to my heart with power (for in all before I found only light): & after
that, I found ye like in ye ministry of many others: so as there began
to be some change: wh. I perceived in myself, & others took notice of."

Six children were born to John Winthrop and his first wife,--three sons
and three daughters. John, the eldest of these, afterwards Governor of
Connecticut, was born February 22, 1606. Mary, the only one of the
daughters surviving infancy, also came to this country, and married a
son of Governor Thomas Dudley. In less than eleven years after her
marriage, Mary Forth died, the husband being not yet twenty-eight years
old, and the eldest child but nine.

The earliest record of his religious experience appears to have been
made under date of 1606. Read with the allowances and abatements to
which reference has already been made, all that this admirable man has
left for us of this self-revelation--little dreaming that it would have
such readers--is profoundly interesting and instructive, when estimated
from a right point of view and with any degree of congeniality of
spirit. Those who are familiar with his published New-England Journal
have already recognized in him a man of a simple and humble spirit, of a
grave, but not a gloomy temperament, kindly in his private estimate and
generous in his public treatment of others, most unselfish, and rigidly
upright. The noble native elements of his character, and the peculiar
tone and style of the piety under which his religious experience was
developed, mutually reacted upon each other, the result being that his
natural virtues were refined and spiritualized, while the morbid and
superstitious tendencies of his creed were to a degree neutralised. He
seems to refer the _crisis_ in his religious experience to a date
immediately following upon his first marriage. But, as we shall see, a
repeated trial in the furnace of sharp affliction deepened and enriched