scription by the kindly,
but abnormally orthodox old Judge: "Lord's Day, Jany 15, 1715-16. An
extraordinary Cold Storm of Wind and Snow.... Bread was frozen at the
Lord's Table: Though 'twas so Cold, yet John Tuckerman was baptised.
At six a-clock my ink freezes so that I can hardly write by a good
fire in my Wive's Chamber. Yet was very Comfortable at Meeting. Laus
Deo."[7]

But let us pass to other phases of this theology under which the Puritan
woman lived. The God pictured in the _Day of Doom_ not only was of a
cruel and angry nature but was arbitrary beyond modern belief. His wrath
fell according to his caprice upon sinner or saint. We are tempted to
inquire as to the strange mental process that could have led any human
being to believe in such a Creator. Regardless of doctrine, creed, or
theology, we cannot totally dissociate our earthly mental condition from
that in the future state; we cannot refuse to believe that we shall have
the same intelligent mind, and the same ability to understand, perceive,
and love. Apparently, however, the Puritan found no difficulty in
believing that the future existence entailed an entire change in the
principles of love and in the emotions of sympathy and pity.

"He that was erst a husband pierc'd
with sense of wife's distress,
Whose tender heart did bear a part
of all her grievances.
Shall mourn no more as heretofore,
because of her ill plight,
Although he see her now to be
a damn'd forsaken wight.

"The tender mother will own no other
of all her num'rous brood
But such as stand at Christ's right hand,
acquitted through his Blood.
The pious father had now much rather
his graceless son should lie
In hell with devils, for all his evils,
burning eternally."

(_Day of Doom._)

But we do not have to trust to Michael Wigglesworth's poem alone for a
realistic conception of the God and the religion of the Puritans. It is
in the sermons of the day that we discover a still more unbending,
harsh, and hideous view of the Creator and his characteristics. In the
thunderings of Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards, we, like the colonial
women who sat so meekly in the high, hard benches, may fairly smell the
brimstone of the Nether World. Why, exclaims Jonathan Edwards in his
sermon, _The Eternity of Hell Torments_:

"Do but consider what it