Customs and Fashions in Old New England

								

about divine mysteries." It is a truly comic anticlimax in her father's
stilted letters to her to have him end his pious instructions with this
advice: "And as you love me do not eat green apples."
Of the demeanor of children to their parents naught can be said but
praise. Respectful in word and deed, every letter, every record shows
that the young Puritans truly honored their fathers and mothers. It were
well for them to thus obey the law of God, for by the law of the land
high-handed disobedience of parents was punishable by death. I do not
find this penalty ever was paid, as it was under the sway of grim
Calvin, a fact which redounds to the credit both of justice and youth in
colonial days.
It was not strange that Judge Sewall, always finding in natural events
and appearances symbols of spiritual and religious signification, should
find in his children painful types of original sin.



     "Nov. 6, 1692.--Joseph threw a knop of Brass and hit his Sister

     Betty on the forehead so as to make it bleed; and upon which, and

     for his playing at Prayer-time and eating when Return Thanks, I

     whip'd him pretty smartly. When I first went in (call'd by his

     Grandmother) he sought to shadow and hide himself from me behind

     the head of the Cradle; which gave me the sorrowful remembrance of

     Adam's carriage."
It was natural, too, that Judge Sewall's children should be timid; they
ran in terror to their father's chamber at the approach of a
thunderstorm; and, living in mysterious witchcraft days, they fled
screaming through the hall, and their mother with them, at the sudden
entrance of a neighbor with a rug over her head.
All youthful Puritans were not as godly as the young Sewalls. Nathaniel
Mather wrote thus in his diary:



     "When very young I went astray from God and my mind was altogether

     taken with vanities and follies: such as the remembrance of them

     doth greatly abase my soul within me. Of the manifold sins which

     then I was guilty of, none so sticks upon me as that, being very

     young, I was whitling on the Sabbath-day; and for fear of being

     seen, I did it behind the door. A great reproach of God! a

     specimen of that atheism I brought into the world with me!"
It is satisfactory to add that this young prig of a Mather died when
nineteen years of age. Except in Jonathan Edwards's "Narratives of
Surprising Conversions," no more painful examples of the Puritanical
religious teaching of the young can be found than the account given in
the Magnalia of various young souls in whom the love of God was
remarkably budding, especially this same unwholesome Nathaniel Mather.
His diary redounded in dismal groans and self-abasement: he wrote out in
detail his covenants with God. He laid out his minute rules and
directions in his various religious duties. He lived in prayer thrice a
day, and "did not slubber over his prayers with hasty amputations, but