Customs and Fashions in Old New England

								

is recorded that the ice had to be broken in the christening bowl. In
villages and towns where the houses were all clustered around the
meeting-house the baby Puritans did not have to be carried far to be
baptized; but in country parishes, where the dwelling-houses were widely
scattered, it might be truthfully recorded of many a chrisom-child:
"Died of being baptized." One cruel parson believed in and practised
infant immersion, fairly a Puritan torture, until his own child nearly
lost its life thereby.
Dressed in fine linen and wrapped in a hand-woven christening blanket--a
"bearing-cloth"--the unfortunate young Puritan was carried to church in
the arms of the midwife, who was a person of vast importance and dignity
as well as of service in early colonial days, when families of from
fifteen to twenty children were quite the common quota. At the altar the
baby was placed in his proud father's arms, and received his first cold
and disheartening reception into the Puritan Church. In the pages of
Judge Samuel Sewall's diary, to which alone we can turn for any definite
or extended contemporary picture of colonial life in Puritan New
England, as for knowledge of England of that date we turn to the diaries
of Evelyn and Pepys, we find abundant proof that inclemency of weather
was little heeded when religious customs and duties were in question.
On January 22d, 1694, Judge Sewall thus records:



     "A very extraordinary Storm by reason of the falling and driving of

     the Snow. Few women could get to Meeting. A child named Alexander

     was baptized in the afternoon."
He does not record Alexander's death in sequence. He writes thus of the
baptism of a four days' old child of his own on February 6th, 1656:



     "Between 3 & 4 P.M. Mr. Willard baptizeth my Son whom I named

     Stephen. Day was louring after the storm but not freezing. Child

     shrank at the water but Cry'd not. His brother Sam shew'd the

     Midwife who carried him the way to the Pew. I held him up."
And still again on April 8th, 1677, of another of his children when but
six days old:



     "Sabbath day, rainy and stormy in the morning but in the afternoon

     fair and sunshine though with a Blustering Wind. So Eliz. Weeden

     the Midwife brought the Infant to the Third Church when Sermon was

     about half done in the Afternoon."
Poor little Stephen and Hull and Joseph, shrinking away from the icy
water, but too benumbed to cry! Small wonder that they quickly yielded
up their souls after the short struggle for life so gloomily and so
coldly begun. Of Judge Sewall's fourteen children but three survived
him, a majority dying in infancy; and of fifteen children of his friend
Cotton Mather but two survived their father.
This religious ordeal was but the initial step in the rigid system of
selection enforced by every detail of the manner of life in early New
England. The mortality among infants was appallingly large; and the