having employed the opportunity
of her virgin state in piety, liberality and sanctity of manners,
Died May 21st A.D. 1654, aged 65.
to whose memory
this monument is gratefully erected by her next of kin,
JOHN BORLAND, ESQUIRE,
A.D. 1771.
Undoubtedly every detail of this eccentric settlement was talked over at length, as everything was talked over. Gossip never had more forcible reason for existence, for the church covenant compelled each member to a practical oversight of his neighbor's concerns, the special clause reading: "We agree to keep mutual watch and ward over one another."
At first, united by a common peril, the dangers of this were less perceptible. The early years held their own necessities for discussion, and the records of the time are full of matter that Anne Bradstreet might have used had she known her opportunity. She was weighed down like every conscientious Puritan of the day not only by a sense of the infinitely great, but quite as strenuously by the infinitely little. It is plain that she saw more clearly than many of her time, and there are no indications in her works of the small superstitions held by all. Superstition had changed its name to Providence, and every item of daily action was believed to be under the constant supervision and interference of the Almighty. The common people had ceased to believe in fairies and brownies, but their places had been filled by Satan's imps and messengers, watchful for some chance to confound the elect.
The faith in dreams and omens of every sort was not lessened by the transferrence of the responsibility for them to the Lord, and the superstition of the day, ended later in a credulity that accepted the Salem Witchcraft delusion with all its horrors, believing always, that diligent search would discover, if not the Lord's, then the devil's hand, working for the edification or confounding of the elect. Even Winthrop does not escape, and in the midst of wise suggestions for the management of affairs sandwiches such a record as the following: "At Watertown there was (in the view of divers witnesses) a great combat between a mouse and a snake; and after a long fight, the mouse prevailed and killed the snake. The pastor of Boston, Mr. Wilson, a very sincere, holy man, hearing of it, gave this interpretation: That the snake was the devil; the mouse was a poor, contemptible, people, which God had brought hither, which should overcome Satan here, and dispossess him of his kingdom. Upon the same occasion, he told the governor that, before he was resolved to come into this country, he dreamed he was here, and that he saw a church arise out of the earth, which grew up and became a marvelously goodly church."