In a time-stained and most precious document from his pen and from his heart, relating his religious experience, to be referred to more particularly by-and-by, he charges himself in his youth with grievous sin.  What we know of his whole life and character would of itself forbid us to accept literally his severe self-judgment, much more to draw from his language the inference which like language would warrant, if used in our times.  Those who have even but a superficial acquaintance with religious diaries, especially with such as date from near that age, need not be told that their writers, when sincerely devout by the Puritan standard, aimed to search and judge their own hearts and lives with all that penetrating, self-revealing, unsparing scrutiny and severity which they believed were turned upon them by the all-seeing eye of infinite purity.  They wished to anticipate the Great Tribunal, and to avert the surprise of any new disclosure there by admitting to themselves while still in the flesh the worst that it could pronounce against them.  Men and women who before the daily companions and witnesses of their lives would stand stoutly, and honestly too, in self-defence against all imputations, and might even boast themselves—­as St. Paul did—­of a surplusage of merits of some sort, when registering the barometer and the thermometer of their religious experience were the most unrelenting self-accusers.  It is safe to say, as a general thing, that those who in that introspection, in the measurement of their heats and chills of piety, grieved most deeply and found the most ingenious causes for self-infliction were either the most calculating hypocrites or the most truly godly.  To which of the two classes any one particular individual might belong could not always be infallibly concluded from what he wrote.  That comfort-loving and greed-indulging, yet picturesque, old sinner, Samuel Pepys, Esq., did not profess to keep a religious diary.  But many such diaries have been kept by men who might have covered alternate pages with matter similar to his own, or with worse.  We must interpret the religious diaries of that age by aids independent of those which their contents furnish us.  John Winthrop, writing of his youth when he had grown to the full exalted stature of Christian manhood, and though sweetly mellowed in the graces of his character by genial ripening from within his soul, was still a Puritan of the severest standard theologically, and, by principle, charges himself with heinous sin.  We feel assured that he was not only guiltless of any folly or error that would deserve such a designation, but that he even overstated the degree of his addiction to the lighter human faults.  Only after such a preliminary assertion of incredulity as to any literal truth in them, could we consent to copy his own words, as follows:—­“In my youth I was very lewdly disposed, inclining unto & attempting (so far as my heart enabled me) all kinds of wickedness, except swearing & scorning religion,