Little wonder that infant mortality was exceedingly high, especially when the baptismal service took place on a day as cold as this one mentioned by Sewall:  “Sabbath, Janr. 24 ...  This day so cold that the Sacramental Bread is frozen pretty hard, and rattles sadly as broken into the Plates."[6] We may take it for granted that the water in the font was rapidly freezing, if not entirely frozen, and doubtless the babe, shrinking under the icy touch, felt inclined to give up the struggle for existence, and decline a further reception into so cold and forbidding a world.  Once more hear a description by the kindly, but abnormally orthodox old Judge:  “Lord’s Day, Jany 15, 1715-16.  An extraordinary Cold Storm of Wind and Snow....  Bread was frozen at the Lord’s Table:  Though ’twas so Cold, yet John Tuckerman was baptised.  At six a-clock my ink freezes so that I can hardly write by a good fire in my Wive’s Chamber.  Yet was very Comfortable at Meeting.  Laus Deo."[7]

But let us pass to other phases of this theology under which the Puritan woman lived.  The God pictured in the Day of Doom not only was of a cruel and angry nature but was arbitrary beyond modern belief.  His wrath fell according to his caprice upon sinner or saint.  We are tempted to inquire as to the strange mental process that could have led any human being to believe in such a Creator.  Regardless of doctrine, creed, or theology, we cannot totally dissociate our earthly mental condition from that in the future state; we cannot refuse to believe that we shall have the same intelligent mind, and the same ability to understand, perceive, and love.  Apparently, however, the Puritan found no difficulty in believing that the future existence entailed an entire change in the principles of love and in the emotions of sympathy and pity.

      “He that was erst a husband pierc’d
        with sense of wife’s distress,
      Whose tender heart did bear a part
        of all her grievances. 
      Shall mourn no more as heretofore,
          because of her ill plight,
      Although he see her now to be
          a damn’d forsaken wight.

“The tender mother will own no other
of all her num’rous brood
But such as stand at Christ’s right hand,
acquitted through his Blood. 
The pious father had now much rather
his graceless son should lie
In hell with devils, for all his evils,
burning eternally.”

(Day of Doom.)

But we do not have to trust to Michael Wigglesworth’s poem alone for a realistic conception of the God and the religion of the Puritans.  It is in the sermons of the day that we discover a still more unbending, harsh, and hideous view of the Creator and his characteristics.  In the thunderings of Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards, we, like the colonial women who sat so meekly in the high, hard benches, may fairly smell the brimstone of the Nether World.  Why, exclaims Jonathan Edwards in his sermon, The Eternity of Hell Torments: