love for Mary may
not only have been the direct cause of his loathing Cambridge, but may
even have been the cause of his sickness, which in that case becomes so
secondary a cause as hardly to be a cause at all. One thing is certain:
our honored Puritan ancestors had no scruples against short engagements,
early marriages, or rematings as often as circumstances favored.

The young bridegroom himself, in the record of his experience, which we
quote again for another purpose, reserves the confession of any haste on
his own part to enter the married state, and would seem delicately to
insinuate parental influence in the case. "About eighteen years of age,
being a man in stature & understanding, as my parents conceived me, I
married into a family under Mr. Culverwell his ministry in Essex, &,
living there sometimes, I first found ye ministry of the word come home
to my heart with power (for in all before I found only light): & after
that, I found ye like in ye ministry of many others: so as there began
to be some change: wh. I perceived in myself, & others took notice of."

Six children were born to John Winthrop and his first wife,--three sons
and three daughters. John, the eldest of these, afterwards Governor of
Connecticut, was born February 22, 1606. Mary, the only one of the
daughters surviving infancy, also came to this country, and married a
son of Governor Thomas Dudley. In less than eleven years after her
marriage, Mary Forth died, the husband being not yet twenty-eight years
old, and the eldest child but nine.

The earliest record of his religious experience appears to have been
made under date of 1606. Read with the allowances and abatements to
which reference has already been made, all that this admirable man has
left for us of this self-revelation--little dreaming that it would have
such readers--is profoundly interesting and instructive, when estimated
from a right point of view and with any degree of congeniality of
spirit. Those who are familiar with his published New-England Journal
have already recognized in him a man of a simple and humble spirit, of a
grave, but not a gloomy temperament, kindly in his private estimate and
generous in his public treatment of others, most unselfish, and rigidly
upright. The noble native elements of his character, and the peculiar
tone and style of the piety under which his religious experience was
developed, mutually reacted upon each other, the result being that his
natu