t if an offender made a thorough-going confession before
the entire congregation or community, he might escape punishment, and on
such occasions it would seem that the congregation sat listening closely
and drinking in all the hideous facts and minutiae. The good fathers in
their diaries and chronicles not only have mentioned the crimes and the
criminals, but have enumerated and described such details as fill a
modern reader with disgust. In fact, Winthrop in his _History of New
England_ has cited examples and circumstances so revolting that it is
impossible to quote them in a modern book intended for the general
public, and yet Winthrop himself seemed to see nothing wrong in offering
cold-bloodedly the exact data. Such indulgence in the morbid or _risque_
was not, however, limited to the New England colonists; it was entirely
too common in other sections; but among the Puritan writers it seemed to
offer an outlet for emotions that could not be dissipated otherwise in
legitimate social activities.

To-day the spectacle or even the very thought of a legal execution is so
horrible to many citizens that the state hedges such occasions about
with the utmost privacy and absence of publicity; but in the seventeenth
century the Puritan seems to have found considerable secret pleasure in
seeing how the victim faced eternity. Condemned criminals were taken to
church on the day of execution, and there the clergyman, dispensing with
the regular order of service, frequently consumed several hours
thundering anathema at the wretch and describing to him his awful crime
and the yawning pit of hell in which even then Satan and his imps were
preparing tortures. If the doomed man was able to face all this without
flinching, the audience went away disappointed, feeling that he was
hard-hearted, stubborn, "predestined to be damned"; but if with loud
lamentation and wails of terror he confessed his sin and his fear of
God's vengeance, his hearers were pleased and edified at the fall of one
more of the devil's agents. Often times a similar scene was enacted at
the gallows, where a host of men, women, and even children crowded close
to see and hear all. Judge Sewall has recorded for us just such an
event:

"Feria Sexta, June 30, 1704.... After Diner, about 3 P.M. I went to see
the Execution.... Many were the people that saw upon Bloughton's Hill.
But when I came to see how the River was cover'd with People, I was
amazed! Some say there were