of Great Stambridge.  We incline rather to the latter alternative as the stronger one, inasmuch as love for Mary may not only have been the direct cause of his loathing Cambridge, but may even have been the cause of his sickness, which in that case becomes so secondary a cause as hardly to be a cause at all.  One thing is certain:  our honored Puritan ancestors had no scruples against short engagements, early marriages, or rematings as often as circumstances favored.

The young bridegroom himself, in the record of his experience, which we quote again for another purpose, reserves the confession of any haste on his own part to enter the married state, and would seem delicately to insinuate parental influence in the case.  “About eighteen years of age, being a man in stature & understanding, as my parents conceived me, I married into a family under Mr. Culverwell his ministry in Essex, &, living there sometimes, I first found ye ministry of the word come home to my heart with power (for in all before I found only light):  & after that, I found ye like in ye ministry of many others:  so as there began to be some change:  wh.  I perceived in myself, & others took notice of.”

Six children were born to John Winthrop and his first wife,—­three sons and three daughters.  John, the eldest of these, afterwards Governor of Connecticut, was born February 22, 1606.  Mary, the only one of the daughters surviving infancy, also came to this country, and married a son of Governor Thomas Dudley.  In less than eleven years after her marriage, Mary Forth died, the husband being not yet twenty-eight years old, and the eldest child but nine.

The earliest record of his religious experience appears to have been made under date of 1606.  Read with the allowances and abatements to which reference has already been made, all that this admirable man has left for us of this self-revelation—­little dreaming that it would have such readers—­is profoundly interesting and instructive, when estimated from a right point of view and with any degree of congeniality of spirit.  Those who are familiar with his published New-England Journal have already recognized in him a man of a simple and humble spirit, of a grave, but not a gloomy temperament, kindly in his private estimate and generous in his public treatment of others, most unselfish, and rigidly upright.  The noble native elements of his character, and the peculiar tone and style of the piety under which his religious experience was developed, mutually reacted upon each other, the result being that his natural virtues were refined and spiritualized, while the morbid and superstitious tendencies of his creed were to a degree neutralised.  He seems to refer the crisis in his religious experience to a date immediately following upon his first marriage.  But, as we shall see, a repeated trial in the furnace of sharp affliction deepened and enriched that experience.  He tells us that during those happy years of his first marriage he had proposed