021, blog post, I wrote briefly about Rachel (Clark) Seat, my great-grandmother. This article is about Great-grandma Rachel’s oldest daughter Isabel (also spelled Isabelle) and her strong faith expressed shortly before her death 132 years ago tomorrow, on February 13, 1890.

Introducing Isabel

Isabel Tempe Seat was born in rural Worth County, Missouri, on September 9, 1871. She was the first child of William and Rachel Seat, who had also been born in the same township.

When she was still 17, Isabel married Jake Williams, and before long they were expecting their first child. Leslie was born on January 25, 1890. But before three weeks had passed, his 18-year-old mother Isabel died of complications from childbirth.

Three days before her untimely death, a sizeable number of relatives and friends gathered around her deathbed where she repeatedly urged people to become Christian believers so that they would later be reunited in Heaven.

Isabel’s Testimony

A document titled “The Last Words of Isabel Williams” has been preserved in the Seat family. I don’t know who initially put those words in writing, but the first copy I saw was one made by Mary Rachel Seat, Isabel’s niece and my “wonderful aunt,” as I called her in my 6/25/16 blog post.

The first line of that document says, “Isabel Williams, while on her deathbed and there being several present, asked them to talk.” But actually, Isabel wanted to talk to them, and most of the document (which can be read in full here) are the words of testimony and entreaty given to many people.

I don’t know how so many people could have been present under one roof—and probably they were not all there at the same time—but Isabel called for them to come one or two at a time for her to speak to them from the depths of her Christian faith.

Her most often spoken words were, “Will you promise me you will meet me in Heaven?”—or words to that effect. And, evidently, many did make such a promise, including many who had not been Christian believers, or active Christians, at the time they heard Isabel’s question and plea to them.

Several of the people didn’t live close to New Hope Church where Isabel and her close family were members, so not long after her death, a new church was started—and given the name Isabelle Church. (It was about 3½ miles northeast of New Hope, a fair distance when traveling by horse and buggy.)

The Isabelle church building has been torn down in that sparsely populated part of northwest Missouri, but the cemetery is still there—and just a year and a half ago, J.W. Harding, a man I knew fairly well, was buried there. The picture below (taken several years ago) is of the entrance to the cemetery.  

Isabel’s Faith

Isabel’s belief/certainty about going to Heaven after death was not at all unusual for someone living when and where she did—although perhaps it was a bit unusual for someone only 18 years old to express that faith so strongly.

Isabel’s parents lived within easy walking distance from New Hope Church after it was constructed in 1877-78, and she, no doubt, attended services every Sunday morning and evening with her mother during her girlhood years. (Isabel’s father, sadly, died in 1880 on Isabel’s ninth birthday.)

My previous blog post was partly about common sense, and I asserted that “common sense” can be called that only for those who see the world through the same, or quite similar, “conceptual lenses.”

The conceptual lenses of most people in Worth County, Mo., in 1890 were those fashioned by evangelical Protestant Christians. While certainly everyone was not a professing or active Christian believer, Christianity as understood by Baptists and other evangelicals was the dominant culture.

Certainly, there were many things about Christianity that Isabel still needed to learn—but who can say that her faith that she expressed so powerfully was wrong?

Isabel’s faith was, without doubt, highly comforting to her. But who can say, and on what basis, that her powerful Christian faith wasn’t also basically true?