rsities. His present biographer tells us that long before
undertaking his present grateful task he had never been reconciled to
admit the inference which had been drawn from silence on this point. He
remembered, by references in his own reading, that by some oversight
there had been an omission of names in the Cambridge University Register
from June, 1589, to June, 1602, and that no admissions were recorded
earlier than 1625. John Winthrop might, therefore, have at least "gone
to college," if he had not "gone through college." His biographer had
also noticed in the Governor's "Christian Experience," drawn up and
signed by him in New England on his forty-ninth birthday, 1636-7, an
allusion to his having been at Cambridge when "about 14 yrs of age," and
having had a lingering fever there. An entry in the records of his
father must have been a most grateful discovery to the Governor's
descendant in the seventh generation. "1602. The 2d of December I rode
to Cambridge. The VIIIth day John my soonne was admitted into Trinitie
College." But the old mystery vanishes only to give place to another,
which has a spice of romance in it. John Winthrop did not graduate at
Cambridge. He was a lawful husband when seventeen years of age, and a
happy father at eighteen.

In a time-stained and most precious document from his pen and from his
heart, relating his religious experience, to be referred to more
particularly by-and-by, he charges himself in his youth with grievous
sin. What we know of his whole life and character would of itself forbid
us to accept literally his severe self-judgment, much more to draw from
his language the inference which like language would warrant, if used in
our times. Those who have even but a superficial acquaintance with
religious diaries, especially with such as date from near that age, need
not be told that their writers, when sincerely devout by the Puritan
standard, aimed to search and judge their own hearts and lives with all
that penetrating, self-revealing, unsparing scrutiny and severity which
they believed were turned upon them by the all-seeing eye of infinite
purity. They wished to anticipate the Great Tribunal, and to avert the
surprise of any new disclosure there by admitting to themselves while
still in the flesh the worst that it could pronounce against them. Men
and women who before the daily companions and witnesses of their lives
would stand stoutly, and honestly too, in self-defence again