Charlotte and Elizabeth Hesselius
Another Puritan preacher, Rev. Ezekiel Rogers, was so laden with the fruit of the tree of knowledge that "he stoopt for the very children to pick off the apple ready to drop into their mouths." When they came to his study, he would examine them, "How they walked with God? How they spent their time, what good books they read? Whether they prayed without ceasing?" He wrote to a brother minister in 1657:—
"Do your children and family grow more godly? I find greatest trouble and grief about the rising generation. Young people are little stirred here; but they strengthen one another in evil by example and by counsel. Much ado have I with my own family; hard to get a servant that is glad of catechizing or family duties. I had a rare blessing of servants in Yorkshire, and those that I brought over were a blessing, but the young brood doth much afflict me. Even the children of the godly here, and elsewhere make a woful proof."
These ministers lived at a time when New England Puritanism in its extreme type was coming to a close; but parents and households thus reared clung more rigidly and exactly to it and instilled in it a fervent hope of giving permanency to what seemed to their sad eyes in danger of being wholly thrust aside and lost. Such religionists were both Cotton Mather and Samuel Sewall, "true New-English Christians" they called and deemed themselves. They were very gentle with their children; but a profound anxiety for the welfare of those young souls made them most cruel in the intensity of their teaching and warning; especially displeasing to modern modes of thought are their constant reminders of death.
When Cotton Mather's little daughter was but four years old he made this entry in his diary:—
"I took my little daughter Katy into my Study and then I told my child I am to dye Shortly and shee 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."
The vanity of all such painful instruction, harrowing to the father and terrifying to the child, is shown in the sequel. Cotton Mather did not die till thirty years afterward, and long survived the tender little blossom that he loved yet blighted with the chill and dread of death.
The pages of Judge Sewall's diary sadly prove his performance of what he believed to be his duty to his children, just as the entries show the bewilderment and terror of his children under his teachings. Elizabeth Sewall was the most timid and fearful of them all; 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."
The process which developed this unhappy nature is plainly shown by many entries in the diary. This was when she was about five years old:—
"It falls to my daughter Elizabeth's Share to read the 24 of Isaiah which she doth with many Tears not being very well and the Contents of the Chapter and Sympathy with her draw Tears from me also."