The terrible verses telling of God's judgment on the land, of fear, of the pit, of the snare, of emptiness and waste, of destruction and desolation, must have sunk deep into the heart of the sick child, and produced the condition shown by this entry when she was a few years older:—
"When I came in, past 7 at night, my wife met me in the Entry and told me Betty had surprised them. I was surprised with the Abruptness of the Relation. It seems Betty Sewall had given some signs of dejection and sorrow; but a little while after dinner she burst into an amazing cry which caus'd all the family to cry too. Her Mother ask'd the Reason, she gave none; at last said she was afraid she should go to Hell, her Sins were not pardon'd. She was first wounded by my reading a sermon of Mr. Norton's; Text, Ye shall seek me and shall not find me. And these words in the Sermon, Ye shall seek me and die in your Sins, ran in her Mind and terrified her greatly. And staying at home, she read out of Mr. Cotton Mather—Why hath Satan filled thy Heart? which increas'd her Fear. Her Mother asked her whether she pray'd. She answered Yes, but fear'd her prayers were not heard, because her sins were not pardoned."
Poor little wounded Betty! her fear that she should go to hell because she, like Spira, was not elected, was answered by her father who, having led her into this sad state, was but ill-fitted to comfort her. Both prayed with bitter tears, and he says mournfully, "I hope God heard us." Hell, Satan, eternal damnation, everlasting torments, were ever held up before these Puritan children. We could truthfully paraphrase Wordsworth's beautiful line "Heaven lies about us in our infancy," and say of these Boston children, "Hell lay about them in their infancy." The lists in their books of the proper names in the Bible had an accompanying list—that of names of the devil.
A most painfully explicit account of one of the ultra-sensitive natures developed by these methods is given by Cotton Mather in his most offensive style in a short religious biography of Nathaniel Mather. The boy died when he was nineteen years old, but unhappily he kept a diary of his religious sentiments and fears. He fasted often and prayed constantly even in his sleep. He wrote out in detail his covenant with God, and I cannot doubt that he more than lived up to his promises, as he did to the minute rules he laid out for his various religious duties. Still this young Christian was full of self-loathing, horrible conceptions of God, unbounded dread of death, and all the horrors of a morbid soul.
A letter written by an older Mather (about 1638), when he was twelve years old, shows an ancestral tendency to religious fears:—
"Though I am thus well in body yet I question whether my soul doth prosper as my body doth, for I perceive yet to this very day, little growth in grace; and this makes me question whether grace be in my heart or no. I feel also daily great unwillingness to good duties, and the great ruling of sin in my heart; and that God is angry with me and gives me no answers to my prayers; but many times he even throws them down as dust in my face; and he does not grant my continued request for the spiritual blessing of the softening of my hard heart. And in all this I could yet take some comfort but that it makes me to wonder what God's secret decree concerning me may be: for I doubt whether even God is wont to deny grace and mercy to his chosen (though uncalled) when they seek unto him by prayer for it; and therefore, seeing he doth thus deny it to me, I think that the reason of it is most like to be because I belong not unto the election of grace. I desire that you would let me have your prayers as I doubt not but I have them, and rest
"Your Son, Samuel Mather."
A strong characteristic of English folk at the time of the settlement of the American colonies was superstition. This showed not only in scores of petty observances but in serious beliefs, such as those about comets and thunder-storms. It controlled medical practice, and was displayed in the religious significance attributed to trifling natural events. It was evinced in the dependence on dreams, and the dread of portents. Naturally children were imbued with the beliefs and fears of their parents, and multiplied the importance and the terror of these notions. It can readily be seen that religious training and thought, such as was shown in the families of Samuel Sewall and Cotton Mather, joined to hereditary traits and race superstitions, could naturally produce a condition of mind and judgment which would permit such an episode as that known as the Salem Witchcraft. Nor is it anything but natural to find that those two prominent Bostonians took such important parts in the progress of that tragedy.
Charles Spooner Cary, Eight Years Old, 1786