sions" or the "Model." In the Journal, he is laboring toward this
under the iron conditions of actualities. He and his associates had to
be strong-willed and stern; they were warring against tremendous
difficulties--more tremendous to them because interpreted as the work of
Satan, while even their God was an awful being.

Superstition throws a dark shadow over the chronicle. Even Winthrop was
deeply infected by it. Disasters small and great were interpreted, on
the Old Testament idea, as divine judgments. A boy seven years old fell
through the ice and was drowned while his parents were at lecture, and
his sister was drowned in trying to save him. "The parents had no more
sons, and confessed they had been too indulgent towards him, and had set
their hearts overmuch on him." A man working on a milldam kept on for an
hour after nightfall on Saturday to finish it, and next day his child
fell into a well and was drowned. The father confessed it as a judgment
of God for his Sabbath-breaking.

There is not unfrequent mention of some woman driven by religious
brooding to frenzy, sometimes to murder. The awful possibilities of hell
for herself and her children wrought the mother-heart to madness. The
religious guides of the people used unsparingly the appeal to fear. The
belief in witchcraft, which long had scourged Europe, broke out in a
panic of fear and cruelty. It was a tragic culmination of the worst
elements,--superstition, malignity, ministerial tyranny. Then came the
reaction, and with it a triumph of the wiser sense, the cooler temper,
the layman's moderation, which thenceforth were to guide the commonwealth
on a humbler but safer road.

In a dramatic sense the turning-point of the story--and the revelation of
the saving power at the heart of this grim people--was when, after the
witchcraft frenzy had subsided, Samuel Sewall, the chief justice of the
colony, rose in his place in the meeting-house and humbly confessed
before God and man that he had erred and shed innocent blood.

In the more prosaic temper of the next stage, a sturdy manhood sometimes
flashes into poetry. So John Wise, a minister but the leader of the
popular party in church government, strikes the high note of courage: "If
men are trusted with duty, they must trust that, and not events. If men
are placed at the helm to steer in all weather that blows, they must not
be afraid of the waves or a wet coat."

In personal religion there was