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, was able “savingly to understand the Mysteries of Redemption”; another of the same age was “a dear lover of faithful ministers”; Anne Greenwich, who, we are not surprised to discover, died at the age of five, “discoursed most astonishingly of great mysteries”; Daniel Bradley, when three years old, had an “impression and inquisition of the state of souls after death”; Elizabeth Butcher, when only two and a half years old, would ask herself as she lay in her cradle, “What is my corrupt nature?” and would answer herself with the quotation, “It is empty of grace, bent unto sin, and only to sin, and that continually.”  With such spiritual food were our ancestors fed—­sometimes to the eternal undoing of their posterity’s physical and mental welfare.

IV.  Woman’s Day of Rest

It is possible that the Puritan woman gained one very material blessing from the religion of her day; she was relieved of practically all work on Sunday.  The colonial Sabbath was indeed strictly observed; there was little visiting, no picnicking, no heavy meals, no week-end parties, none of the entertainments so prevalent in our own day.  The wife and mother was therefore spared the heavy tasks of Sunday so commonly expected of the typical twentieth-century housewife.  But it is doubtful whether the alternative—­attendance at church almost the entire day—­would appear one whit more desirable to the modern woman.  The Sabbath of those times was verily a period of religious worship.  No one must leave town, and no one must travel to town save for the church service.  There must be no work on the farm or in the city.  Boats must not be used except when necessary to transport people to divine service.  Fishing, hunting, and dancing were absolutely forbidden.  No one must use a horse, ox, or wagon if the church were within reasonable walking distance, and “reasonable” was a most expansive word.  Tobacco was not to be smoked or chewed near any meeting-house.  The odor of cooking food on Sunday was an abomination in the nostrils of the Most High.  And we should bear in mind that these rules were enforced from sunset on Saturday to sunset on Sunday—­the twenty-four hours of the Puritan Sabbath.  The Holy Day, as spent by the preacher, John Cotton, may be taken as typical of the strenuous hours of the Sabbath as observed by many a New England pastor: