“After they had thus found out a place of abode they burrow themselves in the earth for their first shelter, under some hillside, casting the earth aloft upon timber; they make a smoke fire against the earth at the highest side and thus these poor servants of Christ provide shelter for themselves, their wives and little ones, keeping off the short showers from their lodgings, but the long rains penetrate through to their great disturbance in the night season.  Yet in these poor wigwams they sing psalms, pray and praise their God till they can provide them houses, which ordinarily was not wont to be with many till the earth by the Lord’s blessing brought forth bread to feed them, their wives and little ones....  Thus this poor people populate this howling desert, marching manfully on, the Lord assisting, through the greatest difficulties and sorest labors that ever any with such weak means have done.”

And Margaret Winthrop writes thus to her step-son in England:  “When I think of the troublesome times and manyfolde destractions that are in our native Countrye, I thinke we doe not pryse oure happinesse heare as we have cause, that we should be in peace when so many troubles are in most places of the world.”

Many another quotation could be presented to emphasize the impressions given above.  Reading these after the lapse of nearly three centuries, we marvel at the strength, the patience, the perseverance, the imperishable hope, trust, and faith of the Puritan woman.  Such hardships and privations as have been described above might seem sufficient; but these were by no means all or even the greatest of the trials of womanhood in the days of the nation’s childhood.  To understand in any measure at all the life of a child or a wife or a mother of the Puritan colonies with its strain and suffering, we must know and comprehend her religion.  Let us examine this—­the dominating influence of her life.

II.  Woman and Her Religion

Paradoxical as it may seem, religion was to the colonial woman both a blessing and a curse.  Though it gave courage and some comfort it was as hard and unyielding as steel.  We of this later hour may well shudder when we read the sermons of Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards; but if the mere reading causes astonishment after the lapse of these hundreds of years, what terror the messages must have inspired in those who lived under their terrific indictments, prophecies, and warnings.  Here was a religion based on Judaism and the Mosaic code, “an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.”  Moses Coit Tyler has declared in his History of American Literature:[2] “They did not attempt to combine the sacred and the secular; they simply abolished the secular and left only the sacred.  The state became the church; the king a priest; politics a department of theology; citizenship the privilege of those only who had received baptism and the Lord’s Supper.”