roubles also. They fully believed in witchcraft as did all their
contemporaries, in a personal devil who was busily plotting the ruin of
their souls, in an everlasting hell of literal fire and brimstone, and
in a Divine election, by which most of them had been irrevocably doomed
from before the creation of the world to eternal perdition, from which
nothing which they could do, or were willing to do, could help to rescue
them. The great object of life to them, therefore, was to try to find
out what their future state would be. Said one of their preachers, "It
is tough work and a wonderful hard matter to be saved. 'Tis a thousand
to one, if ever thou be one of that small number whom God hath picked
out to escape this wrath to come." That we may get a touch of reality
from those far off days, let me quote you a few lines from the saintly
Thomas Hooker, the founder of Connecticut, and long the model for her
preachers. "Suppose any soul here present were to behold the damned in
hell, and if the Lord should give thee a peephole into hell, that thou
didst see the horror of those damned souls, and thy heart begins to
shake in consideration thereof; then propound this to thy own heart,
what pains the damned in hell do endure for sin, and thy heart will
shake and quake at it. The least sin that thou didst ever commit, though
thou makest a light matter of it, is a greater evil than the pains of
the damned in hell, setting aside their sins. All the torments in hell
are not so great an evil as the least sin is; men begin to shrink at
this, and loathe to go down to hell and be in endless torment."

The only test they were taught to apply to ascertain whether they were
predestined to suffer or escape this fearful doom, was in their ability
and willingness to conform their wills to the will of God as revealed in
the Bible. Accordingly as they had succeeded in this, they had a
reasonable assurance as to their fate, although no wile of the devil was
more frequent than to falsely persuade men that their prospects were
favorable. To study the scriptures day and night to ascertain the will
of God, and to struggle without ceasing to conform their wills to his as
therein revealed, was therefore the great object of existence for them,
not that they could thereby alter in the least their future state, but
that they might, if possible, find out what it was likely to be.

Should this recital of their beliefs provoke a smile, our amusement will
so