find in his children painful types of original sin.

"Nov. 6, 1692.--Joseph threw a knop of Brass and hit his Sister
Betty on the forehead so as to make it bleed; and upon which, and
for his playing at Prayer-time and eating when Return Thanks, I
whip'd him pretty smartly. When I first went in (call'd by his
Grandmother) he sought to shadow and hide himself from me behind
the head of the Cradle; which gave me the sorrowful remembrance of
Adam's carriage."

It was natural, too, that Judge Sewall's children should be timid; they
ran in terror to their father's chamber at the approach of a
thunderstorm; and, living in mysterious witchcraft days, they fled
screaming through the hall, and their mother with them, at the sudden
entrance of a neighbor with a rug over her head.

All youthful Puritans were not as godly as the young Sewalls. Nathaniel
Mather wrote thus in his diary:

"When very young I went astray from God and my mind was altogether
taken with vanities and follies: such as the remembrance of them
doth greatly abase my soul within me. Of the manifold sins which
then I was guilty of, none so sticks upon me as that, being very
young, I was _whitling_ on the Sabbath-day; and for fear of being
seen, I did it behind the _door_. A great _reproach_ of God! a
specimen of that _atheism_ I brought into the world with me!"

It is satisfactory to add that this young prig of a Mather died when
nineteen years of age. Except in Jonathan Edwards's "Narratives of
Surprising Conversions," no more painful examples of the Puritanical
religious teaching of the young can be found than the account given in
the _Magnalia_ of various young souls in whom the love of God was
remarkably budding, especially this same unwholesome Nathaniel Mather.
His diary redounded in dismal groans and self-abasement: he wrote out in
detail his covenants with God. He laid out his minute rules and
directions in his various religious duties. He lived in prayer thrice a
day, and "did not slubber over his prayers with hasty amputations, but
wrestled in them for a good part of an hour." He prayed in his sleep. He
fasted. He made long lists of sins, long catalogues of things forbidden,
"and then fell a-stoning them." He "chewed much on excellent sermons."
He not only read the Bible, but "obliged himself to fetch a note and
prayer out of each verse," as he read. In spite of all these
preparat