SOURCE: Ahluwalia, Harshapan Singh. “Salvation New England Style: A Study of Covenant Theology in Michael Wigglesworth's The Day of Doom.” Indian Journal of American Studies 4, no. 1-2 (June and December 1974): 1-12.

In this essay, Ahluwalia compares Wigglesworth's theology as expressed in the Day of Doom to the school of Covenant Theology articulated first by William Perkins.

Perhaps no poem in American literature has been so much ridiculed as Michael Wigglesworth's The Day of Doom (1662). Whereas the modern reader finds the doomsday verses “smoking with hell-fire and brimstone theology,”¹ Wigglesworth's contemporaries “perfumed their breath”² with them. The poem was a best-seller for a century and ran into at least ten editions before 1760.³ It was so important in American cultural history that in the early years of the nineteenth century there could still be found persons who could repeat nearly all of it by heart. They knew very well the...