Little Pharisees in Fiction by Agnes Repplier

In that accurate and interesting study of Puritanism which Alice Morse Earle has rather laboriously entitled "Customs and Fashions in Old New England," there is a delightful chapter devoted to the little boys and girls who lived their chastened lives under the uncompromising discipline of the church. With many prayers, with scanty play, with frequent exhortations, and a depressing consciousness of their own sinful natures, these children walked sedately in the bleak atmosphere of continual correction. By way of pastime, they were taken to church, to baptisms, and to funerals, and for reading they had the "Early Piety Series," "Spiritual Milk for Boston Babes," "The Conversion and Exemplary Lives of Several Young Children," and a "Particular Account of Some Extraordinary Pious Motions and Devout Exercises observed of late in Many Children in Siberia," -- a safe and remote spot in which to locate something too "extraordinary" for belief. To this list Cotton Mather added "Good Lessons for Children in Verse," by no means a sprightly volume, and "Some Examples of Children in whom the Fear of God was remarkably Budding before they died; in several parts of New England."

Small wonder that under this depressing burden of books, little boys and girls, too young to know the meaning of sin, were assailed with grievous doubts concerning their salvation. Small wonder that Betty Sewall, an innocent child of nine, "burst into an amazing cry" after reading a page or two of Cotton Mather, and said "she was afraid she should goe to Hell, her sins were not pardon'd. " It is heart-rending to read Judge Sewall's entry in his diary: "Betty can hardly read her chapter for weeping. Tells me she is afraid she is gone back" (at nine). "Does not taste that sweetness in reading the Word which once she did. Fears that what was upon her is worn off. I said what I could to her, and in the evening pray'd with her alone. " It is scant comfort for us, recalling the misery of this poor wounded child, and of many others who suffered with her, to know that Phebe Bartlett was ostentatiously converted at four; that Jane Turell "asked many astonishing questions about divine mysteries," before she was five; and that an infant son of Cotton Mather's "made a most edifying end in praise and prayer," at the age of two years and seven months. We cannot forget the less happy children who, instead of developing into baby prodigies or baby prigs, fretted out their helpless hearts in nightly fears of Hell.