death and the future life, until at the age of thirty-five her father
sadly wrote, 'God has delivered her now from all her fears.'"[12]

According to our modern conception of what child life should consist of,
the existence of the Puritan girl must have been darkened from early
infancy by such a creed. Only the indomitable desire of the human being
to survive, and the capacity of the human spirit under the pressure of
daily duties to thrust back into the subconscious mind its dread or
terror, could enable man or woman to withstand the physical and mental
strain of the theories hurled down so sternly and so confidently from
the colonial pulpit. Cotton Mather in his _Diary_ records this incident
when his daughter was but four years old: "I took my little daughter
Katy into my Study and then I told my child I am to dye Shortly and she
must, when I am Dead, remember Everything I now said unto her. I sett
before her the sinful Condition of her Nature, and I charged her to pray
in Secret Places every Day. That God for the sake of Jesus Christ would
give her a New Heart. I gave her to understand that when I am taken from
her she must look to meet with more humbling Afflictions than she does
now she has a Tender Father to provide for her."

Infinite pity we may well have for those stern parents who, faithful to
what they considered their duty, missed so much of the sanity, sweetness
and joy of life, and thrust upon their babes, whose days should have
been filled with love and light and play, the dread of death and hell
and eternal damnation. It is with a touch of irony that we read that
Mather survived by thirty years this child whose infant mind was
tortured with visions of the grave. Yet a strange sort of pride seems to
have been taken in the capacity of children to imbibe such gloomy
theological theories and in the ability to repeat, parrotlike, the
oft-repeated doctrines of inherent sinfulness. One babe, two years old,