uld not get out; but then it
pleased God, that a young man, coming that way, saved it. She would give
no other reason for it, but that she did it to save it from misery, and
with that she was assured, she had sinned against the Holy Ghost, and
that she could not repent of any sin. Thus doth Satan work by the
advantage of our infirmities, which would stir us up to cleave the more
fast to Christ Jesus, and to walk the more humbly and watchfully in all
our conversation."

"Dorothy Talby was hanged at Boston for murdering her own daughter a
child of three years old. She had been a member of the church of Salem,
and of good esteem for goodliness, but, falling at difference with her
husband, through melancholy or spiritual delusions, she sometime
attempted to kill him, and her children, and herself, by refusing
meat.... After much patience, and divers admonitions not prevailing, the
church cast her out. Whereupon she grew worse; so as the magistrate
caused her to be whipped. Whereupon she was reformed for a time, and
carried herself more dutifully to her husband, but soon after she was so
possessed with Satan, that he persuaded her (by his delusions, which she
listened to as revelations from God) to break the neck of her own
child, that she might free it from future misery. This she confessed
upon her apprehension; yet, at her arraignment, she stood mute a good
space, till the governour told her she should be pressed to death, and
then she confessed the indictment. When she was to receive judgment, she
would not uncover her face, nor stand up, but as she was forced, nor
give any testimony of her repentance, either then or at her execution.
The cloth which should have covered her face, she plucked off, and put
between the rope and her neck. She desired to have been beheaded, giving
this reason, that it was less painful and less shameful. Mr. Peter, her
late pastor, and Mr. Wilson, went with her to the place of execution,
but could do no good with her."[15]

_VI. Woman's Comfort in Religion_

Little gentleness and surely little of the overwhelming love that was
Christ's are apparent in a creed so stern and uncompromising. But the
age in which it flourished was not in itself a gentle and tolerant era.
It had not been so many years since men and women had been tortured and
executed for their faith. The Spanish Inquisition had scarcely ceased
its labor of barbarism; and days were to follow both in England and on
the continent