had surprised them.  I was surprised with the Abruptness of the Relation.  It seems Betty Sewall had given some signs of dejection and sorrow; but a little while after dinner she burst into an amazing cry which caus’d all the family to cry too.  Her mother ask’d the Reason, she gave none; at last said she was afraid she should go to Hell, her Sins were not pardon’d.  She was first wounded by my reading a Sermon of Mr. Norton’s; Text, Ye shall seek me and shall not find me.  And these words in the Sermon, Ye shall seek me and die in your Sins, ran in her Mind and terrified her greatly.  And staying at home, she read out of Mr. Cotton Mather—­Why hath Satan filled thy Heart? which increas’d her Fear.  Her Mother asked her whether she pray’d.  She answered Yes, but fear’d her prayers were not heard, because her sins were not pardoned.’"[11]

We may well imagine the anguish of Betty Sewall’s mother.  And yet neither that mother, whose life had been gloomy enough under the same religion, nor the father who had led his child into distress by holding before her her sinful condition, could offer any genuine comfort.  Miss Earle has summarized with briefness and force the results of such training:  “A frightened child, a retiring girl, a vacillating sweetheart, an unwilling bride, she became the mother of eight children; but always suffered from morbid introspection, and overwhelming fear of 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.”