On October 11, 1754, Esther Edwards Burr (1732-1758), the third of Jonathan and Sarah Pierpont Edwards’s eleven children, writing in her diary, called her best friend, Sarah Prince (1728-1771), “the Sister of my heart.” The special spiritual friendship between these two godly young women is largely recorded in Esther’s Journal, written between 1754 and 1757. According to Roger Lundin and Mark Noll, this Journal “shows us a very busy young mother who yet took time, amid her pressing duties, to reflect on her relationship with God. The life that shines forth in the diary is one of sincere religion, hard work, family joys and sorrows, nearly overwhelming domestic responsibility, and faithful friendship.”¹ This faithful friendship is the focus of this brief article.

Esther was accustomed to change. When her father was discharged from his congregation in Northampton largely over the issue of the Lord’s Supper, her family was forced to leave Northampton for Stockbridge in 1752, shortly before she married.² In 1752, at the age of twenty, Esther married Aaron Burr, Sr., (1716-1757) a pious Presbyterian pastor and the second President of the College of New Jersey, Newark, New Jersey.³ In 1756, the same year Esther bore her second and last child, Aaron Jr., who would later become the second Vice-President of the United States, the College moved to Princeton and became known as Princeton University.⁴ Esther would then eventually have to move from Newark to Princeton, where she died in 1758 at the age of only twenty-six.

While living in Newark, Esther, although happily married to Aaron, often experienced homesickness caused by her separation from her loved ones and friends. With her husband’s ministerial and administrative work load in the church and school, she spent much of her day alone at home. Finding new friends was difficult for her, especially since the “wives of her husband’s associates tended to be considerably older than she.”⁵ Thus it was her old-time friendship with Sarah Prince, although at a long distance, that became a constant source of comfort. Two years after marriage, while she and her husband were still in Newark, Esther wrote to Sarah Prince in Boston:

It is a great comfort to me when my friends are absent from me that I have ’em some where in the World, and you my dear for one, not of the least, for I esteem you one of the best, and in some respects nerer than any Sister I have. I have not one Sister I can write so freely to as to you the Sister of my heart. There is a friend nerer than a Brother, sertainly... That old proverb is not a true one, out of sight out of mind.⁶

Esther and Sarah had been acquainted with each other from early girlhood. In fact, Sarah’s father, Thomas Prince, a Congregational pastor in Boston, was a friend of Jonathan Edwards and a leading supporter of the Great Awakening.⁷ It is important to note that the Evangelical Revival of the 1730s and 1740s coincided with Esther’s formative years, and, by the time she became a teenager, she experienced gospel conversion under the ministry of her father.⁸ As she grew up and matured spiritually, her piety became more and more evident. One important area of her life in which this piety can be clearly noticed is in her friendship with Sarah which took root early in their childhood.

Esther’s move to Newark made regular communication with Sarah in Boston a challenge. However, in 1754, Sarah went to visit Esther. What a joyous time this was for the two! It “was probably at this time that they decided to maintain their intimacy by keeping journals for one another.”⁹ 

Their main purpose for exchanging journals was to keep an eye on each other’s spiritual life in Christ. They did not use these journals to gossip or talk about trivia, but to talk about religion. As Esther says in her letter to Sarah written on April 20, 1755:

I feel thankfull that you are so blessed Tis not fit that I should have everything agreeable. I have already a Thousand, Thousand, more mercies than I make a good improvement of – I esteem religious Conversation one of the best helps to keep up religion in the soul, excepting secret devotion, I don’t know but the very best – then what a lamentable thing that ’tis so neglected by God’s own Children.¹⁰

In this sense, Esther and Sarah were like the Puritans who regarded journaling as a means of sanctifying grace. And since their journaling was done in the context of their friendship, they no doubt also viewed their friendship as a means to grow in holiness.

Esther and Sarah both took their friendship very seriously. In her letter to Sarah dated October 5, 1754, Esther explains that to break a vow in friendship is sin:

I call it sin, for I look on the ties of Friendship as sacred and I am of your mind, that it aught to be (a) matter of Solemn Prayer to God (where there is a friendship contracted) that it may be preserved. And it is what I have done and shall continue to do.¹¹ 

This demonstrates Esther’s high and holy view of friendship. Such a view of friendship is rarely seen today even among Christian friends. In this present generation, few are like Esther and Sarah who considered friendship sacred. Certainly, the friendship of the two was not without trials, but by God’s grace, the two remained loyal friends until death. This is faithful friendship!

Let us ask ourselves: Are we faithful friends? What kind of friends do we have? Do our friends help us become more like Christ? And finally, how do we view our friendship with others? Do we view friendship as a means to grow in holiness?