us examine this--the dominating influence of her life.


_II. Woman and Her Religion_

Paradoxical as it may seem, religion was to the colonial woman both a
blessing and a curse. Though it gave courage and some comfort it was as
hard and unyielding as steel. We of this later hour may well shudder
when we read the sermons of Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards; but if
the mere reading causes astonishment after the lapse of these hundreds
of years, what terror the messages must have inspired in those who lived
under their terrific indictments, prophecies, and warnings. Here was a
religion based on Judaism and the Mosaic code, "an eye for an eye, and a
tooth for a tooth." Moses Coit Tyler has declared in his _History of
American Literature_:[2] "They did not attempt to combine the sacred and
the secular; they simply abolished the secular and left only the sacred.
The state became the church; the king a priest; politics a department of
theology; citizenship the privilege of those only who had received
baptism and the Lord's Supper."

And what an idea of the sacred was theirs! The gentleness, the mercy,
the loving kindness that are of God so seldom enter into those ancient
discussions that such attributes are almost negligible. Michael
Wigglesworth's poem, _The Day of Doom_, published in 1662, may be
considered as an authoritative treatise on the theology of the Puritans;
for it not only was so popular as to receive several reprints, but was
sanctioned by the elders of the church themselves. If this was
orthodoxy--and the proof that it was is evident--it was of a sort that
might well sour and embitter the nature of man and fill the gentle soul
of womanhood with fear and dark forebodings. We well know that the